Bill 96: Dawson language professors worry they will lose their jobs

Professors at Dawson College’s languages department say they might be out of a job come fall because of Quebec’s French-language law Bill 96.

Students at English CEGEPs in the province are now required to take additional courses taught in French. But foreign-language courses do not meet the requirements to be considered a course “taught in French.”

That’s leaving them at risk of being cut from the list of courses offered in English CEGEPs.

“We’re all at a level of just being constantly overwhelmed,” said Christina Chough, a Spanish teacher and the Chair of the modern languages department at Dawson.

The implementation of the province’s language law means English CEGEP students will have to take a minimum of three courses taught in French – two of which will come from a student’s elective courses.

READ MORE: ‘Unrealistic’ timeline given to English CEGEP for Bill 96 changes

With modern languages not satisfying the French requirements of the Ministry of Education, Chough and the 14 others who are part of the department at Dawson fear the worst.

“We teach about 2,000 students a year in complementary classes,” said Chough. “If we only have access to 1,000 of those students, we would see a huge impact in jobs, in availability of work. But if no courses are going to be offered in modern languages, we lose those other thousand seats.

“So essentially, we don’t have enough work to even staff our tenured teachers, let alone all the part-time teachers that we have.”

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The new law also limits the number of students English CEGEPs can accept, and requires CEGEPs to prioritize students who were eligible to attend English elementary schools and high schools.

“There’s been a lack of consultation and a lack of transparency and a lack of analysis of the impact on students and teachers and the consequence of that is a lot of anxiety and uncertainty and stress among teachers here at Dawson and elsewhere,” said Louisa Hadley, the president of the Dawson Teachers’ Union and a teacher at the college for 13 years.

Hadley and Chough say with very little guidance and information on how the implementation of the new French language law will be carried out, it leaves many unsure of what the new school year will look like.

“There’s no long-term plan for its implementation, which is making this extremely messy and anxiety-producing for students, teachers, parents – anyone who’s trying to seek out higher education,” said Chough.

WATCH: How Bill 96 will affect English-speakers in Quebec in 2023?

The implementation of Quebec’s new language law will severely impact English CEGEPs and the education offered to students, Chough believes.

“It really does create this sort of two-tiered educational system, whereby francophone students have access to all the courses that were initially created for the CEGEP systems and anglophone students no longer have that,” she said.