The book industry is concerned about the reform of the budget rules for school service centres announced by the Minister of Education, Sonia LeBel. It promises to ease the bureaucratic burden surrounding a series of budget rules, but those in the book industry fear that this easing will open the door to a worsening of the sharp decline in book purchases by primary and secondary institutions in 2025.
There are currently 261 budget envelopes from which school service centres (CSS) and school boards draw, and this number will increase to 37 through the merger of many envelopes. This will give institutions much more leeway in allocating the money they receive from the government.
The measure that worries the book industry is the grouping of eight envelopes into a new category called “Sports, cultural and social activities.” Until now, a protected envelope was dedicated to the purchase of books. For any purchase, the institution paid a third of the book and the government the remaining two-thirds. Quebec was providing $16 million for this program and the CSS was to provide $8 million. It is also this envelope that provided $300 to each teacher at the beginning of the school year to buy books for his or her classroom, a measure of $11.6 million. In all cases, these books had to come from an approved bookstore.
A first blow in 2025
However, by amalgamating the eight envelopes, each CSS will have full autonomy to spend the money in it, so not necessarily to buy books. However, the community had already suffered a first blow last year following an announcement of budget cuts by the then Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville. The Gaspard 2025 report, published by the Banque de titres de langue française, shows an 11.9 per cent drop in purchases by libraries and schools, which represents about 250,000 fewer children’s books, especially in schools, compared to the previous year, according to the Association des libraires du Québec (ALQ).
“What we were already worried about at the beginning is that the Ministry of Education had announced budget cuts last year on the last day of classes. This has caused uncertainty in the CSS and in schools and a sharp drop in purchases,” says the president of the ALQ, Laurence Monet.
Referring to a survey by the Association for the Promotion of School Documentary Services, she said that the Association found that no one really knew how to deal with this first announcement of cuts. “There were school service centres where it had dropped by 70 per cent, others that had not decreased, high schools that had cut book purchases by 100 per cent. There is a lack of understanding of the measures as to whether or not they have the right to use the budgets booked.”
Competing with sport?
While she welcomes the desire to reduce bureaucracy, the ALQ president fears that this reduction will be even worse. “When you merge envelopes like the book envelope, that’s when it really jeopardizes the entire book chain, whether it’s bookstores, publishers, authors, the chain of creators, distributors, and that’s not to mention the harmful effects on the training of future citizens. Being in direct competition with other expenses such as sport makes no sense. Sport is necessary, but books are the basis of learning. It’s not an optional expense.”
One of the problems with the measures to encourage the purchase of books is that none of them require HSCs and schools to do so. The incentive to pay two-thirds of the cost of a book, on the other hand, forces institutions to spend the other third. In other words, if they are asked to reduce their spending, why would they add an expense to buy books if they do not have to?
Call to Fréchette and Drainville
The idea of forcing educational institutions to use money intended for the purchase of books “is something that we would like to push further as well,” admits Monet. Obviously, it becomes difficult if the envelopes are merged with others. But what we really want is for our envelope to remain intact, for there to be no envelope merger, for Christine Fréchette and Bernard Drainville to take a position on the issue and commit to protecting budgets for reading in schools.”
The ALQ has sent three letters to the Minister of Education since the beginning of the year, two of which were signed by a large number of players in the book industry, but has not received any response to date.
Minister LeBel’s office, however, responded to The Canadian Press with a rather laconic missive that postpones the question of budgets for the purchase of books to a later date: “The budget rules will be tabled in the coming weeks with the network’s partners,” we were told.
The only substitute for screens
After reaffirming that the educational success of students remains its priority, the Minister’s office adds that “school organizations must make the appropriate choices according to their environment. The government will always give clear directions and objectives to achieve, that will not change. Managers will be accountable for achieving these objectives and for the decisions they make.”
For Laurence Monet, however, the Ministry of Education must go much further than that, otherwise it risks failing one of its other stated priorities, she says: “We have a ministry here that claims to protect French and fight screens. If we remove the only tool that allows us to succeed in these two missions, which is the book, it doesn’t work.”
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
