Up until age 17, francophone Quebecers and the children of immigrants have no say in their language of schooling. Under Bill 101, if they attend a publicly subsidized school, it must be in French.
But when high school finishes and they head for the pre-university colleges known as CEGEPs, doors of the province’s English institutions swing open, and judging from the latest admissions statistics, they are voting with their feet.
“The popularity of anglophone CEGEPs cannot be denied,” La Presse reported last week. The province’s largest English CEGEP, Dawson College in downtown Montreal, saw a 20% jump in applications for next fall. Other anglo CEGEPs experienced increased demand, and it is not as if the city’s anglophone population is booming. The latest hike comes a year after a similar boom in applications forced the three main anglo CEGEPs to increase their enrollment by a total of nearly 700 students. Dawson had to rent space in the former Montreal Forum, whose main tenant now is a movie complex.
The reason for the increased interest seems obvious. CEGEP is the first opportunity for young allophone and francophone Quebecers to receive a free education in English. A Léger Marketing poll published by The Gazette last month found that francophones surveyed are in favour of keeping the rules for CEGEP as they are. (The Parti Québécois wants to extend Bill 101′s restrictions to cover CEGEPs.) Fifty-three percent of francophones wanted freedom of choice, versus 38% who wanted to block access to English CEGEPs for allophones and francophones.
It will take more than clear evidence of a desire for English education to persuade the hard-line nationalists at the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste and the Mouvement Montréal français to change their tune, however.
Reacting to Premier Jean Charest’s recent announcement of plans to have sixth graders in the French-language system spend half their year learning English, the two organizations have decided Quebec kids already have quite enough English, merci. “There are already many more bilingual Quebecers than the number of jobs requiring a knowledge of English,” their respective spokesmen, Mario Beaulieu and Denis Trudel write. Teach students Spanish, Mandarin, anything but English, they argue. English-language colleges and universities are “over-financed,” and the government is neglecting its mission to foster an economy that functions in French.
“If a serious change of direction is not made to reinforce French in Quebec, we will be confronted with a more and more difficult and unavoidable choice: anglicize or once again become drawers of water.”
Those fresh-faced teens who submitted their CEGEP applications last month thought they were taking a step toward an exciting future. Little did they know they were condemning their compatriots to a future of menial labour.