Québec’s universities say law is a threat to autonomy

University autonomy and academic freedom are threatened by Bill 74, say Québec’s universities and the union that represents the province’s professors, the Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université (FQPPU).

The innocuously titled bill, “An Act mainly to improve the regulatory scheme governing international students”, which passed into law on 5 December by a vote of 78 to 27 (with one abstention), gives the province’s minister of higher education extraordinary powers to control the financial viability of many programmes that depend on international students – effectively trampling on the university’s right to choose which programmes to offer and how many international students it will enrol.

One of the parties voting against the bill was the Québec Solidaire. Its immigration critic, Guillaume Cliche-Rivard told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that the fact that Québec’s Minister of Immigration, Francization and Integration Jean-François Roberge refused to address the university leaders’ concerns “tells me a lot as to his real intentions on the ground”.

Daniel Jutras, rector of Quebec’s largest and most prestigious French-language university, Université de Montréal, held little back in his condemnation of the law.

“The minister is granting himself the power to cap international student enrolment based on very granular criteria like region, level of study, institution, and even programme. Universities are very concerned about their autonomy,” he said.

Concordia University, in its submission to the committee of the Québec Assemblé National, said: “We consider this [Bill 74] to be a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of all [Québec universities], and we find it hard to understand why such a new power is necessary.”

Lack of consultation

When tabling the bill, Roberge placed it in the context of Canada’s decision – driven partly by a housing affordability crisis and partly by the fact that hundreds of thousands of international students were using the foreign visa system as a backdoor into Canada – to sharply limit international students, cutting the number of visas by 35% this year from 1 million in 2023 and 10% further cuts in each of the next two years.

Referring to the 120,000 international students in Québec, Roberge was reported by CBC as saying: “We will reduce the numbers with some criteria that are well chosen. We don’t want to reduce just to reduce. We don’t want to say, ‘let’s cut and discuss after’.”

At hearings on the bill, Université Laval (UL), Université Sherbrooke, Université de Montréal and the province’s English-language universities, McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s, made it clear they had little faith in Roberge’s promise that any decisions would be “surgical” and will not penalise institutions that depend on international students to mount programmes, or in his promise to consult.

Sébastien Lebel-Grenier, Bishop’s principal reportedly told the minister: “You understand, we don’t have much confidence there will be a dialogue.”

Lebel-Grenier’s and the scorn of other rector was due in part to last year’s decision by the Québec government to – without consultation – increase the fees of out-of-province English-speaking students by 33% and to impose a French language level for these students in order for them to graduate.

As well, Minister of Higher Education Pascale Déry, imposed what amounted to a tax of CA$40 million (US$28.5 million) on English language universities, which enrol the bulk of the international students in the province and, therefore, collected through unregulated tuition, tens of millions more than did the provinces’ French language universities.

The effect of these changes, the committee heard, was a steep decline in out-of-province students. Bishop’s out-of-province enrolment fell by 27.7%. Concordia lost almost 30% of its out-of-province intake, while at McGill, the number of out-of-province students fell by 15.8%.

According to a member of Concordia’s senior administration, Bill 74 contains no requirement for the minister of higher education to consult with the universities.

Rather, the administrator told University World News that it’s possible the administrator would find out about a new decision, such as deciding that a university could no longer enrol international students, by reading the government Gazette in the morning.

“This gets to the fundamental principle of academic freedom for professors: in order to teach whatever they want and say whatever they want, programmes have to exist,” the administrator said.

A ‘healthy distance from government’

Unlike the United States, where academic freedom and university autonomy are grounded in decisions of the United States Supreme Court (and are, therefore, binding on lower courts), in Québec university autonomy is grounded in the ethos of the La Commission royale d’enquête sur l’enseignement dans la province de Québec (published between 1963-66 and known, after Alphonse-Marie Parent, president of UL, as the Parent Commission [PC]) and Bill 32, An Act respecting academic freedom in the university sector, that became law in June 2022.

The PC was chiefly concerned with providing the framework to remove K-12 education from the Catholic Church and into a secular ministry of education; as well, it laid the groundwork for Québec’s system of junior colleges.

In its third volume, the PC underscored the need to “safeguard the autonomy essential to any university” and “they have an imperative duty to protect this freedom of knowledge, of research and its expression, both within their own walls and in their relations with outside bodies; this is the very essence of academic freedom.”

In its submission to the committee, studying Bill 74, Projet de loi 74: Rôle crucial des étudiants internationaux dans le réseau universitaire et analyse des impacts potentiels du projet de loi, Concordia reminded legislators that the PC foresaw that “institutional autonomy revolves around the academic freedom of universities and collegial governance, which permits the members of the university community to make decisions about the institution. University autonomy is no accent . . . . Its aim is to give universities a healthy distance from government”.

The submission goes on to say that while the government has always had prerogative powers over immigration, Bill 74 expands those powers so much that law “creates a new paradigm” that “directly interferes with the autonomy of universities in managing their admission process and the composition of their student body”.

According to a member of Concordia’s senior administration, while the PC’s positions are known, “the more time passes, the more attacks on university autonomy because the government wants to control programmes, to divert them to engineering, for example”.

The second document upon which academic freedom and university autonomy rest in Québec is Bill 32, An Act respecting academic freedom in the university sector, that became law in June 2022, which begins by quoting the 1997 United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) statement on academic freedom: the proper enjoyment of academic freedom requires the autonomy of institutions of higher education.

“As university autonomy and university academic freedom constitute essential conditions for carrying out the mission of such educational institutions . . . there is a need to see to it that such educational institutions are able to carry out their mission without doctrinal, ideological or moral constraint,” it states.

Bill 32 is, however, an ordinary law, which can be repealed or amended at the will of Québec’s Assemblée nationale and is open to interpretation by the government of the day.

Accordingly, as Madeleine Pastinelli, Université Laval sociology professor, who is also president of FQPPU, explained, Bill 32’s robust statements about academic freedom are no defence against Bill 74’s rather stealthy attack on university autonomy.

“This proposed law will give the government the power to limit the number of foreign students in certain fields in some universities,” she stated.

“And by doing that, the government will be able to do what it is forbidden from doing directly because of the special law on academic freedom [Bill 32, adopted in 2022], which is pretty clear that the government has to respect the autonomy of universities,” including the setting of curricula and programmes.

“The government, for sure, will say they are not making decisions about a programme or field today – but just about the admission of foreign students.

“But, by doing so, the government will be doing exactly that [deciding on programmes] because universities really need foreign students to maintain many programmes. Their contribution is very, very important to us and they are needed to offer programmes in some regions,” said Pastinelli.

Predicting the job market

While neither Roberge nor Déry has indicated which programmes the government plans to restrict, Denis Cossette, Concordia’s chief financial officer, has little doubt that the government’s decision will mirror its overall philosophy about universities, which is not about intellectual growth.

Rather, he explained, “it’s about associating university resources to the job market, not only for international students but for everything.

“In his [Premier François Legault’s] mind, universities are about engineering, education and health. Engineering is about prosperity. In his mind, ‘I need to catch up with Ontario. I need to keep pace.’ So he understands that knowledge is the source of a better economy.

“He doesn’t support social sciences and the humanities because he doesn’t think they create good jobs,” said Cossette.

The senior administrator added, “I would say they have a vision that is extremely utilitarian for university education, which is the job market.

“This is problematic because historically the government has been extremely bad at predicting the job market.

“When they try to predict the workforce needs, you’re taking kids in their 20s. But the job market and their need for a job will be over the next 40 or 50 years.”

* University World News reached out to the government of Quebec for a comment on the issues raised in this article, specifically asking whether or not the Ontario-based author of this article, who studied in Quebec as a student, would under today’s laws be disqualified from doing so, but received no substantial response by the time of publication.

This article was updated on 8 December 2024.