Last week, Quebec school administrators informed thousands of students with disabilities that they would be experiencing a ‘break in services’ until Nov. 2026. Those breaks, the result of funding and staffing shortages that made accessibility programming reportedly infeasible, entail reduced schedules, removal from classes, and in some instances, being forced entirely into home learning. 

In June 2025, Quebec’s education ministry, at the time led by Bernard Drainville, imposed a $570 million CAD cut on lower-education institutions. Following public outcry over the budget cuts, the province later introduced a revised budgetary envelope reinstating $540 million CAD. However, the vast majority of its funds were earmarked to prevent schools from running deficits as a strategy to accumulate funding to cover critical student services, leaving schools with little flexibility to respond to accessibility needs. As reduced funding and stricter guidelines compound upon government-mandated changes to in-school policies, the result is a system in which decision-making has shifted away from the hands of educators and support staff on the ground—all to the detriment of students with disabilities. 

With budget cuts rising, the number of students with disabilities experiencing a break in services—3,417 students in 2025—will only continue to climb. As a result, families and communities are forced to take on the duty of homeschooling their children or outsource their educational needs to the private sector. 

Relying on families to take time away from their jobs to act as their children’s educators not only poses risks to the quality of education received by students with disabilities but also fails to fill the critical role schools play in child development. Schools are sites of socialization, interaction with other students, physical education, and civic training. Support staff may provide speech therapy, psychological assessments, and occupational therapy, roles that untrained family members cannot replace at home.

Breaks in services also deepen long-term inequities for students with disabilities. Extended absences from school make reentry into educational spaces more difficult, and for those fortunate enough not to have been forced to leave school, insufficient programming under tightened budgets still poses immense risks, such as exclusion from academics and extracurriculars, higher rates of suspension and expulsion, and lower graduation rates. 

Inequities produced by a budget design that neglects students with disabilities do not simply disappear as students reach the post-secondary level. Instead, these gaps heighten universities’ responsibility to invest in robust systems that treat accessibility as foundational to education. 

In June 2025, the Quebec government maintained its 33 per cent tuition hike for out-of-province and international students in the higher education system, despite a Superior Court ruling requiring the province to abandon this tuition structure. For institutions like McGill, increasing barriers to entry for students from outside Quebec have deepened financial deficits, leading to severe staff and budget cuts.

Laying off nearly 100 faculty and staff in March 2025 and cutting 25 varsity and club sports programs in December, McGill has taken drastic action to address its budget deficit—reductions the university cannot sustain. While provincial policy has created substantial financial pressures, McGill has a responsibility to ensure that accessibility and student well-being are not treated as expendable in the face of tuition hikes and declining international student enrollment. 

With McGill’s Student Accessibility and Achievement Centre requiring a doctor’s note to receive accommodations and remaining infamous for its unprofessional treatment of students, the same accessibility failures seen in Quebec’s primary and secondary school system are reproduced at the university level. 

When institutions like McGill offer insufficient or inaccessible support, these failures cannot be dismissed as mere byproducts of provincial underfunding. Rather, McGill’s failure to counteract the barriers created by provincial policy constitutes institutional negligence. 

Accessibility must not be contingent on documentation nor rationed through administrative scarcity; it should be enshrined as a fundamental component of students with disabilities’ right to education. Provincial underfunding does not absolve McGill of responsibility—it heightens it.