education cuts

Drainville walks back education cuts, warns against ‘open bar’

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / July 23, 2025 / Bernard Drainville, Education, education cuts, labour unions, petition, QESBA, Ruby Pratka, school boards

Drainville walks back education budget cuts, warns against ‘open bar’

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

Weeks after asking school boards and service centres to slash their budgets by as much as $570 million, Education Minister Bernard Drainville has reversed course. On July 16, in a post on social media, he announced that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government had set aside up to $540 million to fund student services.

School 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.”

Although Drainville’s announcement made no mention of English-language school boards, officials from the Ministry of Education and Higher Learning (MEES) and the Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA) both later confirmed that the announcement also applied to school boards; MEES spokesperson Bryan St-Louis also said $29.5 million of the $540 million was set aside for private schools.

The announcement has left school boards and teachers’ unions scrambling to adapt to a radical funding overhaul, for the second time in two months, at the height of summer vacation.

“Everyone’s on vacation, everyone’s scrambling and making a plan to fill these positions,” said Steven Le Sueur, president of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers (QPAT), the union federation representing teachers at English-language public schools. “Some cuts are still going to happen. We haven’t seen the details. 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“We’re happy [the cuts initially announced] have been retracted, but we’re not jump- ing up and down about it,” he added.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.”

“The additional funding from the ministry is certainly welcome news. We are presently crunching numbers,” said Jean Robert, chair of the Council of Commissioners of the Central Québec School Board, in a brief email exchange with the QCT. “I am convinced that the minister understood his original proposed cuts would directly affect services to our students.” Robert and QESBA communications director Kim Hamilton said they would know more later this summer about how the funding would be divided and distributed between boards and service centres; St-Louis later said the funds would be distributed between school boards, service centres and eligible private schools, pro-rated to student numbers.

The about-face came a week after a National Assembly petition against cuts to education, sponsored by Parti Québécois MNA Pascal Bérubé and heavily promoted by QESBA and by unions and parents’ groups on both sides of the language barrier, began making headlines (see story in last week’s edition on QCT website). As of this writing, it had received nearly 159,000 signatures. It can still 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.

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Petition against education cuts crosses language divide

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / July 15, 2025 / Bernard Drainville, Education, education cuts, Quebec English School Boards Association, Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers, Ruby Pratka, school boards, unions

Petition against education cuts crosses linguistic divide

Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism

Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

The Parti Québécois (PQ) and the Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA) may seem like unlikely allies, but they have joined forces to denounce the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government’s belt-tightening on education funding. Along with former leaders of French-language school boards, unions and parents’ groups on both sides of the linguistic divide, PQ MNA Pascal Bérubé and the school boards’ association, of which the Central Québec School Board (CQSB) is a member, are joining forces to back a National Assembly petition against cuts to education.

Last month, the Ministry of Education imposed at least $510 million in across-the-board cuts to the public school system; Education Minister Bernard Drainville said at the time that the ministry’s expenses had grown an “unsustainable” seven per cent per year since 2018. Next school year’s increase has been capped at 1.8 per cent – below the rate of inflation – as part of a wider effort to rein in the deficit. Furthermore, autonomous English school boards, which have more control over how funding is allocated than their government-run French-language counterparts, have been told they can’t run deficits or dip into surpluses to cushion the impact of funding cuts. Drainville has encouraged school boards and service centres to “respect the budgets without touching student services … to the extent possible” although school board and union representatives have argued this is impossible.

The petition on the National Assembly website calls on Drainville to walk back the budgetary restrictions to avoid affecting student services. As of this writing, it has nearly 157,000 signatures.

Steven Le Sueur is the president of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers (QPAT), the union federation representing teachers at English-language public schools. He said the petition was initially drawn up by the Fédération des syndicats de l’enseignement (FSE), the largest federation of teachers’ unions in the province, which encouraged QPAT to get on board.

“It is important to get the public involved to denounce what’s going on,” he told the QCT. “Our students with special needs and at-risk students will suffer the most. The ‘extra’ services which we may have had in the past will be disappearing. This is not going to attract more teachers to the profession and it may drive some of our younger teachers away.”

Le Sueur said promoting the petition in both languages is “sending a strong message that the government is hurting the system, both the English and French system.”

QESBA president Joe Ortona echoed several of Le Sueur’s arguments. “Balancing the budget, with the [funding] the government is giving us, means slashing all sorts of programs that go beyond the bare minimum – music, art, extracurriculars, programs for gifted kids, extra support for kids with special needs, breakfast, tutoring.”

Ortona, who has served on the English Montreal School Board (EMSB) since 2014, said he has “never seen anything that remotely resembles” the cuts Drainville has told boards to brace for. “The government is claiming the budget is going up, but they aren’t taking into account inflation or the impact of the collective agreements [signed with teachers’ unions after the 2023 strikes]. At the end of the day … we wind up with less than what we had before. We pride ourselves on the quality of education we provide, but if the government doesn’t fund us, there is no way we can provide those services.

“A decade ago [when the previous Liberal government announced cuts to education] we were in a recession. We are nowhere near that now. We’re in this situation because the government has mismanaged a billion dollars on SAAQClic, Northvolt, $7 million for the L.A. Kings, $10 billion for the third link, and the kids are paying the price,” he argued. He added that the campaign against the planned cuts would be stronger if French-language school boards, which were converted into service centres in 2020, still had the same autonomy as their English counterparts, which have kept their independence through a long and still unresolved court challenge. “The only [school officials] who can speak out publicly are the elected officials on the English side.”

Le Sueur and Ortona called on parents, graduates and other concerned voters to sign the petition and lobby their MNAs to oppose the looming cuts. “I am hopeful [the government] will look at this and try to appease the population and backtrack a little, or a lot – there is an election coming up,” Le Sueur said.

The QCT asked the Ministry of Education about options available for English school boards to cushion the impact of the cuts, but did not receive a response by press time.

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