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Education was hill Charest was 'ready to die on'

THUNDER BAY -- Looking back on his final weeks as Quebec’s Premier, Jean Charest stands behind the decisions he made on post-secondary tuition.
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Former federal Progressive Conservative Party leader and Quebec Premier Jean Charest (centre) prepares to receive an Honourary Doctorate from Lakehead University on Friday. Charest reflected on his final days leading Quebec through education protests as a 'hill I was ready to die on." (Photo by Jon Thompson, tbnewswatch.com)

THUNDER BAY -- Looking back on his final weeks as Quebec’s Premier, Jean Charest stands behind the decisions he made on post-secondary tuition.

In the spring of 2012, Charest’s plan to increase average tuition from $2,600 to $4,200 per year over five years was facing nightly demonstrations where protesters numbered in the tens of thousands. Many among Quebec’s 180,000 students declared a strike and boycotted attending their classes.

Unions and opposition parties joined the fray, prompting the broader movement to call itself Printemps Erable (Maple Spring) after the Arab Spring demonstrations that were ousting long-standing dictatorships in the Middle East and north Africa.

With nine years as Premier behind him, Charest declared an early election on the issue; one that would play out to be his last in public life.

“I campaigned on that because in the end, I thought, ‘this is a hill I’m ready to die on,’” Charest recalled on Friday as he received an Honourary Doctorate from Lakehead University. 

“The policy we were proposing, I continue to believe today, was very fair. They would have made tuition fees lower than they were in the rest of Canada, even to this day. Any family that was earning $100,000 or less was actually getting a better deal.

"Other people saw it differently.”

Pauline Marois and the Parti Quebecois narrowly formed government in September with 55 of the Legislature’s 125 seats, beating the 49 ridings won for Charest’s Liberals.

Although Marois scrapped Charest’s tuition raises on her first day in office, she then introduced a smaller fee increase in Feb. 2013, which was met with further protests. She followed that with a $124-million cut to education, retroactive to 2012. Among other issues, education played a role in sweeping the PQ from power in Apr. 2014 in the party’s worst showing at the polls since 1970.

Charest sees the entire affair as having regretfully left Quebec’s education funding lingering behind the rest of Canada. His advice to provincial governments across the country is to stay disciplined in ensuring all citizens can financially access post-secondary education.

“I think there should be a fair policy that always allows lower income Canadians to have access to universities and colleges. That’s sacred. I want to live in a country where that’s always the case,” he said.

“That being said, I think students should be expected to make a reasonable contribution to their education, which is pretty much the case in Canada -- much more so in a fair way than in the United States.”





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