School board federation confident of winning over CAQ government on importance of elections

The Fédération des commissions scolaires du Québec (FCSQ) is confident it can convince the incoming Coalition Avenir Québec government of the importance of local school board elections.

During the 2014 provincial election campaign, François Legault, now the province’s premier-elect, pledged to abolish school boards. He said they suffered from governance problems and noted the low participation rates in their elections. He reiterated this stance during the recently completed electoral campaign. FCSQ president Alain Fortier told The Canadian Press he wanted to establish a “constructive dialogue” with the new government. He plans to explain what school boards and their elections do, and why they matter. He said that without school boards, more than 3,000 schools would have to directly approach the provincial government for their budget and the services they provide. “It would be equivalent to creating 3,000 school boards, which is insane.”

Fortier added that school boards exist to distribute resources in a fair manner — a task he thinks a central government would struggle to carry out.

As for the low participation rate in school board elections, Fortier said that “if educational democracy is sick, we need to heal it instead of killing it.”

He noted that voter turnout in Quebec’s recent election was also below 70 percent.