Due to the increase in tuition fees that the Legault government has decided to impose on foreign students and Canadian students from other provinces, McGill University announced that it had postponed a French teaching program in which it would have invested 50 millions of dollars.
“The goal of the program was to help students, faculty and staff fully integrate into Quebec society,” she explained. Anticipating that the announced increase will discourage many students, who will prefer to go elsewhere, which will lead to a drop in its income, the richest of Quebec universities will unfortunately have to give up this great enterprise.
We would be tempted to see this as a form of retaliation if this were the first time that McGill University had slashed the teaching of French despite its language policy stating that it “is strongly rooted in Quebec and supports the important role of French in Quebec society.
In the fall of 2021, the 12 lecturers of the intensive French, language and culture program, offered to newcomers, were informed — in an email written only in English — that financial imperatives forced the School of Continuing Education to McGill to remove it. Obviously we had other priorities.
On its website, the university was however delighted that this program had “enabled thousands of students from 60 countries to work, study and live in French”. Obviously, this enthusiasm for the language of Molière did not last, since a spokesperson for the management declared to Offensethe university’s French-speaking student newspaper, that the decision was made “following a steady decline in enrollment numbers over the past decade.”
Unsurprisingly, English Canada reacted very badly to the Legault government’s initiative, as it does every time Quebec adopts measures aimed at protecting French, the decline of which is considered a fad in the rest of the country. regardless of what Statistics Canada data indicates.
Some saw it as a gesture of panic caused by the more scathing than expected defeat in Jean-Talon, even if Prime Minister Legault had already announced his intentions in an interview with Radio-Canada before the election was held.
If it is true that many take advantage of their stay in Montreal to take a dip in French and appreciate their experience to the point of settling in Quebec, it is obvious that the concentration in the city center of tens of thousands of students who do not master French contributes to its anglicization. We will say that most are simply passing through, but they are immediately replaced by others.
The overabundance of resources available to English-speaking universities compared to French-speaking ones, due in particular to the recruitment of foreign students, is a phenomenon that has been extensively documented.
Is it normal that the Quebec state contributes to this imbalance by largely financing the studies of those who choose to come here because tuition fees are lower than at home and who leave as soon as they have their diploma in pocket? Well-ordered charity begins with oneself.
Despite the concern of English-speaking universities and fears for the influence of Montreal and the economy of Quebec in general, the government maintains that the announced increase will not discourage Canadian and foreign students. It will instead allow the annual redistribution of a sum of 100 million to French-speaking universities.
A CBC report tends to prove him right. He concluded that even if a student from Toronto or Vancouver pays higher tuition fees at McGill than at home, the difference in cost of living will still make Montreal a bargain.
Even if the 100 million are there, the problem of underfunding of French-speaking universities will not be resolved, in particular that of the University of Quebec (UQ), which is heavily disadvantaged by the current formula.
The deregulation of tuition fees decreed by the Couillard government allowed English-speaking universities to raise 282 million between 2019 and 2022, while the 10 components of UQ had to make do with 47 million. It would only receive a fraction of the 100 million planned by the government, even though it estimates that it needs the entire sum on its own.
In an open letter published in The duty last June, the president of UQ, Alexandre Cloutier, recalled that a third of the Quebec population held a university diploma in 2021, while the proportion approached 40% in Ontario. In the region, where the UQ network is deployed, it was more like 20%.
Premier Legault has made reducing the wealth gap with Ontario a real obsession. Closing the graduation gap for those who will stay here is the best way to achieve this goal.