Before the Ford government came to office in Ontario, the province had exactly zero French-language universities.  This might seem strange in a province with something close to a million French speakers, a third of whom use it as a first language.  After all, Manitoba – which has a similarly-sized francophone population in proportional terms – can maintain Université de St. Boniface, so why couldn’t Ontario?

The answer is that at the time Ontario had two very good bilingual universities in Ottawa and Laurentian (along with Glendon), and by and large they satisfied the need of the province’s francophone population.  However, the province’s francophone leadership decided that wasn’t enough and they wanted an institution that was francophone rather than bilingual.  And so, in the early 2010s, the idea of l’Université de l’Ontario français was born and sold to a Liberal government that owed several seats in Eastern Ontario to a block francophone vote. 

Now, I think there was a pretty good case for a small-ish francophone university somewhere in Ontario.  Just not in the two places that now have them: Toronto, and the community of Hearst in Northern Ontario.  Ottawa or Sudbury were always the more sensible places to put such a university, but no one wanted to be seen in competition with Laurentian and Ottawa.  So instead, buttressed by a set of frankly nonsensical arguments, the decision was made to place l’Université de l’Ontario français in Toronto, where it was practically guaranteed to fail.

There were a number of fairy tales used to make Toronto seem like a good idea (I outlined them here among other places), but basically proponents of the plan decided that it didn’t want to compete with existing francophone-serving  institutions and became convinced that by offering “unconventional” degrees in things like Digital Culture Studies and Human Diversity Studies, it would attract a “different audience”.  In fact, domestically at least, it found no audience at all.

And then there is Hearst, which was a satellite campus of Laurentian until 2022 when it very suddenly became an independent university on its own.  I am not sure anyone outside Hearst thought this it was a great idea to turn a satellite campus with something like 150 students into a full-fledged university, but the government was already drafting legislation to extricate the Northern Ontario School of Medicine from the Laurentian morass, and somebody must have figured “hey, what’s one more university?”  And so now we have two such institutions.

Let me provide a couple of statistics about these universities.  They are a couple of years out of date, but instructive nonetheless.   In 2021-22, Hearst reported undergraduate enrolment of 215, of which only 65 were domestic students – which is consistent with longer-term data showing that domestic enrolment has never exceeded 100 per year.  L’Université de l’ontario français – which, to be fair, was only in its first year of operations in 2021 – reported total enrolment of 26, of which only 11 were domestic students.  We do not know the current number of students at UOF because while the institution lists its recruitment activities in elaborate detail in its annual report (see here, page 12) nowhere does it talk about recruitment results let alone total enrolment (although data from the Universities Application Centre strongly suggests its intake is skewed towards international students, despite a promise at the time it was created that 85% of its students would be domestic).  But let’s be generous, and posit that there are 100 domestic students there at the moment.

In 2021-22, Hearst’s total subsidies were $6 million.  UOF’s were $13 million – an amount it is theoretically guaranteed every year between now and 2027.  Using the (probably generous) assumptions above, what that means is that Ontario’s French language universities are receiving somewhere in the neighbourhood of $125,000 per domestic student, which is close to ten times what anglophone institutions receive.

One can see why the provincial government might think these figures excessive, and in the absence of any evidence that UOF is growing into the role its founders envisaged for it, that it isn’t going to change any time soon.  A premium for minority language is to be expected – two or even three times the mainstream figure wouldn’t be excessive.  But nearly ten times is just not on.  And so, as the province prepares to re-acquire funding responsibility for UOF (the feds took over financing for four years in later 2019 in order to a) prevent Ontario from closing it altogether and b) to cement its relationship with the franco-Ontarian community in an election year, but responsibility reverts to Queen’s Park in January). 

And now, there’s a push on to fund a third francophone university.  L’université de Sudbury is a Catholic university founded in 1957 (but with roots stretching back a century) that was federated into Laurentian back around 1960. While it received provincial money, it did so indirectly through the grant to Laurentian.  When Laurentian tore up that agreement during its restructuring process, Sudbury was left high and dry.  Its President, Serge Miville, has been working hard to try to regain some provincial funding but has been turned down – and given the figures above you can see why the provincial government is skeptical about funding more small francophone schools, even if (and I haven’t seen them, so I can’t say) Sudbury’s specific proposals have merit.

What to do with all this?  Well, the best solution probably would have been if everyone could have foreseen the Laurentian mess years in advance and created a new, multi-campus francophone university centred in Sudbury (which was the likeliest spot to generate significant enrolments) to rise from the ashes.  But that didn’t happen, so the next best solution probably looks something like this:

1. The government pulls back subsidies to domestic francophone students from something like 10x the system average to something like 3X the system (it won’t necessarily be a per-student subsidy, but that’s what it will amount to). 
2. Sudbury, Hearst, and UOF all federate into the University of Ottawa, which will run a “Network of Francophone Institutions” using a governing council which is both francophone and is majoritarily drawn – but also separate – from Ottawa’s own governing body.

This is an imperfect solution that reduces the power of francophone institutions, but administratively and financially it keeps services going for those francophone students who desire them.  But genuinely, I think this is about the best we can hope for.