McGill University campus in Montreal, on June 21, 2016.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
Jeffery Vacante is an assistant professor of history at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of National Manhood and the Creation of Modern Quebec.
The Quebec government’s recent announcement that it will nearly double the tuition fees it charges out-of-province students who wish to attend an English-language university in the province means that starting next year, anyone outside Quebec who wishes to study at McGill, Concordia, or Bishop’s will have to pay a staggering $17,000 a year rather than the roughly $9,000 they currently pay. The government says that it will redistribute this extra money to the province’s French-language universities.
In making the announcement, Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry explained that this increase is necessary because the government was spending too much to subsidize the education of out-of-province English-speaking students who contribute very little to Quebec society, since they typically leave the province after they graduate. In more pointed language, Jean-François Roberge, the Minister of the French Language, suggested that the mere presence of English-speaking students from outside the province represents a threat to the French language in Quebec. “There are a lot of people who come to Quebec, who attend an English-language university and who very often express themselves in the English language on a daily basis,” Mr. Roberge warned. These students, he claimed, contribute to “the decline of the French language in Quebec.”
This announcement is merely the latest instance of François Legault’s government taking aim at the province’s English-language institutions. Last year, it blocked an expansion plan by Dawson College, an English-language CEGEP in Montreal, arguing that the funds for such an expansion should be redirected to the French-language system. It has also capped the number of students that can attend English-language CEGEPs, arguing that these CEGEPs had become too large and too attractive to non-anglophones. The government has been cheered on by some voices in the local media who have been demanding that at least some of the money being used to fund English-language post-secondary institutions be turned over to the French system in order to halt what they call the anglicization of the province.
All of this has tapped into the long-simmering resentment by some in the province toward institutions like Bishop’s, Concordia, and especially McGill. With its stately campus in the heart of downtown Montreal, McGill University has long irritated nationalists who regard it as a conspicuous reminder of the enduring power of the city’s English-speaking population. This resentment has occasionally risen to the surface, as it did in the spring of 1969, when a number of people associated with the “McGill français” movement marched on the university’s Roddick Gates to demand that it become more open to French-speaking students and even that it be turned into a French-language institution.
This resentment had, until now, failed to produce much in the way of government action against McGill or other English-language institutions of higher learning in Quebec. Unlike elementary and secondary schools in the province, post-secondary institutions have not been subject to those parts of Bill 101 that limit access to students who can demonstrate that at least one of their parents had attended elementary or high school in English.
But this is starting to change. The Parti Québécois has been pushing to restrict access to English-language CEGEPs to those who can prove that they are eligible to attend English elementary and secondary school in Quebec. The Legault government insists that it is not interested in extending these parts of Bill 101 to post-secondary institutions. But the cap it has placed on the number of students who can attend English-language CEGEPs, the newly imposed requirement that students at these CEGEPs take a number of their courses in French, and the push to divert funding away from the English system and toward the French system should make us wonder if we are not, in fact, witnessing an attempt by the government to extend Bill 101 to CEGEPs and universities through the back door.
In the end, this latest announcement that out-of-province students will be forced to pay significantly more to attend an English-language university in the province appears designed primarily to demonstrate that the government is no longer willing to pretend that Bishop’s, Concordia, or McGill are real Quebec institutions that have much of value to contribute to Quebec society. It appears designed, in fact, to portray these institutions as working against the interests of Quebec because of their supposed role in anglicizing the province. Defining these institutions as threats to Quebec society makes it easier for the Legault government to deprive them of the students and of the funding they need to thrive and even to survive.