Stephen Burke to retire as CQSB chair
Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
editor@qctonline.com
On Sept. 26, Stephen Burke, the chair of the Council of Commission- ers of the Central Québec School Board (CQSB), will officially open New Liverpool Elementary School, the board’s brand new elementary school in Lévis. It will be one of his last acts as chair.
After nearly 37 years of involvement with the governance of the CQSB and the Commission scolaire des Découvreurs, Burke, a career civil servant, will not run in the Nov. 3 election. He plans to retire, spend more time with his family and focus on other pursuits including writing, music (he has made many appearances as an Elvis impersonator over the years) and stand-up comedy. “You’ve got to leave the game before the game leaves you,” he quipped, quoting Wayne Gretzky.
Burke initially planned to step down in 2020, but decided to serve a “final and last” term starting that year to address fallout from the pandemic and proposed legislation affecting the future of school boards.
Burke recently sat down with the QCT to look back on his long career in school governance, which began in the mid-1980s, when his own children attended the recently closed St. Vincent School in Sainte-Foy. At the time, school districts were set up along geographic and sectarian, rather than linguistic, lines, and St. Vincent was under the umbrella of the mostly francophone, nominally Catholic Commission scolaire des Découvreurs (CSD).
“They thought I was going to be the token English fellow who was just going to look out for St. Vincent,” he remembered. “That’s not knowing me very well, because I love to defend causes.”
Burke served on the CSD board until 1998, when sectarian school boards were replaced with linguistic boards. St. Vincent and the city’s other English public schools were absorbed by the new CQSB, which covered a territory ranging from Quebec City and the South Shore to Kawawachikamach, near Schefferville. Burke served as a CQSB commissioner and was elected chair in 2009, succeeding then-city councillor Michelle Morin-Doyle.
“I didn’t expect to be the chairman … but I think people realized that with a civil service background, I know how to read a piece of legislation, how to write a [position paper], how to defend a position … so I was lucky enough to get the confidence of my colleagues.”
The election of the Parti Québécois (PQ) government in 2012 brought the CQSB into its first high-profile scrap with the government. Bill 14 would have subjected the children of out-of-province military families to the same English school eligibility requirements as other Quebecers.
“There was a right that René Lévesque gave to the French Canadian soldiers who were based in Valcartier or Roberval, to send their children to the school of their choice. [Former PQ education minister Diane] De Courcy said, ‘We’re going to put a stop to that.’ We had two town halls, one in Saguenay and one in Valcartier, we went to the National Assembly and we fought like heck.”
The bill died when the PQ lost the 2014 election to the Liberals, but the fight against Bill 14 set the scene for the CQSB’s opposition to Bill 40, a bill tabled by the Coalition Avenir Québec government in 2019 which aimed to eliminate school boards altogether and replace them with service centres run by government appointees; Bill 96, which subjected English schools to French language requirements for internal communication; and Bill 23, which would make the directors general of service centres government appointees. (All French-language boards have since been replaced with service centres, but the bill has not yet been applied to English school boards pending an appeals court judgment.)
“I was lucky enough to attend the [inauguration] of the current government. I told [then education minister] Jean-François Roberge, ‘Look, we don’t cause any problems. We’re all fluent in French, but we want our schools. We have rights, and we want those rights to be protected.’ Who would say that if there were not elected commissioners?” he argued.
During his chairmanship, Burke has not only overseen these fights alongside his counterparts from other English school boards. His work has also laid the groundwork for two new schools – New Liverpool and the yet-to-be- named consolidated English high school in Sainte-Foy, a merger of St. Patrick’s High School, Quebec High School and Dollard-des-Ormeaux High School known for the moment as the “superschool,” expected to open in fall 2027.
“My purpose in life is to make sure we can provide good educational services in English from kindergarten to high school, and enough kids to provide them to,” he said, adding that he hoped the new high school, initially proposed in 2018 by a parents’ group, would encourage more parents to keep their teens in the English public school system.
“It’s the greatest thing that’s happened to the English- speaking community in 80 years, an extraordinary school. There are still three years to go before we open, but I think we’re on course and we have a plane that will fly.”
Burke said he believes the same thing about the board itself. He has a good idea of who his successor will be, but prefers for that person to announce their plans on their own time. “If something happens and that person has to remove [themself] from consideration, I would go back, but that’s not going to happen. Life goes on, and we’re in good hands.”