Francophone education chair laments 'stormy' relationship with Higgs government
Michel Côté says district spends most of its time ‘putting out fires’ set by the province
The chair of the province's largest francophone school district says battles with the Higgs government are consuming more than half the district's time, time that could be otherwise spent improving the education of students.
Michel Côté says the problem began about two years ago when the government proposed to limit the powers of district education councils.
Now they are feuding about how districts should implement the education department's Policy 713 on the sexual orientation and gender identity of students.
"The door is completely closed to the Department of Education. We do our work as a DEC. We try to progress," Côté told Radio-Canada.
"But a lot of time — I would say more than half our time — is spent not working on things to help our students succeed, but on putting out fires set by the government."
Last week Education Minister Bill Hogan wrote to the chairs of four district education councils — three francophone districts plus Anglophone East — to notify them he was repealing policies they adopted at the council level on implementing Policy 713.
He told the councils to remove their policies from their websites. As of this week, the policies for all three francophone districts remain on their sites.
The three education councils issued a statement Tuesday afternoon saying they haven't responded to Hogan yet because they haven't had a chance to meet since the letters.
The statement said the councils will each meet "in the coming weeks to allow its members to evaluate the different options available to them."
Côté said he could not comment on the letters until the Francophone South council meets but he described the education councils' relationship with the province as "stormy."
"The majority of our time is spent defending ourselves against approaches by the government that are trying to bypass districts to implement their policies or their ideology."
He called it "very exhausting."
According to Côté, the province proposed a new model for educational governance to the councils two years ago that would have reduced their decision making powers, turning them into little more than consultative committees and taking away "almost all of our rights."
Under Section 23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, minority language communities in all provinces have a constitutional right to manage their own schools.
Côté says then-minister Dominic Cardy eventually backed off, and the province's three francophone districts began working together and with stakeholder groups and department officials on their own proposal to modernize governance.
Cardy says he didn't back off and the process worked as he intended.
District education councils were offered the chance to "co-create" the new system, and after initially rejecting the offer, francophone councils "soon re-engaged and helped lead the plans to de-centralize and de-politicize school governance," Cardy said.
"Unfortunately, those plans were abandoned by government following my resignation."
Last spring, Cardy's successor as minister, Bill Hogan, introduced Bill 46.
While it would have limited the powers of anglophone education councils only and left the powers of francophone councils intact — because of Section 23 of the Charter — Côté says it ignored the proposals the councils had come up with themselves.
Hogan eventually withdrew Bill 46 without it being passed into law.
"They had an idea they wanted to impose and it didn't work. To me the trust is not there anymore," said Côté.
At the same time, education councils were pushing back at the changes to Policy 713, which now says teachers and school staff must get parental consent when a student under the age of 16 wants to adopt a new name or pronoun at school.
The three francophone districts adopted their own policy, modelled on a proposal by child and youth advocate Kelly Lamrock, that allows students in Grade 6 or older to do so.
The districts argue that the province's changes could violate equality-rights provisions of the Charter as well as the provincial Human Rights Act and Education Act.
Last December the government stripped away a policy requirement that it fund the legal expenses of school districts that find themselves in a disagreement with the province.
"We were never in a situation where we had to continually contact lawyers for legal advice because we had governments who were allies, who worked with us," Côté said.
"Now we don't see the same approach."
Hogan did not immediately respond to an interview request from CBC News about Côté's comments.
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With files from Alix Villeneuve