Quebec education summit frustrates all sides

It is late spring 2012, and neighbourhoods across Montreal resound each evening with the clanging of pots against the government’s new law to quell students protesting against tuition fee hikes announced earlier that year by the province’s Liberal government.

Mass marches by students through the streets had begun in February and gained momentum through the printemps d’erable – the ‘Maple Spring’, named for the Quebec sugar maple and a play on the Arab Spring – with the largest event numbering over 400,000 participants.

The government’s strategy of standing firm on its law and a C$1,778 (US$1,732) fee hike over five years proves to be a losing one, and the Liberals fall in September elections.

The victorious Parti Québécois government of Pauline Marois rolls back the tuition increases, and the thorny problem of university funding is conveniently deferred to a later date. That date arrived on 25 February 2013.

Marois and Pierre Duchesne, Quebec’s minister of higher education, met with university leaders and student groups in Montreal for a two-day summit to discuss financial and governance issues facing Quebec’s 18 universities.

The universities have long lobbied for greater funding, in part through increased tuition fees – frozen at an average of $2,168 for almost 10 years – arguing that they are underfunded compared to Canadian and North American counterparts.

Meanwhile, some student groups advocated for free tuition, with university funding coming from other sources. Neither left the summit pleased.

Universities, students on the defensive

Universities were on the defensive from the summit’s start.

Earlier in February, Marois announced that her government would cut its university support by $250 million in the coming year; during the summit, the cuts were broken into $125 million a year over two years, but that did little to comfort university leaders.

“The university system is anaemic,” said Guy Breton, rector of the Université du Montréal. “If we do not enhance funding, there will be programmes in jeopardy.”

McGill University’s leader Heather Munroe-Blum agreed, noting that the cuts “leave us taking very serious decisions about jobs, about programmes, about support for students. And every job is a real person who makes a contribution to the well-being of the university.”

Indeed, before the summit began Montreal’s École Polytechnique had already announced that budget cuts would force it to close fully equipped labs.

Despite asserting the economic necessity of these cuts, the government also promised $1.8 billion in new university funding by 2019, along with 4,000 new jobs for professors, contract faculty and technicians in the coming years. That offer was met with scepticism, or, at best, muted enthusiasm from universities.

Dismayed university leaders were soon joined by dismayed student leaders.

The first day of the summit ended with Marois proposing a 3% annual increase to tuition fees for five years, or roughly $70 per year – clearly moving in the wrong direction for the student groups.

The fee increase was sugar-coated somewhat by the promise of greater financial support through bursaries, especially for students from families with low or modest incomes.

The summit also saw the creation of several working groups to explore issues over the next year. These include investigating financial aid options, reviewing the government’s formula for financing universities, investigating ancillary fees that universities regularly charge students (which many argue is simply a disguised tuition fee), and defining the mandate and composition of a body to oversee university governance.

This latter proposal also drew fire from university leaders. “Each of our universities is a unique institution with a unique history,” said Concordia University President Alan Shepard.

“Imposing a single board model would do a disservice to their respective legacies and futures.”

Re-establishing dialogue

Controversies aside, Marois argued that the summit achieved its goals in discussing problems confronting Quebec’s university system.

“This exercise does not aim to resolve everything in a few hours,” she said. “The summit is an occasion to re-establish the dialogue, to rebuild bridges, to re-weave the links between us.”

While the summit participants within the conference hall were packing up their laptops and portfolios, a familiar scene developed outside: a thousand students advocating free tuition staged a peaceful march through downtown Montreal, with 10 being arrested in later clashes with police.

But there seems to be little student appetite for continued protest – and only time will tell if dialogue between various stakeholders is in fact re-established.