Quebec Education Minister Pierre Reid may well be the hardest man in the province to get a hold of right now. Since the Charest government’s decision to cut $103 million from Quebec’s bursaries program, Reid has been the main target for criticism from student groups. Now the Millennium Scholarship Foundation has declared that the cuts are a violation of an agreement reached in 1999 between themselves and the province. While no one at the minister’s office would comment on the situation, Joseph Berger, speaking on behalf of the Foundation, says the problem is that their agreement was based on another earlier deal.
“In 1999, the province got together with the rectors of the colleges and universities, as well as the student groups. They said ‘Ok, we’ve got $70 million coming into the province per year, how are we going to spend it.'” These three groups achieved a consensus that half of the money would go to the colleges and universities, with the other half going into the province’s bursaries program.
“The net benefit to the students was enormous,” said Berger. “The province, the rectors, and the students signed this agreement, and the foundation and the Federal government undersigned it and said ‘We accept that this is a legitimate agreement, and we’ll dispense our funds accordingly.’ Everybody was happy.”
Since 1999, everything ran smoothly until last spring, when the government announced it was cutting its bursary program by converting $103 million from bursaries into loans. “What they’re basically doing is that instead of our original agreement, which called for the reduction of loans by 25 per cent, now they were increasing them by 50 per cent, I think it is,” said Berger. “So what they’re basically saying is that instead of reducing the amount of debt students are going to have, they’re going to increase it significantly.”
According to Berger, this constitutes a breach of the agreement. “There are not too many things in the agreement that you can go against, and one of those is that you’ve got to keep the loan limits down instead of up. By increasing the loan amounts, we basically said, ‘look, we no longer have a valid agreement, so how can be distribute our funds if we’re working off of an agreement that nobody’s respecting?’ We’re not looking for a situation where we come in and for every dollar we spend, the Quebec government takes a dollar of its own away and spends it on something else.”
Berger said that continuing to dispense the funding after the cuts have been made is not an option. “If we allow the Government to make this decision, then what we’re saying is that the agreement that was reached among those three parties isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”
Berger said the current impasse is in nobody’s interest. “The government of Quebec certainly doesn’t want a situation where the Foundation’s $70 million isn’t being dispensed. The students obviously don’t want that, because regardless of what happens, it will make their situation worse. And we’re not interested in withholding the funds, because it goes against our mandate.”
The way forward, said Berger, is for the three parties to come to a new agreement to replace the 1999 deal.
“What we really need right now is for cooler heads to prevail, everybody to sit down and work out a new deal, and if it can be done where the foundation doesn’t take a lead role but just says ‘Ok, we accept that everyone’s in agreement,’ then we’ll be really happy.”
The minister of education would be the obvious candidate to take the lead role in this process, and with the foundation’s funds scheduled for allocation in the spring, time is running out. If the negotiations don’t get underway soon, Quebec’s post-secondary students could be facing the loss of an additional $70 million in bursaries, on top of the $103 million that has already been cut.
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