Drimonis: Drainville says he's fighting for students. School cuts say otherwise
In the latest blow, Quebec's English school boards and French school service centres were told to slash at least $570 million (some school officials estimate it could be closer to $1 billion) from their budgets. This is in addition to $200 million in budget cuts announced earlier in the school year, which will undoubtedly affect the quality and availability of student services, meal programs, renovations and staff hirings. Even services for students with learning difficulties won't be spared.
While school boards, service centres, teachers and parents were busy denouncing the cuts last week, part of the ceiling of a Quebec City elementary school collapsed, poetically representative of the breakdown of our educational system.
Quebec's two major education unions, the Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ) and the Fédération autonome de l'enseignement (FAE), are decrying the cuts and Education Minister Bernard Drainville's lack of leadership, saying confidence in him 'has been seriously undermined.' The FAE is even calling for Drainville to resign from his post.
In response, Drainville lashed out at the FAE, stating on X that he has 'no lessons to learn from a union that deprived our children of school during a five-week strike and that uses its members' money to challenge the government's secularism law.'
Two things should be made abundantly clear here. First, teachers' unions have a constitutionally protected right to go on strike and fight for better working conditions, fair salaries and improved resources for students. Quebec teachers do a hard job under increasingly difficult circumstances in a province where teachers' salaries are among the lowest in the country. Their criticism of Drainville's performance isn't invalid because they went on strike.
Secondly, the FAE, which represents more than 66,500 teachers across seven Quebec regions, said it joined the fight against Bill 21 in large part because it opposes the government's flippant use of the notwithstanding clause to violate Quebecers' rights. The FAE isn't there to do the minister's bidding or toe any specific government line. Just like the English Montreal School Board, it has not only the right but the obligation to fight against legislation that may compromise students' and teachers' rights and freedoms.
It's been tough to watch the CAQ government's unwillingness to acknowledge these cuts are full-blown austerity measures that will affect our educational system and school infrastructure for years to come. That they come on the heels of shocking reports about government financial mismanagement in the SAAQclic and Northvolt portfolios isn't lost on many frustrated Quebecers.
Drainville concluded his online post by defiantly stating: 'Schools exist for our children, our students. It is for them that I fight every day.'
What kind of fight involves slashing close to $800 million from school budgets to make up for a government's shortfalls while insisting it won't have a significant impact on students or the quality of education they receive?
'Yes, difficult choices will have to be made,' Drainville told reporters last week, 'but the goal is to protect student services as much as possible.'
It will not be possible.
You can't slash budgets and maintain the same level of services. The CAQ knows this.
Back in 2018, François Legault stated: 'We cannot cut education. ... We cannot achieve a balanced budget at the expense of children with learning difficulties.'
Seven years later, you apparently can.
It takes a lot of brazenness to declare you're fighting for Quebec students while demanding administrators and teachers make 'difficult choices' to find the money to pay for the government's horrendously bad moves in the past few years.
If that's Drainville fighting for our kids, I'd hate to see him in action if he chose to fight against them.
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