Making Quebecois language and culture a punishment won’t encourage engagement with them.
Concordia University and McGill University, Montreal’s two English-language universities, are separately launching lawsuits against the Quebec government. The lawsuits are in response to Quebec’s decision to raise tuition for out-of-province students by roughly 30 per cent, and charge universities $20,000 for every international student admitted.
Quebec plans to require 80 per cent of out-of-province students at English-language universities to graduate with an intermediate knowledge of spoken French.
In justifying each of these initiatives, the Quebec government cited its desire to reduce the ratio of English- to French-language university students.
McGill and Concordia, meanwhile, are worried about reduced enrolment and diversity among students. The number of out-of-province applicants to both McGill and Concordia has dropped by upwards of 20 per cent.
Spiking tuition for out-of-province students and requiring French unmistakably convey that university students who don’t speak French aren’t wanted or welcome in Quebec. It’s hard not to believe non-French-speaking immigrants wouldn’t feel subject to similar reception.
Requiring French could pose just as much of a financial barrier for applicants as raising tuition. Students who don’t speak French—meaning not only Canadian candidates applying from out-of-province, but individuals applying from countries where French isn’t taught—will have to independently take on the burden of learning French to feel comfortable on their campuses and in their communities. Learning a new language will cost applicants a lot of time, effort, and money.
It’s disappointing to see governments creating rather than resolving barriers to post-secondary education, obstructing many bright and deserving candidates from the education they could otherwise enjoy receiving at Concordia or McGill.
If the Quebec government wants more university students to learn and speak French, they have a responsibility to make doing so accessible.
Many universities mandate first-year English classes for all incoming students. Quebec universities could do the same with French, offering a 100-level French class. Imbuing curriculum with topics, slang, and cultural phenomena central to life in Quebec would more likely encourage students to learn, use, and appreciate French and its significance in Quebec’s cultural history.
Even so, mandating French speaking at an English-language university feels out of the Quebec government’s jurisdiction: both English and French are the official languages of Canada, so Canadian universities should have a right to operate in either of the two without incurring financial penalties for themselves or their students.
The idea of enforcing the French language becomes even more problematic considering its colonial roots and the possibility of Indigenous students at McGill being forced to learn it.
Decreasing enrolment at English-language universities in Quebec will be harmful to French-speaking students and Quebec as a whole insofar as doing so will negatively affect local economies.
The Quebecois government should be looking for ways to encourage students to fall in love with its province and language by making engagement with both exciting and inviting. Enforcing financial penalties and requirements approaching assimilation won’t preserve the French language or French universities as they hope it will.
Quebec’s English-language universities should be spending their energy and resources educating students who could stay and enrich the province, not fighting legal battles to teach their government the value and importance of diversity.
—Journal Editorial Board
Tags
bilingualism, Concordia University, McGill University, Quebec
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