Language in schoolyards is a Quebec issue

School-sharers were getting along just fine. Was that the problem?

Quebec’s official motto is “Je me souviens” — I remember. But sometimes, its political class forgets pretty quickly.

It’s been only two months since Premier François Legault complained to Doug Ford about Ontario’s cancellation of promised funding for a proposed French-language university.

But then, the closing of Riverdale High School in Montreal comes under Quebec’s unofficial motto: C’est pas pareil — It’s not the same. Ford’s government took away a French school that doesn’t exist yet. Legault’s is taking away an English one that does.

Last Monday, Education Minister Jean-François Roberge confirmed rumours that he will invoke a rarely used section of the Education Act to order the local English-language Lester B. Pearson School Board to transfer Riverdale to the French-language Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys.

The Marguerite-Bourgeoys schools are seriously overcrowded due to an unexpected influx of pupils, many of them recently arrived immigrants. Riverdale, like many English-language schools to which admission is restricted by Quebec’s language law, Bill 101, is half-empty.

For Riverdale pupils and their parents and teachers, the transfer has the same effect as closing the school, and forcing them to move to a new school in only seven months. This violates the spirit of section 212 of the Education Act, which requires a school board to give at least a year’s notice that it intends to close a school, and to hold a public consultation before it does.

It’s also questionable whether Roberge respected the spirit of section 477.1.3 of the law, which required him to give the Pearson board at least 30 days to respond in writing after he informed it of his intention. He announced the transfer 41 days after he informed the board, without the board having responded. But he ignored Pearson’s request for more time to answer because of the board’s two-week year-end holidays.

The Marguerite-Bourgeoys commission was probably going to get Riverdale anyway, with the Pearson board handing it over voluntarily in time for the school year after next. In its statement responding to the minister’s announcement, the English board said it was already discussing with the French one the possible transfer of one of its “under-occupied” schools.

So, why the haste? Defending the transfer, Legault’s spokesperson to the anglos, Christopher Skeete, told CTV News that it was not anglophones who were being discriminated against, but francophones.

Some, Skeete said, are being kept out of school and deprived of an education because there is no room for them in the Marguerite-Bourgeoys schools.

Not true anymore, said a spokesperson for the French commission this week — thanks to the English board, which in January had leased available space in Riverdale and another school to the French one. The Pearson board said in its statement that since the fall, it had been discussing several options for the use of its available space with the Marguerite-Bourgeoys commission. Even the education minister, in announcing the transfer, went out of his way to praise the two boards for their exemplary co-operation.

The pupils from the Marguerite-Bourgeoys commission in the Pearson schools are recent immigrants in “welcome classes.” They’re being taught in separate, regular classrooms of their own, in French, by teachers from the French board. They’re better off than other Marguerite-Bourgeoys pupils attending classes in trailers in schoolyards. And by all accounts, outside of class, they’re getting along well with their English-speaking schoolmates.

Maybe that’s the problem: they’re getting along too well.

The language of the schoolyard is an issue in Quebec: What good does it do, some ask, to teach children, especially immigrant children, in French, if they use English outside of class? So, maybe the government thought it was urgent to separate the immigrant children at Riverdale from their English-speaking schoolmates before another year passed.

It couldn’t take them out of the English school, since it had nowhere else to put them. So instead, it took the school away from the English.