Concordia University ‘astonished’ after Quebec vows to maintain tuition hikes for out-of-province students

Concordia University said it was shocked by comments from Quebec’s higher education minister, who is promising to go ahead with tuition hikes for out-of-province students despite a court ruling that struck down the measure in its current form.

“We were astonished by the comments made today by the Ministry,” a university spokesperson said in an email to CTV News. “We had hoped that the decision by the Superior Court in April could mark a reset of our relationship with the government. The comments, made one day after the end of the appeal period, make it clear that this is not the case.”

In 2023, the provincial government announced a tuition hike of 33 per cent for non-Quebec students at English-language universities, a measure that had a direct impact on Quebec’s largest anglophone universities, McGill and Concordia. The government also imposed a new requirement that 80 per cent of out-of-province students at those universities would have to reach an intermediate level of French proficiency before graduating.

However, in a ruling handed down last April, Superior Court Justice Éric Dufour took aim at the process by which the government imposed the new regulations. He declared the tuition hikes “unreasonable and invalid” — except for those applicable to international students — because “they are not based on objective data or rational considerations.”

Dufour also struck down the French-language requirement for out-of-province students, writing in his 82-page judgment that the threshold was “almost certain to be impossible to achieve.”

He gave the government nine months from April to revise its tuition plan.

The Ministry of Education confirmed in an email that it will not appeal the decision.

On Tuesday, the day after the deadline to file an appeal of the April decision, Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry said on social media that there was “misinformation” circulating online about the judgment and that the province is “sticking to our decision.”

“First, regarding the tuition fees charged to Canadian students outside Quebec, I want to be clear: the court did not cancel the increase, and we are sticking to our decision. We firmly believe that it is not up to the Quebec government to guarantee financial accessibility to studies for non-Quebecers,” the minister wrote on her X account.

She went on to say the ruling supports the goal of correcting the “financial imbalance between English- and French-language universities” and recognized the government’s objective of protecting the French language in Quebec.

Discussions will be happening with English-language universities “over the coming weeks” regarding French-language proficiency requirements, according to Déry.

University hopes to meet minister ‘soon’

A Concordia spokesperson said Monday the university was “troubled” by the minister’s comments that “seem to indicate that the government simply plans to come back with a new set of arguments to justify an increase of tuition fees for out-of-province students,” which the university argues goes against Justice Dufour’s judgment.

The university says it hopes to meet the minister “soon” but that no meeting has yet been scheduled.

Meanwhile, in a brief statement on Tuesday, McGill said in an email that the Superior Court judgment “is quite clear.”

“We will abide by it, as we hope others will. We remain committed to maintaining a constructive and respectful relationship with the Quebec Government,” the statement reads.

Judge letting province ‘go back to the drawing board’

Montreal lawyer Michael Bergman, who is not involved in the legal dispute, said the judge’s ruling said the process by which the government arrived at the tuition hike was “erroneous” and, therefore, “to go back to the drawing board” and to come back with data and statistics to justify the increase.

“The judge doesn’t say that the actual regulation in the tuition increase is unreasonable. The decision to make it was unreasonable. That’s an important distinction,” he said in an interview Tuesday.

“So, if there’s a reasonable basis as demonstrable in the future during the nine months, the government can just start the whole thing all over again and say, this is it. In the meantime, the poor old Canadian out-of-province province students, they still have to pay the tuition hike during the nine months.”

McGill has said previously that it had “repeatedly” requested data from the government to justify the tuition hike, but never received it.

“The Minister can say, ‘You know what? We, the government, believe in these tuition increases. So what we’ll do is we’ll go on a research mission, we’ll find the data, we’ll find the statistics … We’ll do some consultation and we’ll come out with something similar or identical," Bergman added.

Impact already being felt, student union says

The Concordia Student Union (CSU), which played a large role in the student protests against the tuition hikes, will be keeping a close eye on the government’s next steps.

Julianna Smith, CSU campaigns coordinator, said Tuesday that the April judgment came with a lot of “mixed emotions” for the student body.

“I think it was also very clear that, OK, the government tried something, it didn’t work out in this specific case because of the ruling. Now, what’s next? I think it was very much, like, we know this wasn’t we knew this wasn’t going to be the end, and so it was just about seeing where things were going to play out,” she said.

Last summer, the university reported a 30 per cent drop in enrolment because of the tuition hike. Smith says Concordia was already facing financial challenges and that the government’s decision has forced the school to cut back.

“It’s hard for students to be able to access classes. The kind of cuts that the university is making is having a real impact, not just on student experience, but also on the quality of education that students are receiving. You know, students are telling me that they’re having to switch out of their programs because they can’t graduate on time, because they can’t get into the specific classes that they need to graduate because they’re being offered less frequently, and by the time they go to register to them they’re already full,” she said.

“Students are really being pushed to the brink with what they’re able to experience within the institution. And I know the same can be said to the staff and to the faculty of the university that are all already being asked to overextend themselves and to work extra hours and to take in more classes and bigger classes at that. So, it really has been a struggle overall.”