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    • Days before school year begins, more than 5,700 teaching positions unfilled in Quebec

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    There are still 5,704 vacant teaching positions in Quebec with the new school year less than two weeks away, and Education Minister Bernard Drainville said Friday the gap is partly due to immigration.

    He told reporters the school system faces a serious challenge to find enough teachers because there are about 20,000 more students enrolled than there were last year. About 80 per cent of them are newcomers to the province, he added.

    Drainville said immigration "has a big impact on our school system." Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has to "help us a bit," he said, and the federal government should "get control of the immigration process to reduce temporary immigration in Quebec, particularly asylum seekers."

    According to Statistics Canada data published in June, there were 597,000 non-permanent residents in Quebec in the second quarter of 2024, including 190,000 asylum seekers. That's up from 420,000 temporary residents a year earlier and 295,000 in 2022.

    While he said it's not the fault of immigrants, "I'm sounding the alarm a bit because we've reached our limit." He noted a lack of resources for the kindergarten program for four-year-olds due to the need for French integration classes.

    While the number of teaching vacancies is high, it is 2,800 fewer compared with this time last year, Drainville told reporters. Overall, he said, the news is "positive." Of the 5,704 unfilled teaching spots, 1,406 are for permanent, full-time positions, and the rest are contract jobs.

    Drainville said the fact there are fewer unfilled positions compared with last year is due in part to a new collective agreement that requires teachers to accept class assignments by Aug. 8. Unions, however, have said that despite the change in the contract, the education network is still dealing with a serious labour shortage.

    Mélanie Hubert, president of the FAE teachers union, said the minister's numbers are incomplete because they don't provide a full picture of how many support staff positions are unfilled.

    This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 16, 2024. 

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    A man who has brain damage has a murder conviction reversed after a 34-year fight

    A man who has brain damage and was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a shopkeeper in London had his decades-old conviction quashed Wednesday by an appeals court troubled by the possibility police elicited a false confession from a mentally vulnerable man. Oliver Campbell, who suffered cognitive impairment as a baby and struggles with his concentration and memory, was 21 when he was jailed in 1991 after being convicted based partly on admissions his lawyer said were coerced. “The fight for justice is finally over after nearly 34 years," Campbell said. “I can start my life an innocent man.” Campbell, now in his 50s, was convicted of the robbery and murder of Baldev Hoondle, who was shot in the head in his shop in the Hackney area of east London in July 1990. He had a previous appeal rejected in 1994 and was released from prison in 2002 on conditions that could have returned him to prison if he got into trouble. Defense lawyer Michael Birnbaum said police lied to Campbell and “badgered and bullied” him into giving a false confession by admitting he pulled the trigger in an accident. He was interviewed more than a dozen times, including sessions without either a lawyer or other adult present. His learning disability put him “out of his depth” and he was "simply unable to do justice to himself,” Birnbaum said. He said the admissions were nonsense riddled with inconsistencies that contradicted facts in the case. At trial, he testified that he was not involved in the robbery and had been somewhere else though he couldn't remember where. A co-defendant, Eric Samuels, who has since died, pleaded guilty to the robbery and was sentenced to five years in prison. At the time, he told his lawyer Campbell was not the gunman and later told others Campbell wasn’t with him during the robbery. Lawyers continued to advocate for Campbell that he wasn't the killer and his case was referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission which investigates potential injustices. The three judges on the Court of Appeal rejected most of Birnbaum's grounds for appeal but said they were troubled by the conviction in light of a new understanding of the reliability of admissions from someone with a mental disability. The panel quashed the conviction as 'unsafe,' and refused to order a retrial.

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