By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
Four years ago this month – on June 15, 2020 – Quebec’s 61 francophone school boards became service centres when Bill 40 came into effect. The bill eliminated elected school boards, replacing them with service centres run by appointed volunteer boards of directors. When the bill was first tabled in 2019, then-education minister Jean-François Roberge argued that eliminating school board elections – which the vast majority of voters did not vote in, particularly in the francophone sector – would save the government $45 million over four years. In 2023, Roberge’s successor, Bernard Drainville, spearheaded Bill 23, which gave the minister the power to hire and fire directors general of service centres and to override their decisions; that bill takes full effect on July 1.
Neither bill has yet been applied in the English sector. Elected school boards remain in place in the English system due to an ongoing legal challenge led by the Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA), who argue that ending school board elections for the sector infringes on the community’s Charter right to control its education system. Earlier this spring, a Quebec appeals court panel unanimously backed QESBA; however, on May 30, The Record learned that the Quebec government intended to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada. In the short term, Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB) chairperson Michael Murray has said, this means business as usual for English boards while the case is adjudicated; in the long term, should the court accept to hear the case and rule in the government’s favour, service centres could replace elected boards.
Townships Weekend spoke with a teacher’s union representative and a spokesperson for a school principals’ association to find out what has changed in the French sector since the bill passed.
“It has changed certain things, but not as much as we expected,” said Sophie Veilleux, president of the Syndicat de l’enseignement de la Haute-Yamaska (SEHY), the union which represents teachers in the Centre des services scolaires de Val-des-Cerfs (CSSVDC) service area. “It was supposed to reduce bureaucracy – which I haven’t seen – and reduce politicization – which I haven’t seen either. The central point was to give more autonomy to schools … but that’s not what happened; the directors and service centres have lost lots of power, and the minister decides practically everything.”
“We used to have the [elected] council of commissioners, which was replaced by the board of directors, but the board of directors is not what’s making a lot of the decisions. We’re not decentralizing anything.” Veilleux said it’s harder for school service centres to enact decisions adapted to local circumstances. She worried aloud about the government adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to governance, when “what’s happening in Montreal, Granby or Gaspé is not the same thing.” She said that many teachers were happy with the bill’s stated objective of decentralizing school governance, but are now disappointed. “Reduced bureaucracy, localized decision making, I don’t know who can be against that, but when you start reading the bill, we see that that’s not what’s happening.”
“The CAQ [government] had good intentions, but now we have more centralization,” said Carl Ouellet, president of the Association québécoise du personnel de direction des écoles (AQPDE). He said commissioners would visit schools and talk to students and parents. “The parents were a lot closer to the schools – parents knew there was a commissioner who represented them. They don’t have that anymore.”
He mentioned that one positive aspect of the reform was to give school leadership control over certain financial decisions. “Now [each service centre has] a resource-sharing committee with principals serving on it, who will decide how we will spend [government funding] provided to the schools. Most of the decisions are taken by this committee where we are represented rather than councils of commissioners, where we were not.”
Ouellet said francophone schools were “still adapting” to the Bill 40 and Bill 23 reforms.
“We have good directors general, but we are worried that we’ll lose a bit of power, because the directors general will be put in place by the minister, who will tell them they have to do this or that. That’ll be another adaptation we have to make.”