Private loophole

Courtesy of our elected government, getting a bilingual education in Quebec is about to get harder. The PQ is getting ready to slip through Bill 104, a law closing a loophole in Bill 101 that allows francophone and allophone kids to attend public English elementary schools if they have attended a non-subsidized, private English school for one year. The province says Bill 104 is intended to crack down on parents who yank their kids after only a year of non-subsidized education. Provincial education minister Diane Lemieux says some 4,000 non-anglophone kids (out of a total 1.1-million in the province) have made the private-public switch over the past five years.

Rubbish, says Geoff Dowd, president of the Quebec Association of Independent Schools (QAIS) and headmaster of the Trafalgar School for Girls. “Our numbers show that within [the QAIS], within the last five years, maybe seven or eight students a year gain eligibility after Grade 1 and then scoot into the public sector. It’s not a big problem. It’s minuscule.”
Dowd also says that over the past few years English private schools have been making significant strides in making their elementary schools more bilingual. “Selwyn House, for example, is now all French for the first three grades.”

At a meeting at Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s, a private Westmount all-girls’ school, on Monday night, Dowd told about 300 parents that the bill only restricts the rights of francophones to choose the language of education for their children. :

—Patrick Lejtenyi