Marois has the excuse she needed

THE PREMIER was not an ardent supporter of CEGEPs 101. With a minority, she might have to sideline a plan to extend the language law

For Premier Pauline Marois, there is one advantage to being the head of a minority government: it gives her an excuse not to keep an election promise that not many people want kept.

The promise is to extend to CEGEPs the restrictions in Bill 101 on admission to publicly funded Englishlanguage primary and elementary schools. It’s the best-known measure in the proposed “new Bill 101” that the Parti Québécois promised during the recent election campaign.

Anti-English hawks in and around the PQ have been pushing the “CEGEPs 101” proposal for years. Marois herself held out against it for a long time after she became PQ leader in 2007, until she finally came around two years ago.

Her change of heart probably had more to do with the PQ’s internal politics than with any sincere belief in CEGEPs 101 as the solution to a real problem.

For one thing, it defies common sense that if 12 years of compulsory attendance of French school, from kindergarten through Grade 11, fail to assimilate children into the French-speaking community, two more years of college attendance — which of course is voluntary — will do the trick.

For another thing, researchers have found that attending an English CEGEP is not what causes non-anglophones to assimilate into the English community. If they do join the English community, it’s because of influences that existed before they chose to attend an English college. That is, their choice is more of an effect than a cause.

And for a third thing, CEGEPs 101 is a solution to a non-existent problem.

Statistics provided to The Gazette this week by the Fédération des CEGEPs show that almost all francophone students and an increasing majority of allophones — those with mother tongues other than French or English — attend French colleges.

The proportion of franco- phone students in French CEGEPs is holding steady at about 95 per cent. And the proportion of allophone students attending French colleges had increased to 61 per cent in 2010 from 44 per cent in 1997.

The Quebec government’s advisory council on the French language came out against the CEGEPs 101 proposal last year. And even the French colleges aren’t in favour of it; the federation says its members are unanimously against the proposal. One reason is that it would be hard for French CEGEPs in the Montreal area to handle a transfer of up to 13,000 additional students.

College students, many of them of voting age, aren’t in favour of CEGEPs 101 either. Last year, after the proposal was adopted at a PQ policy convention, it failed to gain the support of a majority of students represented at a meeting of the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec.

After the federation’s president, Léo BureauBlouin, became a PQ candidate, he conceded to Le Devoir that it’s “a debate that divides people a lot,” and that “if we form the next government, we’ll have a lot of work to do on that.” (He was elected Sept. 4.)

The PQ now finds itself facing a majority in the National Assembly formed by the official-opposition Liberals and the Coalition Avenir Québec, both of which oppose CEGEPs 101.

Marois accepted the proposal to appease her party in the absence of a commitment on her part to a deadline for another sovereignty referendum, and to preserve her leadership.

But even during the recent election campaign, she said that while a PQ government would introduce its “new Bill 101” in its first 100 days in office, it wouldn’t actually adopt the CEGEPs measure “for a few years.”

Now, with a minority government, she has an excuse to submit CEGEPs 101 to consultative hearings, where overwhelming opposition might kill it.

dmacpherson@ montrealgazette.com Twitter: @MacphersonGaz