FordLate last week, Ontario Finance Minister Vic Fedeli delivered a mid-year economic statement.  There wasn’t a whole lot of news in it, to be honest.  For the most part, it was a final government statement about how bad the previous government had been and a re-statement of actions taken to date.  There were repetitions about the need to get to a balanced budget and to reduce electricity rates, but no timetables for either were given.  But there were a few things in there: mainly, the ditching of a few independent oversight bodies and legislative offices, and the cancellation of the francophone university in Toronto which the Liberals announced and the Tories themselves had confirmed was going ahead only a few days after their swearing in.

At one level, cancelling a university your own government announced four months ago looks silly.  At another level, when you’ve just cancelled three other universities with (frankly) better enrolment prospects, it makes perfect sense – why go ahead with this one when you are cancelling other expansions?  Arguably, keeping the francophone university would have made less sense, politically.

Because, let’s face it, until this weekend, support for this university wasn’t universal even among francophones.  Yes, if you were designing a provincial university system for Ontario from scratch, it would almost certainly include a francophone university.  But that’s not how this works: history matters.  For instance, if you were designing such a university, you probably wouldn’t put it in Toronto.  The only reason it was being put there is because that location would create the least amount competition with Ottawa and Laurentian, the province’s two existing bilingual institutions, which already do a hell of a job of serving the province’s francophone population.

(Yes, yes, Glendon College.  But Glendon’s a part of York whose managerial strata is not remotely francophone and in any case its mission is more about creating French speakers than it is about serving francophone communities.  Let’s leave Glendon out of this.)

The problem is, the case for a francophone university in Toronto is virtually nil.  The enrolment projections which are contained in the institution’s founding documents are a fantasy, based on conjuring up thousands of students who apparently Ottawa and Laurentian have been completely ignoring all these years.   The only way this institution could ever have got off the ground financially at the scale contemplated was by getting the government to stop Ottawa and Laurentian from offering certain programs in French, so it could have a monopoly.  And there were a lot of people at both Ottawa and Laurentian who understood this and were very, very skeptical about the project, though politics being what they are, they couldn’t say so publicly.

(To be clear, a smaller francophone university – something closer in scale to Université St. Boniface in Winnipeg – is probably do-able and something like that still may get resurrected out of this fiasco.  But an institution with francophone enrolments rivalling those of Laurentian was never going to happen).

If backtracking on the university had been the only announcement last week, we wouldn’t be hearing any more about it.  It’d be done and dusted.  But it wasn’t quite the only announcement.  Among those legislative and oversight offices abolished last week was that of the French Language Services Commissioner, which is widely – and correctly – viewed as a key pillar supporting minority language rights in the province.  Ontario francophones – and to some degree francophones in Québec as well (see Patrick Lagacé’s forceful piece  in English (!) in yesterday’s La Presse) are rightly angry.

Now in some ways this hands a francophone university something of a lifeline, at least over the medium term.  By being axed at the same time as the French Language Services Commissioner, it has symbolically been elevated to the same level as the Commissioner in terms of being a non-negotiable “right” of the entire Ontario francophone community instead of just being an act of hubris on the part of the Toronto francophone elite.  The fact that almost no one saw a francophone university as a right as recently as a week ago, that Ottawa and Laurentian were important pillars of the community instead of “merely” bilingual institutions, is neither here nor there.  Now, it’s a right. And no one bargains away rights.

I doubt the Ford government will backtrack on this no matter how hard the pressure.  That’s not the way modern right-wing populism works.  But I do think this change to a rights-based language makes reinstatement of the project under a future government a lot more likely; arguably, it may also give a future francophone university a lot more leeway to lose money and monkey with programs at Ottawa and Laurentian to make the numbers work too because people will be more invested in its success come what may.