Red tape making it harder for soldiers’ kids to attend English schools

Government upping demands on proof of residency: board official

The Parti Québécois government is discriminating against children of Canadian military families in Quebec who attend or want to attend English institutions, school board officials are charging.

The children are eligible under Quebec’s language law to go to primary and secondary school in English. That’s the way it’s been since Bill 101 came into force in 1977.

Certificates to attend English school are good for three years, and are renewable.

There are 750 children from mil- itary families in the system now, mostly in and around Quebec City near the Canadian Forces’ Valcartier base.

For their kids to qualify for English school, military parents must be temporary, not permanent, residents of the province.

That’s not normally an issue, since it’s a fact of military life that personnel can be deployed or moved elsewhere at any time.

But these days, the Education Department is making families jump through hoops to prove it, according to the Quebec English School Boards Association.

Parents have to get affidavits from the Department of National Defence attesting that they’re not here permanently, association president David D’Aoust said Friday.

They also have to fill out forms stating why they came to Quebec and when they expect to move again, and explain why they selected English schooling over French.

That’s unreasonable, the school association believes.

“It should be a straightforward issue,” D’Aoust said. “We don’t want it to be any more complicated than it already is.”

On Thursday, after the association protested, the Education Department said it’s merely following a recent suggestion by the Quebec Administrative Tribunal that it re-examine what “temporary residence” means.

The tribunal ruled last year in the case of former Valcartier soldier David Robert, a francophone who wanted to keep his sons in English school after he left the military. The boys were forced to switch to French school.

Other military personnel face questions over just how “temporary” their stay in Quebec really is.

Some live here for years — for a student’s entire childhood, in fact — without ever being deployed abroad or transferred elsewhere in Canada.

Valcartier, for one, is full of them. There are also military bases, training schools and depots in Montreal (Longue-Pointe), Bagotville (near Saguenay), and Farnham and StJean-sur-Richelieu, southeast of Montreal.

Quebec is right to “take another look at how it handles requests” for military exemptions under Bill 101, the Education Department said in a statement on Thursday.

Unacceptable, countered D’Aoust, whose association represents Quebec’s nine Englishlanguage school boards and 100,000 students.

“It’s all very well and good to want to ask about temporary stays in Quebec. But the tribunal’s deci- sion (should) not take precedence over the law.”

A spokesman for Education Minister Marie Malavoy did not respond Friday to a request for comment.

The department’s “investigations” could also impact others who move here, said D’Aoust, a bilingual Quebecer who was once an officer in training.

“New parents who get assigned to Quebec may just say, ‘Well, it’s too hot an issue, I’m not applying for a certificate, I’ll just send my kids to French school.’ ”

Besides the Valcartier case, no military family has yet been refused.

“But if they don’t get their temporary stays renewed,” D’Aoust said, “a number of those 750 kids in our school system now may have to go to French school” in 2014-2015.

“Is that fair? I think not.”