blogcutter

I don't usually pay much attention to these manufactured occasions like Black Friday or Cyber Monday or Giving Tuesday. And incidentally, I haven't heard a word this year about Buy Nothing Day.

Anyway, today, Giving Tuesday, with my e-mail box overflowing with beg-messages from organizations I've donated to in the past - and several more that I don't recall EVER donating to - I File-13'd the lot of them and made a donation elsewhere: the Schulich School of Music at McGill University:

https://giving.mcgill.ca/make-impact/faculties-schools-and-units/schulich-school-music

Quebec's decision to double tuition fees for out-of-province students is one that's deeply personal for me. While I've never actually lived in the province of Quebec, I did work in Gatineau for about 12 years out of my 33+ year career in the federal public service. My daughter, now in her early 40s, has been a Quebec resident since she was 18 and got all of her postsecondary education in Montreal.

Montreal used to be a wonderfully vibrant, international city. When it hosted Expo '67, it managed to construct a subway system and underground city in record time (Is there a lesson there for our beleaguered LRT?) In my late teens and early twenties, I took numerous day trips to Montreal, both to shop at their quirky boutiques and soak up the language and culture. Voyageur offered buses every hour on the hour, from 6AM to midnight, at an economical same-day-return rate. Mind you, I recall one occasion where I had to forgo the cheaper rate after spending an uncomfortable night in the Montreal bus station, the result of attending a Joni Mitchell concert that both started and finished late.

My daughter passed up scholarship opportunities at Carleton and uOttawa to attend McGill, and I think it was a good decision for her. At the time, rents in Montreal were reasonable and tuition expenses affordable. But over the years, housing and tuition expenses have gone up at a much faster rate than overall cost-of-living expenses. That's true in all provinces, of course, but when all Canadians (not to mention people from other countries) are struggling with inflation, it seems particularly egregious for Quebec to be doubling university tuition fees for anyone living outside the province, even if it's just a few metres across a bridge!

Some programmes at English-language universities will be particularly hard-hit, including music programmes at McGill, where nearly half the students come from outside Quebec:

https://epaper.nationalpost.com/article/281736979207644

Legault insists the very survival of the French language is at stake. Like, seriously? French is already one of Canada's official languages. In Ontario and elsewhere in Canada, parents clamour to get their kids into French immersion, to the point that English-only education is rapidly becoming a poor second cousin. And unilinguals who come to Quebec to enrol in an English-language institution are definitely going to want to learn French, just to participation the social life of the city. The strength of one's loins doesn't only apply to "pure laine" Quebecers!

For many of the people enrolling in English-language programmes in Quebec, English is not even their first language. It may merely be, so to speak, a lingua franca. And if they have several languages under their belt already, learning French will likely come easily.

Anyway, I'm somewhat heartened to read that not all Quebecers support Legault:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/most-quebecers-support-english-universities-alternative-to-doubling-tuition-polls/ar-AA1klvpG

My grandchildren are already citizens of Quebec and will not greatly suffer if this tuition hike goes ahead.
Still, it feels as if, Quiet Revolution notwithstanding, the province is becoming more and more parochial.

What impact is the pandemic having on the relationship between Ontario and Quebec, and between anglophones and francophones in whatever part of the country?

Pre-Covid, the impetus towards Quebec sovereignty seemed to have abated. But then came the checkpoints on bridges between Ottawa and Gatineau. And with the 50th anniversary of the October Crisis, the Bloc leader is demanding an apology for the invocation of the War Measures Act and the arbitrary arrest and detention of a number of Quebecers suspected of subversive activities. Mind you, that happened with Ottawans and other people in communities near Quebec's borders, a fact that is conveniently being forgotten.

Another concern is that with public servants' working lives moving online, bilingualism is in decline:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/bilingualism-public-sector-pandemic-1.5780423

With all the work we've done since the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission to foster a bilingual working and living environment, we don't want to see it all fall by the wayside!

Then of course there's the younger generation. Kids in French immersion may be struggling to maintain their proficiency in the language. Kids whose parents' first language is neither English nor French are facing even more formidable challenges.

I just finished reading Joanna Goodman's novel The Home for Unwanted Girls. It opens in 1950 and the central character is Maggie, an unwed mother with a francophone mother and anglophone father. Her baby, Elodie, is taken from her at birth and sent to one of Duplessis' "orphanages". Then in the mid-1950s, the orphanage is arbitrarily declared to be a mental institution instead, because the government of the day paid the nuns three times as much money per child to look after mental patients. But the money all goes to a corrupt church while the children are raised in appalling circumstances and see absolutely no benefit from it. Schooling comes to an abrupt end.

Elodie eventually gets to leave institutional life at the age of seventeen, but of course she has practically no life skills for living in an ordinary community. Soon she too finds herself with a child to raise on her own, although fortunately there's a new premier by then and social attitudes have evolved.

I'm now reading a sequel to that book, The Forgotten Daughter.

It does get me thinking, though, about the children of this pandemic. While I'm sure the circumstances in most homes are considerably less grim than those of the Duplessis-era institutions, I do fear for kids in their formative years, unable to establish a reasonable degree of independence and maturity while stuck in their household bubbles. It's something I haven't heard much discussion of, apart from a generalized concern about youth mental health.