Quebec's young Liberals sure know how to pique their elders

DON MACPHERSON, The Gazette

Published: 5 hours ago

Young Quebec Liberals never learn: In the change-resistant politics of this province, points are not awarded for originality, but rather are deducted.

Other parties' youth wings serve mainly as candidate farms and launching pads for policy trial balloons for their respective parties. But the young Quebec Liberals seem to be free of the control of their elders, whom they occasionally cause to squirm uncomfortably by expressing new ideas.

Three years ago, the Quebec Liberal youth wing tried to start a discussion of the pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases resulting from teenage sexual activity.

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But any hope of a discussion of a need for more and better sex education was drowned out by laughter at another of the solutions proposed at the same meeting: an "anti-thong" proposal to ban revealing clothing from schools.

Ridicule often kills in politics, but the Liberal youth wing lived to fight the sclerosis of Quebec politics another day.

And this year, the reaction was not ridicule but near rage at some of the ideas proposed by the young Liberals at their 2008 convention last weekend.

Even before the convention ended, representatives of student and labour organizations and the youth wings of other parties were making pilgrimages to the site of the convention in Sherbrooke to denounce some of the young Liberals' proposals.

These included doubling university tuition fees and introducing English immersion in French elementary schools.

Certainly, these ideas were flawed.

Doubling tuition fees, to about $6,000 a year, would make a university education less accessible to needy students unless bursaries were also increased. It might even encourage graduates to leave the province, since the extra payment would be deferred until graduation, when it would be collected gradually through a Quebec income surtax.

And there simply aren't enough teachers fluent in English to teach every subject in that language for half the year in Grade 6 in French schools, as proposed.

Many of the young Liberals wanted to go even farther. An amendment that would have extended the half-year English immersion through all six years of French elementary school was narrowly defeated.

That's just as well, since, as noted, there aren't even enough qualified teachers for the existing English classes in French schools. Not only is there a shortage of specialists in teaching English as a second language, Radio-Canada television program Enjeux reported two years ago, many of those considered specialists can't actually speak English themselves.

But if the young Liberals' solutions were flawed, they did have the merit of trying to address some real problems.

There's a connection between the under-financing of Quebec universities and the fact that the province has the lowest tuition fees in Canada, which mainly benefit students who could afford to pay more. And there was little opposition to the decision last year, by Jean Charest's government, to lift the freeze on tuition fees while increasing bursaries for needy students.

And even though the Charest government has started the teaching of English in French schools two years earlier, in Grade 1, French-speaking parents apparently continue to lack confidence in the quality of this instruction, especially in the public schools. So the better-off ones send their children to predominantly English summer camps, or to subsidized private French schools, which have a better reputation for teaching English. The wealthiest pay the five-figure fees at unsubsidized English schools, to which admission is not restricted by Bill 101. The less fortunate must settle for English-language child care or extracurricular activities, at least in the Montreal area.

Yet Charest preferred this week to emphasize his government's "sacred" duty to protect French - apparently against the youth wing of his own party.

And he said that before the young Liberals' ideas reach his government, they would have to work their way through the party's "instances" - where they will probably be lost somewhere along the way.

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