The Paul Wells Show - Quebec's Tuition Bombshell

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

The Quebec government recently announced it will double university tuition for out-of-province students, raise international student fees, and change how the money from those fees is distributed. The new measures will disproportionately affect the province’s three English universities.    Graham Carr, president of Concordia University in Montreal, tells Paul that these changes will cause a major blow to Concordia’s finances. He also talks about how we got here, and why this has become such a hot button issue in Quebec.

Imagine running one of the biggest universities in Canada and being told you're doing it wrong. You know, Paul, I'm not sure if that was a curveball or a beanball. I have to say it felt a little bit more like the latter. Today, Concordia University President Graham Carr on the Quebec government's tuition bombshell. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's Monk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show.

This week you're going to meet Graham Carr, a historian from Montreal, who's the president of Concordia, one of Canada's biggest universities. But what he can't ever forget is that Concordia is also one of Quebec's biggest universities. And because Concordia does most of what it does in English for English-speaking students, sometimes the government of Quebec sees Concordia as a problem. In October, the government of Premier Francois Legault announced it would double tuition fees for Canadian students from outside Quebec, and will also keep more of the fees paid by students from outside Canada. The new tuition policy applies to every university in Quebec, but it's really going to hurt the ones that attract the largest number of out-of-province

students and international students. And it just so happens that the schools at the top of that list are Quebec's English language universities, McGill, Concordia, and Bishops. Carr says the new policy could cost Concordia tens of millions of dollars per year. He says it'll dry up the supply of out-of-province students. Students just simply won't come to Quebec to study at Concordia. He's stuck at the center of a paradox Concordia didn't create. The province doesn't want all of these English-speaking students lying around, but it really needs their money. So this is a look at the complexities of language politics in a place where language politics matter a lot. It's also an insight into what it's like to attract the government's attention when you were really hoping to lie low.

Graham Carr, thank you for joining me. It's great to be with you, Paul. Thanks for the invitation. Let's start by situating Concordia in people's imagination because it's a very distinctive university with a very distinctive history, and it's a place where you spend many years. So tell us about Concordia.

So Concordia was founded in 1974. It was a merger of two existing institutions. One was a small liberal arts college, mostly liberal arts college called Loyola, and the other was a larger university called Sir George Williams University, which essentially catered to clientele that was in most cases first-generation university attendees, people who were working and taking courses at night, had a lot of open doors for women and people from what we would today call marginalized communities. So the university, as a result of that integration in 1974, has evolved a lot. And today, we have more than 50,000 students, including students enrolled in continuing education. We've become one of the top 15 to 20 research institutions in Canada, with excellence in areas like electrification and cybersecurity, but we also have the largest

cinema program in the world. So we've put a lot of emphasis on trying to differentiate Concordia in Montreal, which, as you know, is a very competitive university environment. Four universities in the city. Well, four big universities, Université de Montréal, McGill, UCAM, and Concordia, but also HSA, the French Business School, École Technologie Supérieure, one of the two engineering schools, along with École Polytechnique. So it's a crowded market. That's also part of what makes Montreal such a fantastic university city.

I think of Concordia as being sort of a quintessential downtown urban campus university, like New York University or the university formerly known as Ryerson, where the fact that it's absolutely in the middle of downtown Montreal is part of its identity and strength and challenge. Yeah. I like to say, Paul, we have the best of both worlds because one of the inheritances of the merger is we also have the campus at Loyola, which is about seven kilometers west of our downtown campus. It's a more residential green space campus right on the border of Notre Dame de Grasse and Montreal West. The downtown campus,

though, is really a storefront campus like NYU. You know, our buildings front on St. Catherine Street, the Maisonneuve, the big pedestrian thoroughfares in Montreal. I think it adds an enormous amount of excitement and vitality to the university. A lot of students these days are drawn by that urban experience. Sometimes it comes with its challenges too, because you are right in the middle of the action in terms of social life and political life in the downtown core. It's also a university that does almost all of its educating in English in a city, in a province,

that is adamant about safeguarding its French identity. Has that been hard to juggle just in general over the last several years? Yeah, I think, you know, we are an English language university, but we serve Quebec society. So 70% of the students at Concordia come from Quebec. That's not the case at the other anglophone institutions. 20% of our students are francophones, either coming from Quebec, francophones from the rest of Canada, or students from France, who are actually the third largest international group on campus. We have international students from more than 150 countries. We've always served what's known in Montreal and Quebec as the

Alifon community. So immigrant communities, whether they're Italian or Greek or Moroccan or Tunisian, that means that Concordia is just culturally a very rich and diverse place. Three quarters of our students are bilingual in terms of French-English competency. A huge percentage of our students are trilingual. With respect to French language training, that's something we've been very sensitive to. Going back to the late 1970s, Concordia had one of the first fully bilingual programs of any university in Quebec, the School of Community and Public Affairs. And I think our commitment to French language training remains very strong. We have new programs in cinema, for example, with sections offered entirely in French and entirely in English.

But predominantly, we are an English language institution. Of course, students have always had the right at Concordia, and now it's legally enshrined to submit any of their evaluative work in French. And we're trying in the current context, and recently made a proposal to the government of Quebec, jointly with McGill and bishops to express, concern also for the vulnerable state of French in North America and our willingness as educational institutions to do our part to address those concerns. Now, about a month ago, the higher education minister in Quebec threw a curveball at you. Substantial changes to the treatment of tuition fees for students from out of the province and changes to the treatment of tuition fees for international students. Walk us through that briefly so that we can get a

sense of how things changed. You know, Paul, I'm not sure if that was a curveball or a beanball. I have to say it felt a little bit more like the latter. Probably the background on this goes to March, April of earlier this year, when articles began to appear in some of the Quebec media focusing on university funding, and essentially making claims that anglophone institutions were too generously funded by comparison with their francophone counterparts. I'm simplifying a little, but not too much, frankly. And the minister, who was new in her portfolio and new to politics, was pretty quick to jump on those statements, indicating her concern that there was this inequality between anglophone and Francophone institutions,

much of which is attributed to the reality that the English language institutions have traditionally drawn a large international student clientele and a large clientele from the rest of Canada. I have to say that, unfortunately, a lot of the information that circulated and seemed to inspire the minister to speak out in the spring was factually inaccurate and problematic. However, the minister indicated that this was something that she wanted to address, had a meeting with the heads of the three universities early in the spring. the three universities early in the spring. We began the discussion at that stage to say, I think we need to have an understanding of the data around the funding formula. And the minister then announced that she wanted to set up six working groups involving officials from her

ministry and people from the university to look at the funding formula for higher education in Quebec. And there's nothing unusual about that. Every seven to 10 years, governments take a look at the funding formula. And then suddenly, really without warning, and frankly, with not much advance notice, I was convoked to a meeting on the 10th of October and told that an announcement would be coming later in the week, suggesting that there would be a significant hike to tuition fees for rest of Canada students and a change to the funding formula for international students. And then, like everybody else, we learned the details, such as they were in a Facebook press conference on Friday, the 13th of October. So that was a pretty terrible way, frankly, to get the news.

And the news itself was also pretty terrible. And the three English language universities will bear the brunt of the policies announced earlier in October, now almost a month ago, announced earlier in October, now almost a month ago, because we are the universities that attract students from the rest of Canada. And we also have significant numbers of international students, although it is worth pointing out that the growth in the international student population at Quebec universities in the last few years has really happened in the francophone network, not the anglophone network. Okay. Now, a peculiarity of all of this is that individual universities don't have a lot of leeway to set tuition. And to the extent they

attract students who pay more tuition, whether from out of the province or from out of the country, they don't keep that money. How does that work? You're right. Tuition for the vast majority of students in Quebec is set by the government of Quebec. So there are the fees which students who are residents of Quebec pay, which are the lowest fees in North America. The government of Quebec also sets the fees for rest of Canada students for students from France and Belgium and they pay substantially less than what other international students would pay.

Students who are in research programs at the master's or PhD level, their fees are pretty much managed also by a combination of government policy and and and university fees because we do get a grant for those students but for undergraduate international students or for students who are in professional master's programs MBA for example or an MNG under the existing system universities had free reign to set tuition for those students, but the government provided no grant to support those students. So the announcement that came on the 13th of October changed the system in two ways. For the rest of Canada's students, the government decided that tuition would be raised to a floor of $17,000 a year.

It's roughly doubling from where it was. Yeah, for the overwhelming majority of students coming from the rest of Canada, they pay in the neighborhood of $9,000. That's more than the national average and more than they would pay in their home province. There are some exceptions, medical, dentistry, law, which are offered at McGill. They are truly exceptional because there's a very small number of students coming from the rest of Canada to McGill medical program. Unfortunately,

in the public discussion, the exception tended to become the rule because fees in Quebec for those programs are quite a bit lower than in the rest of Canada. On the international side, and Paul, I have to say we're a month in, we still don't have anything in writing from the government of Quebec about the policy changes. On the international side, the decision was to re-regulate undergraduate and professional master's students, meaning that the fees that were charged, a portion of those fees would be kept by the government of Quebec rather than entirely by the universities, and some compensation would be given to the universities in the form of a

government grant. But the details of that arrangement haven't been finalized, and as a result, it's creating enormous confusion in the recruitment season, frankly, not just for Anglophone institutions, but for all universities in Quebec. Because more and more universities in general have been banking on attracting international students as a revenue source, as well as as a source of cultural richness and openness to the world and all that stuff, right? These folks bring money. And until about a decade ago, all of the supplementary tuition income went into a generalized pool that was equalized among Quebec universities. For the last several years, universities have been able to keep more of that

differential tuition income. And now the Quebec announcement is, no, we're going back to the way it used to be where differential tuition, the extra money that an international student pays will go into a pot that is shared among all Quebec universities. Is that right? You're right. So in 2017, 2018 was the last time that the government of Quebec examined the funding formula. And one of the major outcomes of that was exactly what you described, that international undergraduate students and non-research students would be deregulated universities would set the tuition and they would keep the revenue the nuance is that under the current system with regard to out of province students that form of equalization already exists so of the nine thousand dollars that a student from Toronto or Vancouver would pay to study at

Concordia, Concordia keeps $3,000. $6,000 is redistributed through the network, mostly to the benefit of the francophone universities, and in particular, universities in the University of Quebec system. So that's an arrangement which has been working well, but now that system is put under threat because by doubling the amount of tuition to $17,000, the inevitable consequences that McGill and Concordia and Bishops are priced out of the market. So those students simply won't be coming and the redistribution of funding won't flow as a result. On the international front, yes, that's what the government is trying to do is get back to that redistribution model whereby we will recruit the students, keep a portion of the tuition, but a lump sum, which we believe is going to be in the area of around $17,000 per student, will be redistributed. I have to point out that it's not only the English universities that will be affected by that, because a number of Francophone universities also recruit very heavily internationally.

And they, too, will be affected by the change. And I think that's one of the reasons why we saw a couple of weeks ago the five francophone universities that are not part of the University of Quebec network come out publicly expressing their concerns with the policy that the minister had announced. policy that the minister had announced. Part of the mission of the Paul Wells Show is helping listeners gain a deeper understanding of the world we live in. Colleges and universities have always played a big role in shaping public discourse as a training ground and platform for many of the country's thought leaders, trendsetters, and policymakers. That's why you should check out Higher Ed Spotlight, a podcast for students, faculty, administrators, and anyone who cares about the

future of our colleges and universities. Hosted by Ben Wildavsky, one of the leading thinkers in higher education policy, this series is a valuable resource where you'll hear from leaders, academics, and innovators working to solve the most pressing issues affecting students today. From cost-effective and career-relevant education to how we can equip students for the future of work and everything in between. Check out Higher Ed Spotlight, brought to you by Chegg and produced by Antica Productions. Available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. So one of the things that's going on here is that most of the students who can be charged

extra tuition out of province or international students are coming to Montreal. A lot of them are going to the English universities. Some of them are going to the big cosmopolitan French language universities here in Montreal. And what the government wants to do, responding to pressures that are kind of understandable, but might as well call things by their name, it wants to take that Montreal money and spread it across the province

to organizations that have less success attracting those out-of-province students. Montreal is becoming the ATM for the rest of the province. That's an interesting way of putting it, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. So I think what's really unfortunate, Paul, and you certainly know this, is for the last 20 years or so, a lot of people have worked really hard to build Montreal and position Montreal as one of the great university cities in the world. Montreal is always far and away the top-ranked Canadian university and always in one of the top 10 destination cities to be a university

student. So the concern that we have is that the policies that have been announced, you know, are going to tarnish that reputation. And you're absolutely right. I mean, the reality is that, although the government has said that it's not right for the taxpayers of Quebec to be subsidizing students coming from the rest of Canada, when they do four years of studies and then leave, the reality is that those rest of Canada students are actually subsidizing parts of the Francophone university network because of how we redistribute their fees. So there is a bit of that redistribution happening. I would say it's, you know, universities in the regions, depends how we define the regions, but universities like University of Sherbrooke or Laval University in Quebec City, you know,

they've been very successful in attracting international students. They've been very successful in growing as well. So I think a little bit of what we're seeing is not just the Montreal rest of Quebec scenario, but I think we're seeing the effect of big cities versus smaller communities. And that's a pattern in higher education that goes beyond Quebec, I think. And I guess there's one more piece of this that is not maybe obvious to people who don't follow Quebec politics as much, which is a previous Quebec government tried hard to produce a situation where every student would contribute more to the cost of higher education. When Jean Charest, near the end of his time as premier in 2012, instituted general tuition

hikes to bring Quebec up closer to the national average for university tuition. And the backlash was enormous. It launched the career of some prominent current day Quebec politicians, those street protests against higher tuition fees, and those tuition hikes were substantially cancelled. With the result that the only fresh money that can go into the system has to come from students from out of the province because the Quebec Society made a decision in 2012

that it sure wasn't going to come from most Quebec students. So that's why there's all of this interest in out-of-province students and international students. Have I got it right? Yeah, maybe I'll just add a couple of points to that to nuance it a little bit. So you're right, in 2012, students were in the streets protesting against the government's proposals with regard to raising tuition.

And the end result is that the tuition that Quebec students pay is approximately $2,700, $2,800 a year. It is the cheapest deal in North America. One of the rationales for that was that traditionally and it's still the case the level of university attendance particularly in francophone communities was substantially less than in the anglophone community in quebec and substantially less than the national average so i think part of the rationale for keeping tuition low was to make sure that there were no economic barriers to access to higher education. Now we can debate whether that was a

smart move or a correct move and it'd be interesting to look at the data and see whether lower tuitions have in fact generated an increase in francophone attendance at universities, because that's a laudable goal. But the end result of it was that over time, the lack of tuition as a significant source of revenue meant that universities have been highly dependent on government grants and or on the ability to raise tuition from other sources, such as students from the rest of Canada or international students. And what it's meant, Paul, is that the system in Quebec is really dramatically underfunded. So a study that Pierre Fortin, a pretty well respected economist in Quebec, did a number of years ago,

suggested that Quebec higher education as a whole was structurally underfunded by $1.4 billion in operating funds per year by comparison with the rest of Canada. The chief scientist of Quebec, Rémi Kyrion, more recently came out with a study which suggested that the structural underfunding was more in the neighborhood of $2 billion per year, but he was also including research, so not just teaching and learning. But he was also including research, so not just teaching and learning. Because of that structural underfunding, the only way that universities have been able to make ends meet in terms of generating sufficient revenue to meet their growing operating costs of collective agreements and everything else has been through growth. So we've had a growth model at Concordia and elsewhere. And as a result, if something is inserted into the financial model, such as the announcement with regard to rest of Canada fees, suddenly the growth model disappears and the

financial consequences for Concordia become pretty dire indeed. And that's also true for McGill and Bishop. So the net effect of the low tuition has been to force universities to rely on other levers to meet their operating costs. And there's a limit to what you can do with those other levers and at this point I think we're now face to face with what those limits are. I know one effect has been that it's gotten McGill I don't know about Concordia but it's gotten McGill big time into student housing because if it can't hang on to tuition fees at least it can hang on to rent. Yeah so our approach at Concordia first of all we don't have a huge amount of student housing.

So we welcome in a typical year between 8,000 and 9,000 new students a year, graduate or an undergraduate. But we have student housing for only about 1,400 of those students. And the approach that Concordia has always taken is that we're not in student housing to make a profit. We're in student housing to provide affordable opportunities for our students. What we do with our residences in the summer is when students are not there, we try to use them as Airbnbs and things like that to generate revenue. But we're not generating revenue from the students per se. And maybe just if I could maybe add one last point, Paul. So, you know, Concordia has always been a pretty entrepreneurial university.

We've sure as heck never been a rich university. We've generated typically around 11% of our operating budget from non-academic activities. So things like hosting conferences, hosting film festivals, using our residences in the summer for Airbnb. So we've been pretty entrepreneurial in terms of trying to find other sources of revenue that differentiates us from the rest of the sector. But again, there's limits to what you can achieve through those entrepreneurial strategies. Our listeners have been super patient walking with us through the peculiarities of the Quebec University system. I figure I owe them a scare quote.

So what's the combined financial impact of these tuition changes on Concordia's revenues for the next little while? We ran a number of scenarios. So in the case of the rest of Canada students, our conclusion is that the decision to double the fees will be pretty catastrophic for us. And that in a best case scenario, we will lose 60% of the normal new registrations from rest of Canada. and in a worst case but probably more realistic scenario 90 of those students i mean why would you pay 17 000 for a program at concordia outstanding as it may be when you're going to pay half of that to do a similar program at ubc or

university of toronto on the international front, because the government has, again, it's not clear, but from the policy that they've articulated so far, it's pretty clear that they're going to claw back a lot of the tuition money that we were otherwise expecting to get. So the combined impact for us, conservatively, for 2024, because it's important to understand that these policies are coming on board for fall 2024. The combined impact for us in year one is $15 million, roughly, that's what we're estimating, 15.5. And over four years, because international

undergraduate and rest of Canada students come for four-year programs, the combined impact will be about $62 million. That's 9% to 10% of our annual operating funding. And I don't care what enterprise you're leading. If you're suddenly looking at being hollowed out 9% to 10% of your operating revenue year over year, that's a massive hit. And that's going to require a really important restructuring to survive and move forward. I have to assume that most of your operating costs are not easily compressible. It's payroll, it's, uh, Operating labs, it's, uh, upkeep on the infrastructure and things like that. Exactly.

So we have very little margin of maneuver and Concordia has historically been a university, which has always teetered on the brink of deficit. In fact, we're in a deficit situation now. And the, the only surplus that we've had in recent years was when I first became president in 2019. And we had a surplus briefly in 2019-20 before COVID hit. And then all bets were off. And what we've seen, and again, we're not unique here, is over the last three years, we're actually experiencing a decline in student numbers at Concordia for the first time. We had been on a terrific growth model, but the decline is happening in part because

there's a search for talent in the economy, so students have other choices. They can postpone the decision to go to university. Some of them are choosing to take courses with Google and other enterprises and feed into jobs in the high-tech sector. So the student recruitment model is also changing, hard to get a grip on. It's very, very competitive competitive and that's having an impact on us so we're in a situation where we're already at concordia uh posting a deficit for this budget year and what the government has announced will just put us really under underwater in uh in in 2024-25 and annually thereafter. I want to get to this big meeting that you have with the premier,

but I just don't want to belabor the flawed logic of this. To the extent that they're hoping that out-of-province students will help to finance the entire system, it's almost literally killing the goose that lays the golden eggs because this will substantially discourage out-of-province students from even coming in. That's the point that we've made repeatedly. And the same is true with respect to international students. So when we expressed our concerns, and by we, I mean the three English universities, expressed our concerns to the minister about the proposed change to international students and the fact that

you know a lot of the revenue on which we have come to expect and depend would be clawed back from us the response was well you can simply raise the fees but the reality is that it's a very competitive market in higher education right now and for for at Concordia, when we look at international student fees, we've had a system in place with our board of governors for about five years now, whereby we peg our international student fees to the universities that we see as our competitors in the rest of Canada. So that's Carleton University, that's Simon Fraser University, that's York University. So we want to be competitive with them.

The option of simply raising the fees dramatically to compensate for the government clawback runs the risk of pricing us out of the market. In addition to which, a different minister, the Minister of Support for the French Language and Integration, made an announcement last week that international students studying and graduating from English language institutions would not automatically qualify for permanent residency as students in French language universities would. That, from a recruitment standpoint, just puts another obstacle in our way because we know in the past access to that easy permanent residency has been a good draw for international students. More than 50% of the international students who graduate from Concordia end up staying in Quebec after they graduate and contributing to the economy.

That's the outcome I think we should be working to support. But right now, there's a kind of triangulation of government policies, which seems to be pushing in the opposite direction. So the policy change gets announced. There's several days of uproar. It's been a month of uproar now. It's been a month. Even I did some writing about it and some broadcast pundit stuff on this file.

And then the clouds part and you get a shot because you get a meeting with Premier Francois Legault and his minister, Pascal Derry to tell them what your point of view as the English language universities is Concordia McGill and bishops, the liberal arts college in the woods in, in the Eastern townships who asked for the meeting and what did you tell them? So the premier invited us to the meeting.

We received a meeting invitation at the end of last week. I am grateful for the fact that the three university heads had a chance to meet with the minister. Not only that, we met with him for an hour. Can I just say it is actually unusual when a head of government is in conflict with stakeholders to actually have the stones to show up and look at them face to face. I don't see a lot of cases of that happening at the federal

level. Yeah. So I'm, you know, I'm genuinely appreciative of the, and I think my colleagues would say the same of the fact that we had that meeting. The meeting was an hour. It was, there was a lot going on in Quebec that day. There was literally a public service strike happening the same day. Major announcements with respect to Hydro-Quebec, one of the flagships of Quebec society coming. So the fact that the premier took the time to meet with us was deeply appreciated. And I have to say, without into the the details of the meeting it was a very respectful meeting and there was a lot of listening uh on both sides he explained

his concerns which are not a surprise given uh public statements that he's made his concerns particularly about uh the state of the french, especially on the island of Montreal, his concerns about the Quebec economy, but mostly focused on the state of the French language. And so for that reason, we had come prepared with a series of proposals that the three universities have been working on independently over the last several months,

and which we qualified as a pretty historic proposal which was to say that the three english language universities fully acknowledge that the language that's vulnerable in north america is french and that is higher education institutions. And as big players in our communities, there is much and more that we can do as institutions to support the promotion and protection of French. students, which would include an obligatory course in French, but also a number of pathway programs that would allow students with different levels of French language competency and in different disciplines to have the opportunity over the four years that they're here to learn, to improve, or to perfect their French, all with a view that at the end of the four years, more of those students would feel totally at home in the fully bilingual environment of Montreal,

totally at home and integrated into Francophone culture, and would make the choice to stay here. You know, we're not starting from zero on this project. A lot of the students coming from the rest of Canada either have chosen Montreal because maybe they have family roots here, they've been through immersion programs in secondary schools elsewhere in the country, or they're just excited by the opportunity to study in the one francophone cosmopolitan city in North America. I look at this is particular to Concordia, but one of our flagship faculties

is our Faculty of Fine Arts. You know, we have a really significant percentage of students coming from the rest of Canada to be part of that faculty of fine arts. Why? Because of the cultural excitement and artistic excitement that is the vibe in Montreal, you know, whether it's contemporary dance on the one hand, or whether it's film and Quebec cinema, or whether it's the opportunity to, you know, work for companies like Moment Factory or Ubisoft or Cirque du Soleil. I mean, there's a vibe. There's a reason why people want to be here. So what more can we do to support those students in learning French and integrating into Quebec society?

So we really went to the premier in solutions mode and to say very clearly, we understand the problem and we want to be part of the solution. And I think for the three Anglophone universities to stand up and take that position publicly, that's unprecedented. And I hope that proposal falls on listening ears. So far, the only public response from the government has been three tweets from the minister saying essentially, thanks for that. Sounds great. We'll take that and we'll continue with this tuition scheme.

Yeah. So I'm not taking a tweet as an answer to a very thoughtful and detailed proposal. I realize we're in an era of social media, but I have to say that seeing those tweets the other night, it kind of reinforces what I think has been a core problem around this subject going back to last spring, which is a failure to consult and a lack of respect, frankly, for our institutions.

I'm hoping for better, and I'm hoping for a more serious response from the government and from the Premier himself. I know many people interpreted those tweets as meaning game over, the door is closed. But, Paul, if you've been looking at Quebec media over the last 36 hours, there is a truly impressive amount of coverage and support for this, including coming from very unexpected sources. So yesterday on television and this morning in an opinion piece in Le Devoir, Jean-François Lisée essentially said, this is an historic proposal.

The premier has to accept this, and he has to walk back on the outer province tuition fees. And you know Jean-François Lisée. He's a former leader of the Parti Québécois and a former advisor during the referendum to Jacques Perrault. Right, and someone who has written several times over the last, in recent memory, about the funding inequalities and sort of fueling some of what I would call the misperceptions around the Anglophone institutions. up and saying, wait a minute, this is something different. This is something dramatic. It gives me hope. I guess I'm always searching for hope. It gives me hope that the government will

reflect on the policies that they've introduced. And I hope accept the proposal that we put forward. But a lot of the discourse around this whole issue, first of all, there's an eternal kind of dialogue of the deaf. I've heard from some people outside Quebec, from some Anglophone Quebecers, one of these bozos is going to realize that the world happens in English and that Quebec is turning itself into a backwater. First of all, that's an argument for which I have personally no patience. I worked hard for decades to perfect my French. I worked hard for decades to perfect my French. And I myself worry when I'm in downtown Montreal that I hear a hell of a lot more English than I used to. But that is part of the discourse. And another part of the discourse is, I think, a widespread belief among nationalist Francophone Quebecers that nothing that happens in English in Montreal can be

legitimate, that the very notion of an English language institution in Montreal is a dead weight on Quebec's aspirations. You surely in your job have to juggle both of those currents of thought all the time. Absolutely. So I have to put this in a bit of a personal context. So, you know, I'm a Quebecer, bred and born. I grew up in Sherbrooke in the eastern townships. I grew up in a primarily Anglophone environment, went to school in English, went to SAGEP in English, and then left the province to do my higher education. But I've spent my own professional career at Concordia.

And I would say that over the long period of time that I've been here, what's happened at Concordia represents for me a really striking evolution that people on both ends of the spectrum that you just described either are unaware of or refuse to countenance and refuse to believe. This university has become far more bilingual, far more integrated into Quebec society in 2023 than it was in 1983 or 1993. As I said, you know, 20% of our student population are Francophone. And let's face it, the majority of anglophones who have stayed in Quebec over the last 10-15 years they've made a choice to be here and part of making that choice is embracing the really wonderful reality that is Quebec society at core of which is its francophone

identity so I don't have any time or patience for the Quebec bashing that comes from the rest of the country, because I think that trivializes a lot of what Quebec society has accomplished, including the extraordinary accomplishments of the business community in Quebec, and the role of the higher education community, which brings me to people at the other end of the spectrum, because one of the things which I believe Concordia and McGill especially provide for Quebec is visibility globally. We have huge international student alumni presence. We're agents of assistance for the government of Quebec and its delegate generals around the world. We become big magnets for people from the rest of the world who want to come to Montreal, who have a great experience, and who leave and themselves become ambassadors for Montreal. It's true that a lot of the work of the world is done in english right

now but i think the delicate choreography for quebec is to understand that but without losing sight of the fact that you have the right and you have the responsibility you should have the desire to protect french as well you know we could look at this in another context. Years and years and years ago, I was an international student at the University of Stockholm. They had an institute for English speaking students. So here was a university teaching in Swedish, but which had a subset of courses targeted for students coming from elsewhere. But you had to learn Swedish as part of your curriculum while you were there. And I think, you know, for people living outside Quebec,

it's difficult sometimes to understand that minority experience of being Quebecois in North America and having a tsunami of English culture coming at you from Netflix to whatever, which younger generations embrace. And I think this is another key part of this, Paul, is that there's a generational dimension to the conversation that's happening in Quebec right now. I think overwhelmingly the students who are the 18 to 24-year-old cohort, they're pretty at ease either way in French or English. This is not for them the number one social issue of the time. And that adaptation to different cultures, that adaptation to different languages, that's happening every day in Montreal. And that's good for Montreal. But you can't lose sight of the fact that this is predominantly a Francophone society, and that the essential

Frenchness of Quebec is, you know, it's one of the things that makes this a rich place to live. That's probably a good note to end our conversation on. Graham Carr, thanks so much for being so generous with your time and letting us know what's filling up your days these days. Thanks, Paul. Thanks for your interest. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe

to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday.