How Quebec Abandoned Adult Literacy
How Quebec Abandoned Adult Literacy
Over the past 10 years, government cuts have all but gutted a popular community learning centres. Facing imminent closure of their educational programs, communities are rising up.
By Savannah Stewart
“What I love about the Carrefour is that you learn about listening to others, and respecting others. And I think this is something that we have to learn from. There would be less wars if people would learn that,” says Eunice Sosa.
“I don’t have to go to the psychologist. It doesn’t cost me a penny–just by going to the Carrefour, I learned to be a better person.”
She’s talking about the Carrefour d’éducation populaire de Pointe-Saint-Charles, one of six popular education centres (CEPs) in Montreal. They are free centres providing educational programming, community activities, or just a place to chat with others and use a computer.
Sosa, a widowed retiree living in a seniors home in Pointe-Saint-Charles, was invited to a Women’s Day event at the Carrefour in 2014.
“I never saw, like I did at the Carrefour, people who really believe in what they're doing. Doing it with their heart. I was really, really impressed,” she says.
She started taking computer classes at the Carrefour and going to some of the many summer events they offered, like art classes or dancing. She often lended a hand, and she says was struck by the dedication of the people working there.
When she was asked to join the Carrefour’s board of directors, mostly made up of people who access the services and therefore are invested in its success, she agreed.
“For many, it's like a second home.They can drink a hot coffee, hot chocolate, the staff helps them. People talk to them and they talk among themselves, and even if they live in a very tiny place and they're financially limited, they have a place where they are respected.”
The Carrefour has been around for 50 years, the last 10 made rocky by austerity and government cuts. But now it along with the five other CEPs in the city are facing their greatest threat yet.
Starting today, July 1, the six CEPs have to pay rent for the first time in their existence. And for centres that provide only free programming, that often serve the most vulnerable in their communities, that added burden is too much to bear.
The centres decided not to pay.
At the Carrefour, workers and community members woke up this morning after spending the night occupying the building. They kicked the day off with a brunch and a town hall meeting about the status of the fight.
“The Carrefour is starting a rent strike,” says Lily Schwarzbaum, the Carrefour’s receptionist and a member of the board of directors. “We are technically supposed to start paying rent, we cannot pay rent, and we are also not leaving the Carrefour and we're not going to cut our services.”
How we got here
“It started with a group of adults 50 years ago who made their own popular education literacy program, and were at first operating out of the basement of the church,” explains Schwarzbaum.
She’s at her post at the Carrefour’s front desk when she’s explaining this to me over the phone. The Carrefour is on Centre Street in Pointe-Saint-Charles, in an old building that was once a school. When the school closed, the group that eventually became the Carrefour asked the Commission scolaire de Montréal (CSDM) if they could use the vacant building.
“The CSDM offered to welcome this group into their building, and actually integrated the Carrefour into their mission because we do adult education.”
The CSDM found that Carrefour's mission to provide literacy courses for adults reflected its own. Five other organizations offering literacy courses or other educational services for adults also made similar arrangements with the school board.
Roughly 53 per cent of Quebec adults are functionally illiterate. In other words, they may have some reading and writing abilities but not enough to hold down a job where they’d be expected to function beyond a basic level. Only Newfoundland (56 per cent) has a higher functional illiteracy rate than Quebec. Experts warn that in an increasingly tech-driven economy, hundreds of thousands of Quebecers will be left behind.
But rather than investing in popular education, subsequent governments have cut spending and exacerbated the problem.
“For the majority of our 50 years of existence, we have not only been a part of the Commission scolaire, but they also sponsored us, they contributed financially to our mission,” she says. “And then 10 years ago, they announced that they would no longer be giving us a subsidy.”
That was $50,000 cut out of the centre’s budget, just at a time when, after 50 years, the building was in need of renovations.
“And since then, it's been a ten-year struggle to stay in the building,” says Schwarzbaum.
In 2017 the CSDM, the provincial government and the six CEPs negotiated the current leases for their buildings.
Schwarzbaum explains what the Carrefour and other CEPs left the negotiations believing they had agreed to: “We would sign a lease based on at that time the current conditions, which meant we would not pay for rent. We respect the function of the buildings. And if we had this lease, that the government would provide the finances necessary to do renovations on the buildings.”
But the contracts the CEPs were presented with asked for rent to be paid starting 2022.
“We have never been financed to pay rent. And the amount that we would be owing would require us to cut most of our services.”
The six centres discussed this change at length, trying to determine the best course of action. They knew right then they would not be able to pay that rent.
“We went around to all the different government offices to ask what should we do and they said, ‘Sign it, it'll give you security, and we'll find a solution.’”
And so with the hope that a solution would be found to allow them to keep offering their services in their respective buildings before the requirement to pay rent would kick in, they signed. Five years later, no solution.
“We wanted to stay in our building, we wanted to respect the game, even though we knew that it was a losing game for us,” says Schwarzbaum. “And now we are technically supposed to start paying the rent that everyone in this whole situation knew that we do not have the money to pay.
We are already deeply underfinanced even to just provide the activities that we are already struggling to provide.”
The politics
In those five years, the six CEPs — the Carrefour, the Comité d'éducation aux adultes de la Petite-Bourgogne et de Saint-Henri, the Comité social Centre-Sud, the Pavillon d'éducation communautaire Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, the Ateliers d’éducation populaire du Plateau, and the Centre éducatif communautaire René-Goupil — have banded together as InterCEP.
The group has talked to the borough, to the city, to members of the National Assembly, looking for allies.
François Legault’s CAQ government abolished school boards in 2020. The CSDM became the Centre de services scolaire de Montréal (CSSDM), an administrative body of the Ministry of Education. So, they are expected to receive funding for renovations from the Ministry, while also paying the Ministry for rent.
When the CSSDM was asked about this situation, it pointed to the contracts.
“We have six surplus buildings that house these popular education centres (CEPs). These organizations have benefited from 40 years of free access. They occupied our buildings without paying rent,” reads a statement from a spokesperson of the CSSDM.
“In 2017, the former Minister of Education, Sébastien Proulx, proposed an agreement to renew leases with the six CEPs. This agreement was accepted by both parties at the time. The Centre de services scolaire de Montréal (CSSDM) is only enforcing signed leases.”
The statement goes on to note that the CSSDM collaborated with the popular education centres for decades to provide their services “for which we receive no funding.”
“We believe in their role in the communities and, as evidenced by our many partnerships, we do everything necessary to sustain our ties with them.”
However, Schwarzbaum contends that the austerity measures and cuts to funding in the last 10 years have made it harder for CEPs and other social services to fulfill their roles in their communities.
“The situation is quite distressful,” she says. “The fact that the government doesn't have enough money to respond to their needs and therefore have been kicking out community organizations is a symbol of how bad it's gotten on a provincial scale, how austerity has impacted public services to the point where we have to fight each other instead of looking at the big picture.
“I don't think that they can easily brush off the impact that that has on all of these communities across Montreal.”
One of the most frustrating aspects of the five years of discussions since the 2017 agreement has been the staff turnover at the Ministry of Education, Schwarzbaum notes.
“We keep on having to restart from zero, explaining the situation of the CEPs, and it’s easy for them to keep passing the buck.”
InterCEP has four demands of the provincial government: that it provide sustainable, long term funding covering rent and utilities for all CEPs, that it provide the funding necessary for all renovations, that it respect the autonomy of the CEPs to determine their programming for themselves, and that it correct a funding injustice that saw some funding go to four of the six CEPs.
Now that July 1 has arrived, the fight has reached a new level of urgency.
A life-saving service
“I think the work we do, I think we really help the government,” says Sosa. “The population does better thanks to the work that is done in all these CEPs, working with all those people that are in need.”
“That's why I committed myself to helping.”
She says she honestly believes that if the Carrefour had to close, the people who use its services would see a drastic decline in their physical and mental health.
Schwarzbaum agrees.
When I ask what would happen if the Carrefour had to close, she replies: “A lot of these people will slip back between the cracks.”
“People who fall between the cracks have real issues, real isolation. It impacts your health, it impacts your life, your choice to continue living,” she says. “There would be a really devastating, devastating state of affairs.”
Sosa says that the instability of the last 10 years has prevented them from doing long term planning, as they struggle to simply remain open.
“We never know from year to year. All we wanted is to have a three-year commitment, so we can make plans, etcetera. I love–”
I hear her voice break as she begins to cry.
“I’m really sorry, I become emotional because I know what injustice is,” she says. Her family had suffered when they lived in Cuba, she tells me.
“I know human beings can be good, can be bad, and I appreciate when I see positive input, and giving back to the world. If I cry it is from happiness, because I think it's beautiful.”
With today’s act of protest, the fight — Schwarzbaum says — isn’t over. It’s just beginning.
“Evicting the popular education centres would be a huge blow to the social security and strength of each of these neighborhoods,” said Schwarzbaum. “And it's not something that's going to happen anyway, because we're not going to quit. We've been fighting this fight for 10 years and it's certainly not going to end now.”