The EMSB remains a hot potato

Here’s an odd Mario Girard piece which comes to a tortured conclusion. Because the EMSB tweaked the dragon’s tail recently by stating that Quebec is not a nation (a radical idea it later withdrew), Girard suggests this bad attitude is why the EMSB doesn’t want to have a new school building constructed on the grounds of Dunrae Gardens, one of its schools in TMR.

“Les francophones sont maintenant majoritaires [in TMR]. Les anglophones doivent aujourd’hui se tourner vers des institutions comme les commissions scolaires pour faire valoir leurs droits.”

He even goes on to suggest that the students are likely to clash because of linguistic stresses.

And yet he entirely ignores the simple, Occam-like reason why the EMSB doesn’t want the new school built on its land: it doesn’t want to give up its playing fields. You can see on Google maps that putting a second school building on that land means neither school would have space around it. The EMSB’s resistance to this plan needn’t have anything to do with anglo rights.

Also note the accompanying La Presse photo which totally distorts the proportion of the lot where the existing school stands.