Fined into bankruptcy: the small Montreal college at the forefront of the language battle

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Garzon is “furious” at what she sees as a provincial government discriminating against a linguistic minority in ways that are “calculated” to bring about the closure of the college, and “actively trying to drive out anglophones.”

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“It’s uncomfortable to live in a place that is always sending you messages, in big ways and small ways, that you are not welcome,” she said. “If you read a headline that stated ‘Government Shuts Down School For Accepting Too Many Minority Students,’ we as Canadians would probably be shocked and wonder in what oppressive regime this school is being shut down.”

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More than 400 employees faced impending unemployment. There was a contingency plan that would have seen almost all of them lose their jobs, keeping only a skeleton team of 16.

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And Marchand, who has run LaSalle for 18 years and whose family owns this private college founded on Sainte-Catherine St. in 1962, wondered whether the government would finally start returning his calls, or responding to settlement offers, of which there have been a full dozen.

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Now, at least, they have to. On Sept. 4, Quebec Superior Court Justice Martin Castonguay ordered the province to pay the school its allocated subsidies, which allows the year of classes to go ahead. He also extended the school’s creditor protection, ordering the parties back to court later this month, just before the provincial election, in which the governing Coalition Avenir Québec is in a tight race.

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There is only one creditor, the province.

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“We don’t get it,” Marchand said. “We don’t get that there was no dialogue from day one…. It’s really strange.”

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The school’s website now declares it “finds itself abandoned by the very organization with which it has collaborated for more than 67 years,” the province.

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Marchand said he accepts the quota system as democratically legitimate, he just expected a period of transition within which to comply.

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“I will not say that personally that’s my vision of the world, but I perfectly respect that a duly elected democratic government can act pretty much however they want,” he said.

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As Marchand describes it, the school was abruptly in a dilemma, wishing to comply with the new law, but mindful of its duties to its students, seeking a compromise.

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The school starts recruiting in early October, and by March 1 prospective students make their decisions. But the quota numbers arrive in mid-February, which is “really late to the game for Quebecer students, but absolutely late to the game for international students,” he said.

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The first year quotas were in fact lower than the school’s actual population, he said, because they were based on the highest numbers of the previous three years, and it seemed impossible to comply.

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As this was happening, then Premier Francois Legault launched a pandemic recovery program that made tuition free for Quebecers in LaSalle’s continuing education “Attestation of College Studies” stream, typically shorter than a diploma program.

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The effect was what the school calls “an administrative imbalance in the distribution of English-speaking students between our (Attestation of College Studies) and (Diploma of College Studies) programs.”

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The school now has fewer students studying in English than they have ever had, and fewer in their diploma programs, but because their anglophone class numbers exceeded the quota, they are being fined into bankruptcy.

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In a statement, Quebec’s Minister of Higher Education, Martine Biron, told the Montreal Gazette that discussions between the government and school can continue through the court-monitored creditor protection process, and that “any settlement proposal submitted by the college can be analyzed in due course and through the proper process.”

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The government offered no clarity, Marchand said, and his messages went unanswered. From the beginning in 2021, he told them he needed a transition period, which is a common element of many new laws, and a delay of application is often explicitly written into legal judgments that overturn old laws.