By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
Weeks after asking school boards and service centres to slash their budgets by as much as $570 million, Education Minister Bernard Drainville has walked back those cuts. On July 16, in a Facebook post, he announced that the ministry would set aside up to $540 million to fund student services. “The last few months have allowed us to consult school organizations and listen to what’s going on on the ground,” he wrote. “We heard the worries and the needs. Today, we’re taking action for students.”
“Over the last seven years, our education budget has risen by 58 per cent. These are historic investments, but every school service centre is responsible for managing this money rigorously,” he wrote, adding that school service centres had been subjected to an “expense review exercise” over the last few weeks.
Although Drainville’s announcement made no mention of English-language school boards, officials from the Ministry of Education and the Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA) both later confirmed that the announcement also applied to school boards.
Boards and service centres will still have to find up to $30 million in savings, and work within spending restrictions imposed by the ministry. “Let’s be clear, this is not an open bar,” Drainville wrote. “Of the $540 million announced today, $425 million will go into a dedicated fund. To have the right [to receive money from this fund], every school service centre must show that it is making efforts to reduce administrative costs, as well as ensuring that the money goes to fund student services only. Accountability will be demanded.”
This is not the first time over the past year the ministry has required school boards and service centres to make sweeping cuts before restoring funding at the eleventh hour. Several boards and service centres, including the Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB) and the Centre des services scolaire Val-des-Cerfs (CSSVDC), were forced to freeze enrolment to French-as-a-second-language courses for adults in fall 2024 after funding – pro-rated according to student numbers from three years prior – turned out to be insufficient to meet vastly increased demand. A wave of protests from teachers’ unions, community groups and adult students that autumn did not appear to move the needle; at the time, 20 CSSVDC teachers and 26 ETSB teachers stood to lose their jobs, and hundreds of students lost access to courses. However, in May, Drainville announced the government would invest $119.3 million in adult francisation for the 2025-26 school year; the ETSB now expects to partially reopen the program if demand is sufficient and enough teachers can be found.
The July 16 announcement has once again left school boards and unions rushing to adapt to a radical funding overhaul.
“Everyone’s on vacation, everyone’s scrambling and making a plan to fill these positions [that were cut last month when cuts were first announced],” said Steven Le Sueur, president of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers (QPAT), the union federation representing teachers at English-language public schools across the province. “Some cuts are still going to happen. I’d like to say we’ll know more before the start of the school year, but we don’t have that information.”
“We’re happy [the cuts initially announced] have been retracted, but we’re not jumping up and down about it,” he added. “There are still so many issues with workload and class size, and it’s definitely not helping [from a recruitment standpoint] when it’s in the news that they’re cutting $570 million.”
ETSB board chair Michael Murray told the BCN via text message on Friday that he had “very few facts” concerning the impact of Drainville’s announcement.
“The recent ‘reinvestment’ is less than the original cuts and comes with conditions,” he said. “We intend to let our hardworking administrators enjoy their summer break before considering which services they can restore and by how much.”
QESBA communications director Kim Hamilton said the school boards’ association would know more later this summer about how the funding would be distributed between boards and service centres.
Drainville’s reversal came a week after a National Assembly petition calling on the government to retract the cuts, sponsored by Parti Québecois MNA Pascal Bérubé and heavily promoted by QESBA and by unions and parents’ groups on both sides of the language barrier, began making headlines. As of this writing, it had received nearly 159,000 signatures. It can be signed on the National Assembly website until Sept. 15. “We’re pleasantly pleased the public outrage worked, but there are still cuts to be made and services will still be affected,” said Le Sueur.