Legault's LPC Lifeline

How The Feds Should Respond To Legault's Tuition Lunacy

There are three broad ways the Liberals win the next election from here – the economy in 2025 is significantly better (rate cuts are bringing down mortgage rates, there’s the beginnings of progress on housing builds, etc), Poilievre just completely shits himself, or the Bloc collapses and the Liberals win 50 seats in Quebec. Now, obviously, there can be a mix of all three, but the broad ways this works is an economic recovery, Poilievre fucking up, or Quebec going full Quebec.

Too much of the Liberal focus seems to be on hoping for, or attempting to induce, the Poilievre fuck up, which is actually the least important part of any of this right now. Run an ad blitz in a year about why he’s a disaster and you’ll dent all the limited progress he’s made so far this year in fixing his image. And it’s noticeable how the government is missing – at least so far – an opportunity to take advantage of the rare event that plays well for them.

Francois Legault, in (seemingly) a bid to outflank the resurgent PQ, has decided to double tuition for out of province Anglos studying at English Universities in the province – essentially charging McGill and Concordia students to try and find some funds for the French university network in the province. It’s a shit policy that will just make UBC and Queens and Dal better off, but it’s also an opportunity for the Liberals, because for once they have an issue where their opposition are just plainly being morons.

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The likelihood this policy actually raises any significant money – and certainly that it will help save the French language, as it’s supposed to – is a crock of shit, derived from an idea that people’s love of Montreal will mean that middle class kids will swallow an extra $32000 to live there for four years. For some people, there’s no price they wouldn’t pay to call that magical city home, but even the worst econ student in the world knows that doubling the price is gonna squeeze a lot of people out.

But it’s also a shitty policy that completely misunderstands the glory of McGill, Concordia, and the city that they call home. They are made great not in spite of the messy, contradictory, and irreplaceable cultural milieu that is Montreal, but because of it. The glory of that city is in its contradictions, in the way that WASPy Anglos and the fiercely Quebecois live side by side, work side by side, and make a city that could have come undone at the seams in the 80s and 90s more than their individual glories. And it’s something that can be achieved another way.

There’s roughly 35k non-Quebec origin students between the two institutions, meaning if every student swallowed the tuition increase and they kept the same recruiting success and generally nobody made a different decision, they’d raise ~$315M. Not chump change, but this is a province that brings in double that merely from alcohol surcharges, not including the SAQ’s dividend to taxpayers. If you’re really looking to raise a few hundred million while still hurting English college students, make it more expensive to drink the pisswater that Molson passes off as beer.

Of course, there’s no way they’ll raise even the $315M number, because of course some families will have to make different choices. Except, it doesn’t have to be, and that’s where the Liberals can, if they’re smart, come in here. There’s an easy solution here – the Feds offer to pony up, say, $250M in funding for French language post secondary in exchange for Legault backing down. With a McGill grad as PM, it’s not exactly an issue that it’s easy to get mad at Trudeau for weighing in on. And potentially even more importantly, it completely wedges Legault, the Bloc, and Poilievre.

I doubt Legault would be able to accept the deal, because this isn’t about protecting the French language but fucking the English, but it would also completely destroy his premise for doing this. If it’s laid bare that the only reason he’s doing this is to fuck the English he looks like a petty vindictive douchebag. If you’re Blanchet, do you celebrate the offer as a proper investment in minority rights inside Canada or needless meddling and Ottawa telling Quebec what it can and can’t do? And if you’re Poilievre, do you risk pissing off Legault by backing in a completely sensible idea?

If the government has any ambition left, they’ll see this for the opportunity it is. Either they get a chance to fix a looming problem with a solution they can sell as a win for everyone. If they get the deal, then they can go to the ring of seats around Montreal where they’re fighting the Bloc and sell themselves as protectors of the French language, and they can go to Anglos both inside and outside Quebec and say they protected McGill and Concordia against these draconian policies for the future. They either make their opposition look like assholes, or they come out looking like compassionate heroes.

What I don’t know the answer to is whether the Liberals have it in them to still do this shit. This shouldn’t be difficult for them to do – finding a quarter billion in spending offsets shouldn’t be hard, especially when inflation is making everyone’s revenue numbers look rosier than they would otherwise. This isn’t a hard one, but the Liberals have been on the back foot and scrambling all year. They finally got a pitch to hit, as it were, and I don’t know if they’re gonna hit it. But holy fuck do they need to.

Legault’s tuition policy is a disaster. It’s a dangerous policy that will do immeasurable harm to Montreal and Quebec as a whole. It’s also a much needed political opportunity for the LPC. Will it suddenly move the polls by 15% in Quebec and bring the government back from the brink? No, of course not. But this is the kind of shit that will help the Government while it waits for the larger stuff to come through. This isn’t a housing solution or a rate cut, but if the government can lock in a victory here, it’s the kind of thing that can get them some much needed good press now, be valuable at the ballot box when the election comes, and is a lot more useful of an action right now than burning some money on an anti-Poilievre ad buy that’ll only serve to make my Twitter mentions happy.

For the love of God may they take advantage.