Following a meeting with Education Minister Jean-Francois Roberge and other community groups and school boards, the different camps came away with different messages, as they discussed the abolition of school boards and their elections.
"Everybody left the room feeling encouraged about the possibility of the dialogue being candid and open and constructive. So that was Friday afternoon," said President of Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN) Geoffrey Chambers. "Saturday morning, the minister was tweeting out 'but I'm not giving up on this eliminating the electoral process.'"
But Laval MNA and the CAQ's representative for English issues, Christopher Skeete, said the school boards should not be surprised by the minister's tweet because he was present at the meeting.
"For having been at the table, I can say our position was always clear," Skeete said. "The reality was we were very firm on our desires to abolish school board elections."
What's more, the CAQ plan is to not only get rid of those elections, they also want to turn Quebec's 72 school boards, nine of which are English, into service centres.
Chambers said this would be a shallow change on the surface and is confident that the make-up of the service centres would need to follow the law.
"The fundamental characteristics is that it has to be elected, it has to have independent financing, it has to be responsive to community input, and those are factors we're pretty sure the courts would guarantee," Chambers said.
Skeete said school board elections will be abolished anyway, but the government is open to discussing the future of school boards with the community.
"What we promised is that we would do consultations with the community, we would reach out," Skeete said.