A three-month crisis ends after a failed attempt at wedge politics
MONTREAL (Dec. 24) – In French, it’s called a “psychodrame” – an emotional crisis with a quick rise and fall. That was the university tuition-fees crisis in Quebec, fall of 2023.
Launched in early October by a reckless Premier after a stunning defeat for his party (a by-election loss in Quebec City), the universities’ coup was a clumsy bit of “wedge politics”, as the Globe and Mail described it.
In short, Quebec proposed a big hike in tuition fees for out-of-province (read: non-taxpaying) students, then waited for some applause. The scheme began to collapse upon itself within a month and ended in steady backpedalling by early December and the holidays.
Following consultations and protests, the government started to retreat. First, it dialed down about half of the impact — dropping the proposed fee hike by almost 70 per cent, and exempting a vulnerable small college. (The financial impact would have varied greatly between the big-city English schools and the small undergraduate school, Bishop’s.)
Then, the big-city schools smartly created wall-to-wall scholarship programs. These basically annulled any fee-hike: see https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/mcgill-launches-canada-award-offset-tuition-increase-canadian-undergraduate-students-353738
By late December, all that remained was the proposal for intermediate-level French competency (“Bonjour, un taxi, s’il vous plaît”) by graduation. This provision was fairly wishy-washy and also subject to legal challenge.
But back in late October, I had to write up the controversy for the Sherbrooke Record’s weekend supplement. Given the dynamic nature of the debate, with new headlines every day, it was hard to get a clear view. I began by noting that fears about the health of English Quebec universities had proven baseless in recent decades, and the impact of big fee hikes in Europe and elsewhere had been mixed.
With that context in mind, below is the Nov. 3 text — revised and updated to capture the full cycle of thi ‘psychodrama’:
| Bishop’s campus, peaceful both before and after “crisis”. |
Ah, those student days
My days were at McGill filled with books, films, girlfriends, philosophy and dreams. No, it wasn’t some Animal House, a non-stop riot of parties and drink. But we had memorable years in our little universe in the neighbourhoods around campus.
The material conditions of my student years often resembled scenes out of Dickens or perhaps Dostoyevsky. I recall vividly our bleak-house living quarters: a semi-heated, upper-storey wooden flat in a charming but underpopulated stretch of Montreal’s central city. Streetlights flashed intermittently in mid-January. Winds howled through the empty laneways.
Draped in a full-length German-style great coat, I wove homeward up St Laurent Boulevard. Slush invaded my outmoded footwear. Looking back today at the bare-bones budgets of those frigid late ‘70s winters, I feel a distinct br-r-r-r-r.
Money ran out steadily and I wonder how I avoided phoning home for supplies every weekend. Food shopping meant Warshaw’s messy supermarket for coffee, chop suey and liver, often little else. But then, blessedly, some faculty office would throw a Friday wine-and-cheese reception. Just in time. While I don’t remember actually stuffing baguette and brie into my vest pockets, it seems likely.
Somehow, I cherish that penniless period as among the happiest times of my life.
Fees a bargain
I had moved to Montreal as an out-of-province student from Ontario at a time when McGill tuition was roughly $685 a year.
Two successive roommates came from New York and Philadelphia. For them, McGill was a bargain, especially compared to Cornell, Brown or Penn, much less the bigger-name Ivy League schools. They were each determinedly studious and today teach at Berkeley and Oxford, respectively. They speak lovingly about their Montreal memories, as if they took part in some meandering Leonard Cohen anthem. Today, McGill remains a U.S.-dollar bargain for American students.
Thirty years after those student days, in 2007, we were again living outside Quebec. Our son surprised me by choosing McGill for university. He had grown up in New York City and was a smashingly good baseball player. I thought he might be tempted by a powerhouse U.S. school, perhaps a baseball-playing campus in the Sunbelt like, gulp, Stanford. At that time, tuition for out-of-state students there would have been well over $40,000 U.S. a year.
But given that he was born in Montreal and had grandparents resident there, he got the in-province rate at McGill, which in those days was edging toward $2500 Canadian. Merci, Québec.
Then in 2012, soon after his graduation, Quebec exploded with protests over tuition increases. The streets were blocked and tin pans were clanged on every street corner. Finally, the Premier backed down. His government fell within a year.
Which brings us to the late-2023 political uproar about tuition hikes.
I’ve been here before. We have all seen crises – from the “Canada clause” of the early 1980s that limited Canadian students’ access to Quebec English schools, but then was struck down, to the English school boards who won their case against abolition and Bill 40.
These challenges were largely resolved through active politics: protests, lobbying, media and the courts. Crises have been repeatedly fought and won by using the tools at the English community’s disposal in a democratic society.
The debate burned on even in a favourite forum, the letters to the editor page of the Globe and Mail:
Crisis-management time
OK, I am panic-averse. Whether the headline fear is about Covid spread or forest-fire trends, I always ask for more substance, less alarmism.
I was reminded of this on Oct 16th when CJAD talk-radio host Natasha Hall blurted out that tuition-fee hikes meant “the end of Bishop’s”. Bookmark that. My guess: a year from now Bishop’s will still be thriving. Later, I repeated my optimism in an interview on CJAD. *
Economic studies around the world conclude that demand for higher education is somewhat “inelastic”; that is, even when the price goes up, people keep buying. Students and parents value their college choices. As the Higher Education Blog concludes in one statistical study, students “tend to be less sensitive to price than consumers are for many other goods and services. This relative insensitivity to price has allowed colleges and universities to boost revenue by raising tuition”. **
Doomsaying about Anglo universities has a history. Back in the mid-1980s, during an evening at the Concordia film club, a student I knew ventured casually that the PQ and nationalists wanted to “kill Concordia”.
To recap: in the mid-1980s, Concordia’s downtown campus was a shambles: the rickety Hall building on de Maisonneuve Blvd. faced a parking lot that had been endlessly proposed for a new library. In the meantime, the university’s actual library was in the YMCA on Drummond, with stacks that looked distinctly high-school-ish. Not remotely top-notch.
Forty years later, everything has changed. A new Concordia library complex was erected on that empty lot and linked by tunnels to the metro. Big towers were built for the Fine Arts and Business faculties. The huge Grey Sisters nunnery was taken over and converted into a student residence. Much of central-west downtown could be called “Concordiaville”.
Capital costs were covered 50 per cent by the province. If nationalist governments actually intended to diminish that school, they did a very poor job.
The president of Concordia published a good op-ed in The Gazette (Oct. 25), recognizing that French Quebec universities are underfunded: 70 per cent of their income depends on the province, compared to just 50 per cent for Anglo campuses, who have more varied revenue sources from private donors and research agencies.
Out-of-province student income looked attractive and unlimited, and this was manipulated by the Legault government. To counter this, English schools need to promote continually direct links with their francophone peers, support their needs for equalization, and not be set against their ambitions.
With that kind of smart politics, the tuition-hike fight was won and fees were attenuated. One day this crisis could be as forgotten as the Canada clause. Hopefully, students can then get back to their books, dreams and, ahem, Friday wine and cheese.
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Notes
* My interview on CJAD, Oct. 31, regarding out-of-province students and tuition: https://www.iheartradio.ca/cjad/audio/they-came-to-montreal-to-study-then-made-it-big-david-winch-s-story-1.20434975?mode=Article
** In the U.K. a decade ago, for example, the newly elected Conservative government suddenly tripled tuition fees, from a cap of 3,300 to 9,000 pounds. Enrolment did decline, by about 8 per cent. In other words, 91-92 per cent of students maintained their course of studies. This does not quite match the school choices that out-of-province students have in Canada, but it suggests that alarmist takes can be misleading.
