As Quebec’s CAQ (Coalition Avenir Quebec) government draws criticism from the province’s English-speaking minority communities over its new language law Bill 96 and Bill 40 - which abolished school boards and replaced them with school service centres - Minister of Education Bernard Drainville introduces Bill 23, an “Act to amend mainly the Education Act and to enact the Act respecting the Institut national d’excellence en éducation.”

According to documentation of the National Assembly of Quebec, its newly proposed Bill 23 will give the Minister more powers over Quebec’s school service centres, including the power to appoint directors and the power to reverse a school service centre’s decisions. 

The Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA), a collective of Quebec’s English school boards, is currently challenging Bill 40 in Quebec’s Superior Court as it deems the piece of legislation as being unconstitutional. According to Section 23 of the Canadian Constitution, language minority populations are guaranteed the right to govern their own educational institutions. The group was granted a stay on Bill 40 until a decision has been made. Bill 23 has been viewed as the next step in the CAQ government’s attempt to take away the right of the English-speaking communities to govern their own institutions.

With educational institutions being the only institutions left in Quebec that are governed by the Anglophone population, community groups and educators say that Quebec’s English-speaking communities need to be concerned about the potential impacts of Bill 23.

“This bill is likely to be even greater of a disaster than Bill 40 was in terms of expanding the powers of the minister, which essentially means the power of faceless, nameless, bureaucrats in Quebec City,” said Michael Murray, chairperson for the Eastern Townships’ School Board, the only English-language school board in the Eastern Townships region.   

Murray described education as being “complex” and that it involves the expertise of a wide range of professionals. He said that by centralizing decision-making powers back to the government everything becomes “arbitrary.”

“And the professionals, the administrators, the aide technicians, the psychological advisors, have nothing to say about. It’s an appallingly broad sweeping of empowerment and centralization,” explained Murray. “You’ll recall when they passed Bill 40, the justification ... was that this would decentralize everything to schools. Well, now this is is the second shoe dropping. They successfully persuaded themselves that the decentralization to schools mean that they appoint everybody.”

Both Murray and Maggie Severs, Executive Director of the Townshippers’ Association - a non-profit organization that supports the interests of the English-speaking community in the Eastern Townships - pointed out that where Townshippers need to be concerned is that Bill 23 offers no guarantees that the individuals the Minister appoints to the school service centres and any future decisions he makes will have the interests of the English-speaking community at heart. 

“Our educational institutions are our last English institutional right within Quebec. Taking away the community’s right to appoint their own General Director for its school boards is quite huge,” noted Severs. (…) “It’s left to be seen, but leaving to chance that these directors will be chosen from within our community, that they will represent our community, and that they will take positions against the Minister of Education, is a significant risk for our community.”

“We’re supposed to have constitutional guarantees as a minority language education system that we can manage and control our own schools, including who we hire. We’d like to have people that are competent in English for example, there’s no guarantee that the Minister will decide in that sense when appointing directors,” Murray highlighted. (…) It’s abuse of power, it’s completely unconstitutional, and it’s disruptive of good education. I can’t be more comprehensive in my critique than that.”

Severs noted that if Bill 23 is adopted, whatever educational priorities are identified in the future by the Quebec government “we  (English-speaking community of the Eastern Townships) will also be subject to prioritizing.”

“The reality of the English-speaking population is different from the French-speaking population. This creates a large degree of separation between our ability to address those needs more directly through the education system,” she said. 

From Severs perspective, centralizing educational power back to the government “is not a good thing.”

“I think that needs from school to school, community to community, region to region, are unique. It’s the jobs of the schools and the school boards to look at their individual needs. We lose some of that in this system,” she explained. “(…) One of the things about Bill 23 is that it does leave a lot of questions on the table. Without these reassurances, there’s no way to look at this and determine that this is a positive in the positive direction to ensure the educational success in the longevity of the English-speaking community.”

CIDI reached out to the QESBA but they were not available for comment. 

CIDI reached out to the Appalachian Teacher’s Association but they did not get back to us before press time. 

Listen to the full interview below to hear more from Michael Murray and  Maggie Severs on Bill 23: