Both Premier Blaine Higgs and newly independent MLA Dominic Cardy say a disagreement over how best to proceed with French second language education reforms is the primary reason the former education minister left cabinet.
The pair were united in their belief that changes were needed to be made in order to ensure that all graduates from the Anglophone school system can speak French at a conversational level and that the immersion program was no longer working as intended.
Where they diverged was how soon reforms could be fully implemented and over the full elimination of the immersion program.
In a resignation letter addressed to the premier, Cardy wrote that the change to French second-language education “requires care, not a wrecking ball” and claimed Higgs was intent on fully eliminating the immersion program by September 2023.
“It just seemed like it came down to with the premier an ideological issue divorced from evidence, divorced from any policy prescription, just the desire to see (the French immersion) program gone, which is, again, not evidence based,” Cardy said in the letter.
Higgs offered a different perspective when speaking with reporters on Thursday, saying Cardy was failing to make progress on a replacement French language program for all incoming Anglophone students. He said Cardy wanted to implement the program in 2024, an election year, which would make it harder to ensure the reforms stick around for the long term.
“The goal was to actually have a French program for all students coming in and yes, it was to do it by next fall and then it got moved,” Higgs said. “We all know in an election year, if you think you’re going to implement something significant, it’s not going to happen. It just won’t happen.”
“We’ve had this on the docket for three or four years now, so how do we do this and have a year before an election?”
In turn, Cardy said the premier was attempting to push forward established targets and deadlines within the department of education that had already been approved by cabinet. Rushing through the reforms, he argued, would be the best way to ensure they were scrapped after the next change in government.
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“We had a carefully designed timeline, designed to take into account the needs of teachers and everybody else to be properly prepared running up against political interference with the premier saying, ‘I want this program to be ended next year,’ not with any clear ideas of what he wanted it replaced with,” Cardy said.
“No one in the department, myself included, were ever really able to get to grips with what he wanted, except in the end it seemed to come down to wanting a lot less French instruction for Anglophone students.”
A key plank of the Progressive Conservative’s 2018 platform was a promise to develop a program to ensure all students could graduate conversationally bilingual. In early 2020, Cardy announced that several schools would begin testing pilot French second language programs that, if successful, could replace French immersion.
“We’ve got a number of programs offered in the Anglophone sector, and those programs haven’t delivered on their goal, which is making sure we have a bilingual province,” he told Global News in January 2020.
A report on second language learning from provincial court Judge Yvette Finn and former deputy education minister John McLaughlin earlier this year suggested scrapping French immersion, saying the province had to radically change its approach to ensure more of the province is bilingual.
“Unless all New Brunswickers develop a comfort level in understanding and communicating in both English and French, we will be a bilingual province in name only,” the report said.
Cardy said the pilot second language programs were proving successful and continuing to expand to more schools and were on track for province-wide implementation in September 2024. He claims the premier was presented with a binder of data showing the program’s success at a recent meeting, then yelling “data my ass” at a senior civil servant.
“He had a binder of information on all of the indicatives … where we’ve already made changes, already seeing results. There was no interest in discussing that, the only focus was on ending immersion,” Cardy said.
The premier doesn’t dispute yelling “data my ass,” but said that’s because the data he was presented with was irrelevant to the immersion program, which is what he wanted to talk about at the meeting.
“The numbers did not reflect any real value in information that we were trying to understand: Are we getting better? Are we implementing the program?” Higgs said.
“I’ve been talking about our inability to speak both languages and the French immersion program only graduating 30 per cent or less of our kids bilingual. I’ve been talking about that forever.”
The pair were united in their goal to offer high-quality French second language education to all Anglophone kids. But, Cardy said he doesn’t believe fully eliminating the immersion program would be a good idea, wanting to ensure that Anglophone New Brunswickers have access to in-depth French instruction if they want it.
“This was a goal I shared with the premier, to make sure New Brunswick’s Anglophone students had the ability to converse in French,” he said.
“That never meant, though, that you wouldn’t also have the ability, if you were a high school student, to take a course in French literature or other courses in French or (if) you wanted to go to a French university, the same way that we offer personalized education (to those) who want to pursue robotics or anything else. Why do we single out and politicize language instruction?”
With Cardy gone, Higgs said his intent is to see French immersion replaced by the beginning of the next school year. That task will fall to new education minister Bill Hogan, a former educator who is also bilingual.
Speaking to reporters after being sworn into cabinet on Thursday, Hogan said he hasn’t spoken to the premier about his expectations in the role. But he said he shares concerns over the current immersion program.
“French immersion is an excellent program. It works really well for a small group of students and I think that’s where the problem lies,” he said.
“It creates streaming … which creates a number of offshoot issues.”
Those issues include an unsuitable learning environment for some, with frequent classroom disruptions from some students, Hogan said. Ultimately, his goal will be the same that united Cardy and Higgs over the last four years: increasing the number of bilingual graduates in the province.
“We want to try to see if there’s a program that will help out children learn how to speak French at a conversational level across the board.”
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