Quebec’s education minister criticizes college’s English-only Montreal campus

Quebec’s education minister is taking aim at an eastern Quebec-based college offering English-only classes to foreign students at its Montreal campus.

Jean-Francois Roberge says he wants the Cegep de la Gaspesie et des Iles to have a bilingual website and to offer French classes at the campus, which caters to international students who come mostly from China and India.

A group dedicated to promoting the French language has called on Roberge to act to limit new English-only college programs, claiming they contribute to the erosion of the French language.

The school’s website says the Montreal campus opened in 2015 with 35 students, and had grown to more than 2,000 international students by last September.

While the school’s other campuses teach primarily in French, the Montreal campus only offers English classes.

Roberge said today he’s confident he’ll reach an agreement with the college to address the issues, beginning with the Montreal campus’s unilingual English website.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 4, 2020.

The Canadian Press