Fined into bankruptcy: the small Montreal college at the forefront of the language battle

For a panicked few days in early September, it looked like LaSalle College in downtown Montreal was going to close for good, forced into bankruptcy by the Quebec government for temporarily teaching too many students in English.

It was politically unusual. In the middle of any other provincial election, campaigning political parties would likely rally to support an institute of higher education that was dying, even indirectly, because of government punishment.

But Quebec, which goes to the polls Oct. 5, is determinedly unique.

In 2022, Quebec strengthened the province’s language charter to make French the sole language for communication between the government and citizens, and what the province calls “a common denominator in the public sphere.”

For private Montreal colleges like LaSalle, and smaller ones like Marionopolis, it required their graduating students to have at least three courses taught in French, excluding courses in French language instruction. It also put a strict quota on the number of students taking courses in English, to keep that under a set proportion of all college students, specified in law and varying in different cases between 11.7 per cent and 18.7 per cent.

But it offered no transition period before financial penalties would be imposed on violators. And it allowed no adjustment based on an unanticipated pandemic relief education program that artificially boosted the number of students in the short term retraining and skills development programs that lead to “Attestation of College Studies,” a lesser degree than a full diploma.

This led to what LaSalle calls a temporary, two-year “administrative imbalance,” now resolved, by which it exceeded the 2023-24 quota by 716 students, and the next year’s by 1,066. In response, the government levied far more in fines than LaSalle could afford to pay, and with the academic year about to start, the bill was due.

“It was a nightmare,” said the school’s director general Claude Marchand. “An existential crisis.”

In the end it did not close, and by court order it survives to teach another year. Classes, suspended for a tense week, finally started on Sept. 8. But legally, the reckoning has only been delayed. The central problem remains, along with the political curiosity, as the school tries to bargain its way out of $30 million in punitive fines for excessive anglophone education.

Students, 3,000 of whom would have been left in the lurch, rallied at the school in advance of a last-ditch court appearance, with signs declaring “Studying is a right, save our education/our future” and “Laissez-nous étudier.”

“They’re tied up in knots,” said Merwie Garzon, whose 20-year-old daughter is a second-year student of fashion design at LaSalle.

Garzon is “furious” at what she sees as a provincial government discriminating against a linguistic minority in ways that are “calculated” to bring about the closure of the college, and “actively trying to drive out anglophones.”

“It’s uncomfortable to live in a place that is always sending you messages, in big ways and small ways, that you are not welcome,” she said. “If you read a headline that stated ‘Government Shuts Down School For Accepting Too Many Minority Students,’ we as Canadians would probably be shocked and wonder in what oppressive regime this school is being shut down.”

More than 400 employees faced impending unemployment. There was a contingency plan that would have seen almost all of them lose their jobs, keeping only a skeleton team of 16.

And Marchand, who has run LaSalle for 18 years and whose family owns this private college founded on Sainte-Catherine St. in 1962, wondered whether the government would finally start returning his calls, or responding to settlement offers, of which there have been a full dozen.

Now, at least, they have to. On Sept. 4, Quebec Superior Court Justice Martin Castonguay ordered the province to pay the school its allocated subsidies, which allows the year of classes to go ahead. He also extended the school’s creditor protection, ordering the parties back to court later this month, just before the provincial election, in which the governing Coalition Avenir Québec is in a tight race.

There is only one creditor, the province.

“We don’t get it,” Marchand said. “We don’t get that there was no dialogue from day one…. It’s really strange.”

The school’s website now declares it “finds itself abandoned by the very organization with which it has collaborated for more than 67 years,” the province.

Marchand said he accepts the quota system as democratically legitimate, he just expected a period of transition within which to comply.

“I will not say that personally that’s my vision of the world, but I perfectly respect that a duly elected democratic government can act pretty much however they want,” he said.

As Marchand describes it, the school was abruptly in a dilemma, wishing to comply with the new law, but mindful of its duties to its students, seeking a compromise.

The school starts recruiting in early October, and by March 1 prospective students make their decisions. But the quota numbers arrive in mid-February, which is “really late to the game for Quebecer students, but absolutely late to the game for international students,” he said.

The first year quotas were in fact lower than the school’s actual population, he said, because they were based on the highest numbers of the previous three years, and it seemed impossible to comply.

As this was happening, then Premier Francois Legault launched a pandemic recovery program that made tuition free for Quebecers in LaSalle’s continuing education “Attestation of College Studies” stream, typically shorter than a diploma program.

The effect was what the school calls “an administrative imbalance in the distribution of English-speaking students between our (Attestation of College Studies) and (Diploma of College Studies) programs.”

The school now has fewer students studying in English than they have ever had, and fewer in their diploma programs, but because their anglophone class numbers exceeded the quota, they are being fined into bankruptcy.

In a statement, Quebec’s Minister of Higher Education, Martine Biron, told the Montreal Gazette that discussions between the government and school can continue through the court-monitored creditor protection process, and that “any settlement proposal submitted by the college can be analyzed in due course and through the proper process.”

The government offered no clarity, Marchand said, and his messages went unanswered. From the beginning in 2021, he told them he needed a transition period, which is a common element of many new laws, and a delay of application is often explicitly written into legal judgments that overturn old laws.

Instead, the school was fined $8,781,740 on June 28, 2024, and $21,113,864 on June 30, 2025.

In a sense, Marchand managed his own transition period, because after those first two years of non-compliance, LaSalle was fully compliant with the quota system in the school year just passed, and will be so this year too.

So the province has at least not recently added to the school’s debt. But the historical debt is crippling, and the total impact of the new law on the school was $50 million, more than enough to put it under. Marchand said he accepts $20 million of that debt as manageable and fair, but the rest — the two fines — he sees as unfair. His hypothesis is that the government doubled down on a narrative it invented to justify the initial fine.

“LaSalle cannot be depicted as the institution threatening French on the island of Montreal,” Marchand said. He supports protecting the French language, “but I refuse that Lasalle be instrumentalized for small politics like that.”

LaSalle College offers both diploma and certificate programs in animation, administration, hospitality, computer science, accounting, real estate and others.

It has an especially rich history educating workers in Montreal’s robust fashion and retail clothing industry.

In 2019, for example, the shoe company Aldo Group backed a shoe design course at LaSalle, which just this month has grown into the “Footwear and Accessory Design” specialization in its fashion diploma program.

When former Gov. Gen. Mary Simon was sworn in, in 2021, she wore a dress and jacket designed by Victoria Okpik of Nunavik, the first Inuk woman to graduate in fashion design at LaSalle.

The school is privately owned by Marchand and his family. His father Jacques was founding academic dean, ran the school for 40 years, and now sits on the board.

A separate campus in Laval has grown internationally with study abroad programs.