Opinion: Anglo universities' legal challenge not just about tuition

McGill and Concordia invoke Quebec’s own laws to argue the government’s duty in upholding language rights does not apply to French alone.

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When the heads of McGill and Concordia announced last week that they were launching separate legal challenges to Quebec’s decision to sharply increase tuition fees for students from outside the province wishing to study at their institutions, they laid out what might be described as the expected case against the plan.

They claimed, for example, that by raising tuition for only for those students coming from outside the province and choosing to attend McGill and Concordia, the government was violating the mobility rights as well as the equality rights of Canadians found in Sections 6 and 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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But what was perhaps unexpected about their announcements was their claim that the government’s tuition plan also violates Quebec’s own laws — starting with its Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

That’s because, unlike the federal charter, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability,” the provincial charter additionally prohibits discrimination based on language.

More unexpected still, the legal action argues the tuition plan violates Quebec’s Charter of the French Language, which in its preamble commits to the pursuit of language policies “in a spirit of fairness and open-mindedness” and in a way that is “respectful of the institutions of the English-speaking community of Quebec.”

The suit argues that by failing to engage in meaningful consultation — and by relying on “stereotypes and false assumptions about the English-speaking community of Quebec” — the Coalition Avenir Québec government has imposed a policy on these institutions that can hardly be described as fair.

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Had the CAQ made no distinction between English and French students from outside the province when it announced its plan to increase tuition fees, it might have been on more solid legal ground. Instead, it made clear from the get-go the point was to target McGill and Concordia (and Bishop’s, before it was given a partial reprieve), in part because too much English was being heard on the streets of Montreal.

As well, the CAQ said it would claw back more of the fees these two institutions collect from international students. And the extra tuition it imagines will be collected from students from the rest of Canada is to be redirected to the province’s French-language universities.

In these ways, the government effectively made clear the purpose of its plan is to discourage English-speaking students from outside the province from attending McGill and Concordia. The plan appears designed to harm their finances and even their viability as English-language institutions — in short, to inflict harm on McGill and Concordia.

The legal challenges are thus significant in ways that go beyond the issue of tuition fees. By referencing Quebec’s own charter of rights and its own French language law, McGill and Concordia are making it more difficult for the CAQ to claim — as it often does when it encounters a law it does not like — that the federal charter was unjustly imposed on it by Ottawa and thus should not be enforced.

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McGill and Concordia are essentially arguing that the responsibility for defending minority language rights in Quebec does not rest exclusively with the federal government. It is the provincial government’s responsibility, too — one that is laid out in its own charter documents.

Moreover, these legal challenges shift the discussion away from the assumption that the Quebec government’s responsibility in upholding language rights applies to French alone.

In other words, these legal claims seek to accomplish much more than just doing away with the tuition hike. They are asking the court to affirm that the Quebec government’s duty is not simply to uphold the rights of French-speaking Quebecers. Its duty, rather, is to uphold the rights of all Quebecers.

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.

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