Ontario government slams door on French college in north

The decision of Ontario’s conservative government to pull the plug on the process of creating a standalone French university in Sudbury, 400 km north of Toronto, came as a surprise to both the francophone organisations that had been working with the government for three years and Sudbury member of the provincial parliament, Jamie West.

“Following careful review, the Ministry of Colleges and Universities (MCU) has determined that the proposal from the Université de Sudbury (UdS), including the request for funding to create a standalone French-language university, does not reflect current demand and enrolment trends, especially given the already expanding capacity of postsecondary institutions to offer French-language programs in the Greater Sudbury area and across Ontario.

"As a result, the Ministry will not provide funding to the university,” the MCU said in a terse three paragraph statement.

In time-honoured fashion for announcing news that governments would like to be overlooked, noted West, a member of the official opposition New Democratic Party, the government announced the decision late on Friday before a long weekend.

“I think this shows that the government was a little embarrassed, making the announcement at 4.30pm on the Friday before Canada Day, which was Saturday [1 July]. And making it very late in the day hoping that the media wouldn’t pick up on it because it wouldn’t have time to react before the six o’clock news. And, then, Canada Day would dominate the headlines for the weekend and people would forget about it.”

Although francophone groups have advocated for a French language university in the province’s north for decades, the most recent push began in mid-2021 after the province allowed the bilingual Laurentian University (LU) in Sudbury to become the first publicly funded entity in Canada to enter creditor protection after declaring insolvency. The government of Doug Ford had refused a request for a CAD$100 million (US$0.75 million) emergency loan by the regional university that had an accumulated debt of CAD$322 million.

One of the fallouts of Laurentian’s financial crisis was its decision to pull out of the six-decade old federation with three other small universities and UdS, which had been founded by the Jesuits in 1913 as Collège du Sacré-Cœur. Following its bankruptcy, LU, which held UdS’ charter and had operated as a bilingual university, cut dozens of French programs.

Among the 24 French undergraduate programs cut were bio-medicine and, surprisingly given that Sudbury is the centre of nickel mining in Canada, mining, as well as four French masters programs. As University World News reported at the time, LU also cut the majority of its Indigenous Studies programs, the third leg of what LU called its “tri-cultural mandate.”

The axing of the LU’s ‘Art expression programme’, the theatre program that for decades has been an incubator of francophone culture across Ontario’s north, was especially concerning.

As Université d’Ottawa (uOttawa) law professor, François Larocque, Research Chair on the Francophone World, Language Rights and Issues, said at the time, LU “was a hub for thinkers and artists from which emanate a slew of culturally significant institutions like the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario, Prise de parole [a publishing house], the Institut Franco-Ontarien – the first multi-disciplinary institute of higher learning devoted to the study of Franco-Ontarians – and a number of music festivals”.

Art d’expression had, in fact, been suffering a slow death for more than a decade. In 2007, it had five full-time professors and three sessional professors. When it was cancelled there was one full-time professor and a few sessionals. “Theatre is all about being able to see different artistic visions and ways of expression, so when you don’t have variety that’s a problem,”

Marie-Pierre Proulx, director of Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario, told University World News in 2021. The program was undermined, she explained, by the decision of LU to count only those enrolled in the program, not the total number of students taking theatre arts courses.

Nor did the francophone community accept LU’s method of counting the French courses that remained.

LU claimed to be offering 28 French programmes, an assertion the MCU indicates it agrees with when it referred to the French programs in the Greater Sudbury Area; the reference the rest of the province are to the Université de l’Ontario français, which opened its doors in Toronto in 2018 and has 151 students and the francophone side of uOttawa, (the world’s largest bilingual university), which has 13,000 students enrolled in 269 undergraduate and 100 graduate programs.

At LU, the five French courses in the faculty of management all have a common core, for example, critics said. Curiously, LU’s calendar still lists French as a second language as a French course.

According to both Serge Miville, president of UdS, and François Hastir, director general of Regroupement étudiant franco-ontarien, everyone involved on the French side of the negotiations with the MCU believed they were progressing well and that the business plan had been accepted.

“[W]hen we were speaking with ministry officials over the past six months, everything was fine, everything was great. They commented favourably on the quality of the business plan, which really does indicate there is a need for a French-language university in the region.

“Right now we feel like we got blindsided last Friday … we have more questions than we have answers,” Miville told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

For his part, Hastir said, “We are very surprised as well because the echoes we had from the government, from the Université de Sudbury, from Assemblé de la francophonie de l’Ontario, were all positive, were all that the business plan was well received. We’ve also seen the business plan and it made a lot of sense.

“Also we have seen the studies from Centre de Leadership et d’Évaluation [an Ottawa, Ontario-based NGO devoted to developing Canada’s francophone communities]. They did a study about what would be the economic impact of the Université de Sudbury and their conclusion was that there would be a lot of money reinvested into the community and it would be very sustainable. So in this sense too we are very surprised that the government decided not to fund it and respond to the needs of the francophone community,” he said.

In the absence of more information from the MUC, West was left to speculate as to why the government turned against the plan.

On the one hand, he told University World News, Ford doesn’t understand the francophone community. The premier, who does not speak French, represents a Toronto riding: 2.3% of Torontonians are francophones as compared to 10.8% of Torontians who speak Mandarin, Cantonese or Tagalog. Francophones make up 4.7% of Ontario’s population.

“When he was first elected in 2018, he cut the French Language Commissioner, he cancelled the French university that was supposed to open in Toronto. [Ultimately], they did move forward with the French university in Toronto, but the federal government is paying the full shot for the first four years. Doug Ford is a little reluctant to pick up his wallet when it comes to paying his fair share of things,” said West.

“His knowledge of the French community is lacking. Frankly, he doesn’t understand them. He’s not in touch with what’s going on with the Franco-community.”

West’s second point concerns the premier’s lack of post-secondary education; Ford famously dropped out of Humber College (Toronto) after two months.

“I’m trying not to be insulting, but the premier didn’t go to post-secondary. So I don’t think he understands that side of it.”

Although the Canadian constitution guarantees primary and secondary education in both French and English “where numbers warrant”, he said. Post-secondary education in either of the country’s two official languages has no such constitutional protection. Until LU’s cuts in 2021, it was generally thought that Ontario, the French Language Services Act (FLSA) provided sufficient protection for French, as it barred cuts to French language education unless ‘absolutely necessary’.

The legal standard of what was ‘absolutely necessary’ was established in 2001, in a case involving Ottawa’s Montfort Hospital, the only francophone teaching hospital in the province. The Ontario Appeals Court ruled that the government of the day’s plan to close Montfort Hospital to help deal with the province’s financial difficulties contravened the FLSA because the government had not shown that it was the only remaining course open to it.

While the MCU’s press release does not mention the FLSA, the reference to an unreleased report by the “independent Postsecondary Education Quality Assessment Board”, the members of which are appointed by the government, and a review of labour market data, appear to be a way of satisfying the requirements of the FLSA.

What such data misses, West and Hastir stressed, is the cost – both in dollars and cents, and to the future of the francophone community in the North – of having students from northern Ontario travelling to Ottawa for university education.

“It’s expensive to live in Toronto or Ottawa. The average rent in Ottawa isCAD$2,000, in Toronto it is CAD$3,000. So if you are French educated all the way to grade 12 and you want to go to [French university, that’s a financial strain a lot of families just can’t afford to bear,” said West.

The plan to continue offering a small number of French programs at LU, Hastir said, amounts to a path to assimilation.

“The reason why we are asking for a francophone institution managed by and for the francophone community is that is because in a bilingual institution, what often happens, whether it is intended or not, is that there is a tendency to assimilation,” noted West.

“First of all,” said West, “even if some classes will be offered in French, most of the student life will be in English. Most of the extended services will also be in English because they’re not necessarily required to be bilingual. All the services that are provided by people that are outside the university will also be provided in English. Professors and students will have more incentive to do their research in English rather than French because they’ll have more opportunities to be published and have more frequent funding opportunities.”

By effectively telling francophone students who want to study, for example, physics, French literature, history, theatre arts, psychology, social work, biology, mechanical engineering, chemistry, nursing or education, to move to Ottawa, the government has, West and Hastir, underscored, ensured a ‘brain drain’ from the North to the province’s second largest city.

“When we send our children South, they tend not to come back. They put down roots. They meet their future spouses and make their adult friends. So we lose that [intellectual] capital, workers who speak French,” said West.

One of the most important impacts of this brain drain, Hastir said, occurs in education. By cutting the French education program, LU made it much more difficult for the French primary and secondary schools to recruit French-speaking teachers because, having lived for several years in Ottawa, French education students from the North have not only put down personal roots but, also, are being recruited by the French school boards in the nation’s capital.

Hastir also pointed out that the loss of French students to Ottawa or Toronto negatively impacts French community services across the North.

“A lot of these organisations have students [working in them] through internships or other programs. They can no longer do that.”

The decision not to fund UdS, West thinks, will damage Sudbury’s ability to attract immigrants who want to live in ‘French’.

“More and more, Sudbury has become a destination of choice for international students, for newcomers who are native French speakers. From Africa, for example, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, are very common immigrants to Sudbury. And one of the things that attracts them here, one of the reasons they recommend coming to Sudbury is because we have such a strong francophone community. You can literally drive a half hour from here [downtown Sudbury] and walk into a store where people don’t speak English.

“We’re not just standing up for the rights of my wife and kids, who are French speakers. We’re standing up for the rights of new Canadians who have the Charter [Constitutional] right to be educated in French. Doug Ford is telling them that for university you can just travel four or five hours away to go to school in Ottawa or Toronto,” he said.

*The office of Ontario’s Minister of Francophone Affairs, Caroline Mulroney, refused to comment and recommended University World News contact the Ministry of Colleges and Universities. Minister Jill Dunlop’s office has not responded to our request for an interview.