McGill University campus in Montreal on Nov. 14, 2017.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
Interim Quebec Liberal Party Leader Marc Tanguay was mostly correct last week when he described Premier François Legault’s move to raise tuition fees and French-language requirements for out-of-province students at Quebec’s leading English-language universities as an act of “self-sabotage.”
For more than 200 years, the McGill University campus has hugged the slope of Mount Royal as both a cherished Montreal landmark and a beacon for some of the planet’s best minds. It consistently ranks among the world’s top universities. For generations of Americans, McGill has been known as the place to go to get an Ivy League education at a fraction of an Ivy League price.
Nearby Concordia University does not have the same cachet as its better-known rival. But over the course of almost a century, it has carved out an enviable reputation as a hip and innovative institution of higher learning that draws thousands of Canadian and foreign students alike each year to Montreal.
Together, Montreal’s four universities, including the Université de Montréal and the Université du Québec à Montréal, contributed about $4.3-billion to the local economy in 2019-20, according to a 2022 Montreal Chamber of Commerce study. The city’s university sector spent about $1.5-billion on research that year, making Montreal a magnet for postdoctoral brainiacs.
For any rational person, it boggles the mind why the Legault government, nationalist though it is, would willfully seek to handicap two of the province’s most respected institutions by pricing them out of the market for most out-of-province students and discouraging even those with the means from coming to Quebec by forcing them to learn French to graduate. As the QLP’s Mr. Tanguay pointed out: “Harming Quebec, attacking its institutions, that is not being a nationalist.”
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Ever since Quebec Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry first unveiled her government’s proposed plan to jack up out-of-province tuition fees at English universities in October, countless pundits in the rest of Canada have theorized about Mr. Legault’s motivations. Some have mused that the francophone Premier, who grew up in a mostly English-speaking Montreal suburb, may be taking revenge on an entitled anglophone community that he has long resented or even despised.
You do not need to psychoanalyze Mr. Legault, however, to see that what he really is doing is just practising his trademark wedge politics. The Premier did not need to be a clairvoyant to have foreseen the reaction that his government’s original proposal – and the revised version tabled last week, which reduced the tuition-fee increase, but tacked on a requirement that 80 per cent of out-of-province students learn intermediate French – would provoke in the rest of Canada.
Indeed, the ensuing uproar in the English-language media is no doubt exactly what he expected. The habitual piling on – or le Quebec-bashing, as they say in these parts – is a badly needed political gift for the Premier’s struggling Coalition Avenir Québec government. It has been embroiled in bitter contract negotiations with public-sector workers, and is trailing a resurgent Parti Québécois in the polls.
What started out as a legitimate effort to fund cash-starved francophone universities – by forcing English ones to transfer a portion of fees paid by foreign students to the government – was superseded by a scheme to rile up “angryphones” for political gain.
Most commentators in the French-language media have seen no unfairness in the plan to make out-of-province students, rather than Quebec taxpayers, cover more of the cost of their education. They scoff that the Level 5 oral French standard (on a 12-level grid) that most future McGill and Concordia undergraduates will need to meet is not particularly onerous. According to the government’s own grid, a Level 5 student would need to be able to book a hotel room over the phone in French.
McGill’s Indian-born president, Deep Saini, who called the plan a “targeted attack” on his university and Concordia, nevertheless seemed to make the government’s case that getting students to learn French is the key to retaining out-of-province talent in Quebec after graduation. “If I hadn’t had the opportunity to learn the language, I wouldn’t have stayed in Montreal for so long, and I probably wouldn’t have come back either,” he recently said. “I would never have had the chance to raise my children in this city or to send them to a French-speaking school.”
Truth be told, the Legault government does not think its plan will be that damaging to McGill and Concordia – and it may even do them good. In recent years, both universities have adapted to expectations that they do more to integrate into French Quebec. Since 1984, McGill has allowed students to write their papers in either English or French. Imposing a basic French standard on all students is seen as a natural next step toward becoming more bilingual.
For now, though, Mr. Legault is likely just thrilled about how badly his plan is playing in the English press.