For several panicked days in early September, it looked as if LaSalle College in downtown Montreal was going to close for good as the Quebec government declared it bankrupt for temporarily teaching too many English-language students.
This was politically unusual. In the midst of any other provincial election, the major political parties would likely have rallied to support an institution of higher education that was dying, even indirectly, due to government punishment.
But Quebec, which will hold elections on October 5, is certainly unique.
In 2022, Quebec strengthened the province’s language charter, making French the sole language of communication between government and citizens and what the province calls “the common denominator in the public sphere.”
Private colleges in Montreal, such as LaSalle, and smaller ones, such as Marionopolis, required their graduates to take at least three courses in French, excluding courses in French language teaching. It also imposed a strict quota on the number of students taking courses in English to keep its share within the prescribed percentage of all college students set by law, varying in different cases from 11.7% to 18.7%.
But he did not propose any transition period before financial penalties would be imposed on violators. And it did not allow for any adjustments based on an unanticipated pandemic education program that artificially increased the number of students in short-term retraining and enrichment programs that lead to “college credentials,” less than a full degree.
This resulted in what LaSalle calls a temporary two-year “administrative imbalance” that has now been resolved, leaving the 2023-2024 quota 716 students over the quota and the following year 1,066 over. The government responded by imposing far more fines than LaSalle could afford to pay, and as the school year approached, the bill had to be paid.
“It was a nightmare,” said school CEO Claude Marchand. “Existential crisis.”
As a result, it did not close and, by court decision, continues to teach for another year. Classes, suspended for a busy week, finally began on September 8th. But from a legal point of view, the reckoning has only been postponed. The central issue remains, along with political curiosity, as the school tries to negotiate $30 million in punitive damages for its excessive English-language education.
Students, 3,000 of whom would have been left behind, gathered outside the school before the final court appearance with signs reading: “Learning is a right, save our education/our future” and “Laissez-nous étudier.”
“They are tied in knots,” said Mervi Garson, whose 20-year-old daughter is a second-year fashion design student at LaSalle.
Garzón is “furious” that she believes the provincial government is discriminating against linguistic minorities in ways that are “calculated” to close the college and is “actively trying to push out English speakers.”
“It’s uncomfortable to live in a place that is always sending you messages, in big and small ways, that you’re not welcome,” she said. “If you read a headline that says, ‘Government closes school for enrolling too many minority students,’ we Canadians would probably be shocked and wonder what kind of oppressive regime it is under to close that school.”
More than 400 employees faced the threat of unemployment. There was a contingency plan that would have seen almost all of them lose their jobs, leaving only a skeleton crew of 16 people.
And Marchant, who has run LaSalle for 18 years and whose family owns the private college founded on Rue Ste-Catherine in 1962, wondered whether the government would finally start answering his calls or responding to settlement proposals, of which there were a dozen.
At least they should do it now. On Sept. 4, Quebec Superior Court Judge Martin Castonguay ordered the province to pay back the school’s allocated subsidies, allowing the school year to continue. He also extended protections for the school’s creditors, ordering the parties to return to court later this month, just ahead of provincial elections in which the governing Avenir Québec coalition is closely contested.
There is only one lender – the province.
“We don’t understand it,” Marchand said. “We don’t understand that there has been no dialogue since day one… It’s really strange.”
The school’s website now says it has “found itself abandoned by the very organization it has partnered with for over 67 years,” the province.
Marchand said he accepts the quota system as democratically legitimate, but he is simply awaiting a transition period during which it can be respected.
“I won’t say that’s how I personally see the world, but I fully respect that a duly elected democratic government can act pretty much the way it wants,” he said.
Marchant said the school suddenly found itself in a dilemma, wanting to comply with the new law but being mindful of its responsibilities to students and seeking a compromise.
The school begins enrollment in early October, and by March 1, future students make a decision. But quota data won’t arrive until mid-February, which is “really late for Quebec students, but absolutely late for international students,” he said.
The first year quotas were actually lower than the school’s actual population because they were based on the highest numbers from the previous three years and seemed impossible to meet, he said.
While this was happening, Premier François Legault launched a pandemic recovery program that made LaSalle’s continuing education track, the Certification of College Learning, which is typically shorter than a diploma program, free for Quebecers.
The result is what the school calls “an administrative imbalance in the distribution of English-speaking students between our (College Certificate of Instruction) and (College Diploma of Instruction) programs.”
The school now has fewer English-medium students than ever and fewer students in diploma programmes, but because the number of English-medium classes exceeded the quota, they were fined and declared bankrupt.
In a statement, Quebec Higher Education Minister Martine Biron told the Montreal Gazette that discussions between the government and the school could continue through a court-supervised creditor protection process and that “any settlement proposal submitted by the college could be analyzed in due course and through the proper process.”
According to Marchant, the government did not provide any clarity and his messages went unanswered. He has told them since the start of 2021 that he needs a transition period, which is a common element of many new laws, with deferred application often explicitly written into court decisions overturning 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 was managing his own transition because, after the first two years of non-compliance, LaSalle was fully compliant with the quota system in the school year just passed, and will remain so this year.
So the province, at least, hasn’t added to school debt recently. But the historical debt is huge, and the total cost of the new law to the school was $50 million, more than enough to force it into compliance. Marchand said he accepts $20 million of that amount as manageable and fair, but the rest – two fines – he considers unfair. His hypothesis is that the government doubled down on the story it concocted to justify the original fine.
“LaSalle cannot be portrayed as an institution that threatens the French on the island of Montreal,” Marchand said. He supports the protection of the French language, “but I am against Lasalle being used for such petty political purposes.”
LaSalle College offers both diploma and certificate programs in animation, administration, hospitality, computer science, accounting, real estate and others.
It has a particularly rich history of training workers in Montreal’s robust fashion and clothing retail industries.
For example, in 2019, shoe company Aldo Group supported a footwear design course at LaSalle, which just this month expanded into a Footwear and Accessories Design specialization in its fashion degree program.
When former Governor General 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 as a fashion designer at LaSalle.
The school is privately owned by Marchand and his family. His father Jacques was the founding academic dean, led the school for 40 years and now serves on the board of directors.
The separate campus in Laval has grown internationally through study abroad programs.
Our site is the place for breaking news, exclusive news, long reads and provocative commentary. Bookmark nationalpost.com and subscribe to our newsletter here.