With the notable exception of the Université du Québec à Montréal, there is no evidence that the province's colleges and universities have been out spending like drunken sailors and now need to be brought under control.
But the UQÀM scandal - in which the government had to bail out the school to the tune of $400 million after its grandiose expansion schemes stumbled - has evidently terrified the provincial government.
To prevent a similar spending scandal from occurring, Education Minister Michèle Courchesne has introduced a governance bill that is as wide-ranging and restrictive as it is unnecessary.
She is insisting on each school's having an internal auditing service. If each of the province's 48 CEGEPs were to have its own internal auditing service, it would cost the network an additional $9 million a year, protested Gaëtan Boucher, head of the federation of CEGEPs. "The CEGEP at Baie Comeau has 600 students," he said. "There is no need to have a internal auditing service at Baie Comeau."
Courchesne's law also inexplicably removes academic deans from CEGEP and university boards. Boucher said he was told it was because Quebec City wants a single person at the head of each institution.
But should this law be passed, it would mean that the top college or university administrator responsible for academic life would be absent from the boards of directors. This should be unthinkable. The whole point of higher-education is academics. The person whose job it is to manage academic programs and student success of course should be present at the highest decision-making body.
Courchesne also wants the government to appoint eight of the 11 external appointees to college boards. The federation argues it should be the other way around: CEGEPs should appoint eight outside members and the government only three. Colleges have a better sense of the communities they serve, Boucher pointed out, and they know who they need on their boards to represent the community.
The real purpose of Courchesne's legislation is ensure that her government is never again embarrassed as it was by the UQÀM scandal. But Quebec's auditor-general warned the Charest government in time to head off the scandal that the university was "on the edge of bankruptcy."
Quebec didn't pay attention and now it wants all the schools to pay for the sins of one. This is not fair. This law needs to go back to the drawing board, or better yet, be ditched altogether.