There's a report suggesting that nearly half of university buildings in Quebec are in bad shape — with some in such bad shape that urgent repairs are needed.
Radio-Canada has obtained a Quebec government report suggesting fully 40 per cent of buildings on the province's university campus are falling apart.
Montreal's McGill University is at the top of the dubious list, with 73 per cent of its buildings listed as being in poor or very poor shape. At Concordia University and the Université de Montréal, at least 60 per cent of their buildings are in a similar state of disrepair.
The province estimates repairing the buildings would cost at least $1.5 billion — but university officials say a lot more maintenance money is needed.
Morty Yalovsky, the interim vice-principal at McGill, suggests the school has been trying to invest in maintenance for about a decade, but that it hasn't been enough.
"You've got to remember that with the exception of about five buildings which were built within the last 15 years, the next group of buildings that we have were built about 50 years ago, and we have still quite a few buildings that were built around the turn of the century and even in the [19th] century," he says.
He says Quebec needs to put more money toward building maintenance — over the last 10 years, Yalovsky says $1 billion was put into maintenance for universities across the province over a 10-year period beginning in 2005.
Yalovsky says more than $1 billion would be needed just to fix McGill.
-Andrew Brennan contributed to this report.