Montreal City Weblog

Kate 12:43 on 2024-10-24 Permalink Reply  

• Chris 12:59 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  Incorrect summary Kate. There’s nothing Catholic-only here. The motion applied to all religious schools, and that 160k is for all, not just Catholic

• Kate 13:09 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  I wonder how many are madrassas.

• Joey 13:30 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  From the National Assembly transcript – the examples the premier cites are all private schools whose origins are Catholic (I think they are all basically secular now – I don’t think, say, College Notre-Dame, is a ‘religious’ school in the same sense as your typical Hasidic school):

  M. Legault : Oui. Mme la Présidente, je prends note que le Parti libéral du Québec, Québec solidaire et le Parti québécois veulent couper, veulent couper le financement au collège Brébeuf, au collège Notre-Dame, au collège de Montréal, au collège Jésus-Marie, au collège Regina Assumpta, au Petit Séminaire de Québec, au collège de Lévis. C’est une décision qui est appuyée par trois partis politiques, incluant le Parti libéral. Puis ils ne nous ont pas démontrés, dans ces écoles-là… il y avait un problème. Donc, on va examiner le dossier de façon détaillée.

  La Presse says QS voted *with* the government?!?

• Kate 13:36 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  I was shocked by QS doing that. Disappointing.

• Ian 13:41 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  It’s been a long time now that QS have been openly ethnonationalist, you shouldn’t be surprised at all.

• nau 14:10 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  From a Radio Canada article from 2022: “Même si le système scolaire québécois est laïque, dans les faits, de nombreuses écoles primaires et secondaires ont une vocation religieuse explicite. … C’est le cas de 50 établissements parmi les 165 écoles privées que subventionne le gouvernement. Parmi celles-là, 27 sont catholiques, 14 juives, quatre musulmanes; deux sont protestantes évangéliques, deux arméniennes et une grecque orthodoxe.”

  Per a CTV article, QS had their own motion yesterday to withdraw the funding from religious schools, which the CAQ also voted down. If they voted against the PQ motion, there was probably something else in there they didn’t like. Note that the QS motion was apparently tabled by a Ruba Ghazal, who I’m guessing is not overly likely to be a pur laine ethnonationalist.

• Daisy 14:20 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  I would like the public funding removed from all 165 private schools, religious and non-religious alike. They contribute to the segregation and compartmentalization of society. 17% of high school students are in private schools! Imagine if almost all of them were in public schools, as only the very richest or those whose parents are willing to make extreme sacrifices would be able to attend non-subsidized schools. Our public schools would get better and society would be more integrated.

• Kate 14:23 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  I wonder what percentage of MNAs’ kids go to private (but partly publicly funded) private school.

• jeather 15:52 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  I admit I’m rather curious how actually secular some of the Catholic schools are — though I guess when you grade on the curve of “everything Christian is just our culture and not religion”, they’re all secular.

  I assume the answer about politicians’ kids at private school, at the high school level, is well above 90%. I know why this information is not made public, but I would love if, in aggregate, it were.

• Kate 16:57 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  I can make a guess. Modern religious schools are nothing compared to the way almost all schools used to be in Quebec (and which François Legault would have been told about, if not raised in). When my mother was in school – public school in Montreal – she not only had to go to class from Monday to Friday, but also had to show up at church on Sunday and sit with her classmates. It was mandatory; if you weren’t there, you had to bring a note from a parent, same as if you missed school. Everything was pinned to the ecclesiastical calendar, school was felt to be an extension of the church and the authority of the school had the power of the church behind it. If a teacher hit or humiliated a kid, the parent probably accepted that they deserved it.

  Nothing is like that now. The private schools might teach religion and prepare kids for sacraments (do they?) but Legault is probably capable of thinking of modern Catholic private schools as merely “culturally Catholic” because of course all Québécois are.

  A detail I recall from my mother: the girls and boys went to separate schools, but they all went to the same mass on Sunday. Girls and boys were seated on opposite sides of the central aisle, with girls ordered from the youngest in front to the oldest in back, the boys in the opposite order, to hinder the adolescents from making eyes at each other across the aisle. Never mind that these kids all lived in the same neighbourhood and many already knew each other outside of school.

• Kevin 19:29 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  Brebeuf says it is no longer a “religious” school and hasn’t been for decades, even if Jesuits are on the board of directors.

  I know someone who graduated from there within the past decade; next time I see them I’ll ask if catechism and the like are required.

  Furthermore, the Ministry of Education doesn’t even track if any private schools are religious in outlook (or teach religion).

• Kate 19:54 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  Is Loyola high school a religious school now?

• Kevin 20:40 on 2024-10-24 Permalink

  Something like 1/3 of kids in Montreal go to private school. And at some “French” schools like Bedford, about 80% of the students are immigrants or first-generation Canadians.
  We really do have a three-tiered school system in this province.

• Joey 09:57 on 2024-10-25 Permalink

  It seems that La Presse perhaps made a mistake in their initial story – the final version, with lots of colour from the National Assembly debate, doesn’t mention how QS voted on the motion but does indicate that the Liberals did and uses the same stunned reaction language to frame their decision (which is new). This is the language they used to describe the QS vote in the initial story; I’m assuming that they meant PLQ all along…

• Andrew 10:04 on 2024-10-25 Permalink

  I know this debate is about private schools, but it’s still worse that we have a boys only public school on the grounds of St-Josephs Oratory with the primary goal of providing a choir to sing at their services. L’école des Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal is part of the CSSDM

• H. John 13:55 on 2024-10-25 Permalink

  @Kate Loyola went as far as the Supreme Court to guarantee that they could teach a course from their Catholic perspective.

  La Presse does a more detailed breakdown this morning (including Loyola in their analysis):

  https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/chroniques/2024-10-25/les-ecoles-religieuses-profitent-des-largesses-du-fisc.php

• Kate 14:00 on 2024-10-25 Permalink

  Fascinating stuff, H. John. I hadn’t realized how much the Jewish schools also benefit. Thank you.

  Andrew, the odd thing about that school is that having an all‑boys choir school is very British.

• jeather 14:30 on 2024-10-25 Permalink

  To be clear: Jewish schools in particular do not get more money from the provincial government, they get money from parents and other donors, some of which has a federal tax deduction, and that is what is added up. You can disagree with the existence of the deduction, but it’s a little bullshit to describe the schools as “60% funded by tax money” by mixing together the Quebec subsidy (about the same for all private schools) and a federal tax deduction.

• walkerp 15:31 on 2024-10-25 Permalink

  I agree they absolutely have to cut these subsidies to private schools and put that money into the public school where it was intended to go after the Quiet Revolution.

  However, this is not something that could be just done with a cut. You have to have some kind of transition plan. It would probably straight out kill some of the private schools, which could maybe become public. A very tricky and contentious business demanding a brave and strong politician, especially these days of whiny entitled individualism.

• jeather 15:54 on 2024-10-25 Permalink

  I have spent time thinking about what happens if they reduced the subsidy to zero over the next, say, decade. The expensive secular private schools (primarily English, I believe), will continue their slow roll to not using a subsidy and therefore not being limited to students with English eligibility; the non-Orthodox Jewish schools will make up for it by more donations — but the top French ones can hardly increase class sizes more, and yet are not going to be able to keep as many students if they double tuition fees. (There are very few English private schools in the 5-8k/year tuition range, just Villa Maria — not secular.)

• carswell 11:09 on 2024-10-27 Permalink

  Data point: At a dinner party yesterday, I was seated next to a 14-year-old who’s attending Collège Notre Dame. In response to my inquiry about whether it was still a religious school, she said no. A few religious artifacts like some stained glass windows and old paintings remained and there is a minor connection with the Oratory, whereby chorus students who want to can take part in certain performances. But there were no nuns or priests teaching, no crucifixes on classroom walls, no prominently displayed bibles or religious tracts. Non-Christians are welcome and made to feel comfortable she said.

  She did complain about the provincially mandated religion and culture class. Said last year’s class was more interesting because it focused as much on other religions as Christianity (I didn’t ask about atheism). However, this year’s class is dominated by studying the various Christian sects, which she found exclusive and boring — but, she pointed out, this is the same course taught in other schools in the province.