Editorial: Get out and vote in English school board elections

Article content

There are many reasons to go out and vote in English school board elections on Sunday.

For starters, casting a ballot will determine who is in charge of our children’s schools — and what could be more important than that?

At the English Montreal School Board all seats on the council of commissioners are being contested, including the chair’s position, so it’s important to choose from among the competing visions for the future. But even at school boards where many posts were filled by acclamation, having a say in determining which voices speak for our children and our community in districts where there is a race is essential and worthwhile.

Article content

Exercising our democratic rights has never been more important. This is both a universal statement and one that should resonate with Quebec’s anglophone community.

The government of Premier François Legault has tried to wrench our constitutional right to manage and control our own schools away from the English-speaking minority in Quebec by abolishing school boards and turning them into service centres. This has already happened in the French system with Bill 40. But the English community has fought back.

So far, we have retained our school boards, thanks to the courts. An injunction kept them intact during the constitutional challenge. And in 2023, Quebec Court Justice Sylvain Lussier affirmed the community’s rights to manage our own schools by governing them through elected councils of commissioners. And this right, by the way, extends to all members of the English-speaking community of all generations (as long as they are registered to vote and don’t have children enrolled in French schools).

“(Bill 40) does not allow the anglophone minority of Quebec to fully exercise its rights,” Lussier wrote in his judgment declaring the law unconstitutional. “The linguistic minority transcends the restrained group of individuals whose children are registered in school. The transmission of the culture is at stake with the scholastic project, which is not limited to classrooms. The community must recognize itself in its representatives. It has a voice in their designation.”

Article content

Now that’s a powerful statement on what these elections mean and what is at stake.

But the Quebec government is appealing the decision. So every school board election could be the last.

The councils of commissioners that run English schools are important governance bodies led by members of the community, for the community. They have such important duties as choosing the directors general of English boards, another right the Legault government tried to remove. We must choose our representatives for these crucial leadership roles.

This is a critical opportunity for anglophones to demonstrate how much we care about our English institutions, be they hospitals, universities or public schools. These valued establishments, into which the community has long thrown our energies, resources and support, have been under increasing pressure in recent years as the Legault government seeks to centralize decision-making power and strengthen the French language.

This is a chance for the English-speaking community to stand up and be counted. And the more voters that show up at the polls, the better. Arguments for eliminating schools boards and their elected councils have long centred on the paltry turnout. In the French system, the participation rate was often in the single digits before Bill 40. But for English boards, it’s always hovered in the teens.

The more of us who cast ballots, the stronger the statement that we matter, that we don’t take our rights for granted and that we won’t allow them to be stripped away.

Article content

Article content