MONTREAL — In April 2025, Superior Court judge Éric Dufour ruled against the government of Quebec’s massive tuition fee increase for out-of-province students at McGill and Concordia universities. Despite being couched in 82 pages of legalese, Dufour’s feelings about the hike were clear: there is no data or proof to back up the Quebec government’s claim that English institutions threatened the prevalence of the French language in the province.

Dufour went further still. The provincial government also claimed that, once graduated, out-of-province students leave Quebec en masse. Such a claim, Dufour ruled, wasn’t true. As such, the decision to inflict higher tuition fees on these students was “unreasonable,” a word that appears 24 times in the decision.

The government chose not to appeal—a sign, some hoped, that it had come to its senses. Collectively, Montreal universities are responsible for over $26 billion in added GDP for the city every year. Surely Quebec doesn’t want to kneecap two of its biggest and best in the name of petty linguistic policies?

Apparently it does. In January, the provincial government released its revised formula for university funding—and the 33 per cent hikes for out-of-province students, namely those applying to McGill and Concordia, remain very much in effect.

It took some bureaucratic sleight of hand to keep the hike despite the unequivocal Superior Court ruling. Under the old rules, only those out-of-province students who went to a French-speaking university could benefit from non-inflated tuition rates. This stipulation has been removed from the new rules. Instead, lower tuition rates apply to those students whose schooling is 75 per cent French, thereby continuing to target McGill and Concordia without naming them. The province’s higher education ministry declared itself satisfied with this loophole and the blinkered status quo prevailed, withering Superior Court decision be damned.

It’s worth examining the extent to which the regulation has gutted the two institutions. At Concordia, Canadian out-of-province student registrations fell nearly 30 per between fall 2023 and fall 2024, when the regulations took effect. Revenues began declining for the first time in its history, necessitating a 7.2 per cent budget cut across all sectors of the already cash-strapped university. 

At McGill, which saw an 8.4 per cent decrease in undergraduate applicants between 2023 and 2024. In June 2025, McGill cited tuition fee increases, anticipated provincial funding cuts and a reduction in immigrant student permits as the main reasons behind a $45-million budget correction. The university has implemented a hiring freeze and culled dozens of jobs.

Why exactly is the Quebec government doing this? In a word, politics. It’s no coincidence that the governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) instituted the increases in the wake of a bruising 2023 byelection loss to a resurgent Parti Québécois. In these parts, scapegoating historically English-speaking institutions is a commonplace reaction for nationalist parties in trying times. 

For the CAQ—de facto leaderless, floundering in the polls, and with a fall election on the horizon—this reaction has hardened into a mantra. In January 2024, a government advisory committee recommended the tuition increases be scrapped, saying they negatively affected “the accessibility, diversity and the appeal of Quebec’s education institutions.” The recommendation was duly ignored. 

More recently, the provincial government has set fire to its economic immigration program, further hamstringing all Quebec universities and their would-be applicants from abroad. The resulting instability, according to a 2025 McGill memo, “has an impact on Quebec’s reputation as a study destination.” For the Quebec government, this is seemingly a feature, not a bug.

There’s a final bit of tragedy in all of this. The government pitched the tuition hikes as a way to bolster the bottom lines of the province’s French universities. Despite this, nearly every major French university came out against the hikes for the same, plainly obvious reasons: they hamper access to education in the province, and threaten the financial well-being of the very institutions that provide it. 

Against a chorus of criticism, and despite being ruled against by its own Superior Court, the Quebec government’s dogged pursuit of this policy is a further reminder that, despite progress, anachronistic battles of the tongue continue to haunt the province to this day.

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panellist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”