McGill warns French-language plan ‘puts its future in question’

McGill University, one of Canada’s top-ranked higher education institutions, is warning that a provincial policy to discourage English-language instruction through sharp tuition fee hikes is threatening its existence.

The move by Quebec premier François Legault “puts the university’s very future in question”, McGill said in issuing an estimate that the plan could cost the institution close to C$100 million (£60 million) a year and cause it grave reputational damage.

Mr Legault is a founder of the conservative-nationalist Coalition Avenir Québec party, which has put a priority on reviving the use of the French language in his province, the nation’s largest by area and second-biggest by population.

In recent weeks and months, his government – first elected in 2018 – has pushed a plan that imposes his French-language agenda on higher education through steps that include substantial tuition increases for Canadian students from outside Quebec and new French-proficiency graduation requirements for most of them.

That planned tuition increase for non-Quebec Canadians – to C$12,000 per year, or 33 per cent beyond current levels – is down from the Legault government’s initial suggestion in October for a rate of C$17,000. Yet it still would leave McGill far more expensive for such students than top-tier competitors such as the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia.

The Legault plan, due to take effect this coming autumn, would also require that English-language institutions in Quebec give the overwhelming share of the fees they receive from international students – already running at about C$20,000 per year – to French-language universities.

McGill estimates that the plan would create for it an annual budgetary loss of C$42 million to C$94 million. Concordia University estimates a C$15.5 million initial-year loss.

The province’s other English-language institution, Bishop’s University, was mostly granted an exemption from the Legault policy, having argued that its small size – about 2,800 students – did not pose a substantial threat to the premier’s French-language ambitions.

The tuition increase for non-Quebec Canadians would apply to universities in the province regardless of their primary language of instruction, though McGill, Concordia and Bishop's stand most vulnerable because they get large shares of their students from outside Quebec.

The government’s goal for the use of the French language “is academically and technically unfeasible and will only serve to deter students from coming here”, McGill’s president, Deep Saini, said in issuing his institution’s cost estimate.

The president of Concordia, Graham Carr, said that the mere threat of the policy is already costing Quebec higher education harm to its global reputation that “cannot be undone”.

Quebec’s French-speaking institutions have showed limited sympathy. The University of Quebec said the Legault government is taking steps aimed at “ensuring a better balance of income generated by international students between universities”.

And the leaders of several other French-speaking institutions – including the University of Montreal and Laval University – said they didn’t necessarily oppose the idea of taking resources from their more popular English-language counterparts, as long as the plan isn’t so extreme that it causes them great harm.

Those leaders did, however, raise early objections to the Legault government’s initial plan, saying it was developed without consulting Quebec’s universities, and that it redistributed money between institutions without adding any new public money.

There’s also debate over the fundamental size of the problem that Mr Legault and his party is battling. Federal data has showed that the share of Quebecers speaking French at home regularly is high, albeit declining slowly, from 87 per cent in 2016 to about 85.5 per cent in 2021.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com