'Catastrophic': Quebec set to impose higher French-language requirements for English universities

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"Catastrophic." "Ridiculous." "Simply impossible."

McGill University's deputy provost, Fabrice Labeau, did not mince words when reacting to a media report that Quebec is going to not only raise tuition fees for non-Quebec students but also require 80 per cent of those students attending English universities to reach level 6 in French proficiency.

Those are the proposals that are currently on the table, according to a report by La Presse on Wednesday.

• UPDATE: Explaining Quebec's new French requirement for out-of-province university students

The press attaché for Quebec Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry did not confirm or deny the newspaper report, but said the minister will make an announcement on Thursday.

"I think it's important to understand that 80 per cent of people from outside Quebec, reaching level 6 in French is completely unrealistic. It makes no sense," said Labeau in an interview with CTV News.

Quebec's three English universities (McGill, Concordia, and Bishop's) on the weekend had made a second counter-offer to the government to modify its plans that included tuition fee increases for different disciplines and a francization program with the goal of ensuring that 40 per cent of non-French-speaking students achieve a level 6, or intermediate level, in French upon graduation.

But now it seems the government is doubling down and wanting the threshold to be higher, at 80 per cent.

"If you're, for instance, a student from Germany or Spain and you have zero notion of French and you come to Montreal, the work that it takes to go from there to level 6 is 240 hours of French-language [classes]. That's the equivalent of 18 university credits, that's more than one semester, in addition to whatever you're doing at the university," Labeau explained.

"So if you're thinking in terms of competition, and the same student from Germany or from Spain looking at possibilities in Canada, and you're looking at McGill, University of Toronto, UBC, one of them is is going to tell them, you can go, we want you here, but you're going to take one more semester to graduate because you'll have to learn French. It gives you a sense of the fact that if you're going with these very huge numbers and you're targeting this very international population [that doesn't have] a lot of pre-existing French, you're in trouble. It's just simply impossible to do. The idea that we publicize that, to us, means that students are going to stop coming."

McGill fears the francization requirement is an even bigger threat to the university than the tuition fee increase Quebec announced on Oct. 13. Instead of doubling tuition fees for non-Quebec students from about $9,000 to $17,000, as previously announced, the government is reportedly going to increase them by about 33 per cent, to about $12,000.

Trying to predict the impact on English universities' bottom lines is difficult, Labeau said, but one thing he said is certain is that "the announcement like this one would be catastrophic in terms of the impact it would have on universities such as McGill."

The Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN), a coalition representing about 40 anglophone groups, has also come out against the latest proposals, calling them "clear existential threats" to the three universities in Quebec that attract the most students from the rest of Canada.

"If a government were trying to devise a plan to starve Quebec’s English-language universities out of existence, it would look a lot like this,” said QCGN's president, Eva Ludvig, in a news release on Wednesday.

"The government has produced no evidence whatsoever that the presence of McGill and Concordia students in the downtown core contributes to the anglicization of the metropolis," added Sylvia Martin-Laforge, director general of the QCGN. "But when Premier François Legault and Language Minister Jean-François Roberge complain about hearing too much English on the streets of Montreal, that is apparently enough to bring about a policy that could kill or severely injure several fine institutions."

If Déry decides to go ahead with the government's plans, McGill is determined to still sit down with her and try to convince her to reverse course, especially since the university is already seeing the first signs of a financial hit.

"Moody's is reviewing our credit score at McGill with the perspective of lowering it so the cost of money or borrowing money is going to be higher from McGill pretty soon with these kinds of directions," Labeau said.

"So we're seeing these effects already."