No paid internships in the civil service, confirms Minister Déry

Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry confirmed on Tuesday that she will not move forward with paid internships in the civil service, even though she has already spoken out in favor of it.

This is what she stated Tuesday morning in the National Assembly, in response to questions from PQ MP Catherine Gentilcore and Liberal MP Michelle Setlakwe during the study of higher education credits.

"We made choices, it's true that I intended to pay for internships," Minister Déry acknowledged from the outset.

"We won't be paying them, I won't be arriving in the fall with paid internships," she continued. "Everyone knows very well that we made necessary choices, we came to substantially improve the collective agreements."

Graduates in health and education will also be able to benefit from salary increases and improved working conditions in these two "unloved" sectors, argued the minister, who had supported a unanimous motion in favor of paying internships in the public sector in March 2023.

However, last fall, Le Devoir reported that Minister Déry and her colleague at Education, Bernard Drainville, had opened the door to remuneration for the last teaching internship, well after the signing of collective agreements with teachers in early 2024.

CEGEP students on strike for internships

Student associations also denounced the lack of funding for paid internships when the provincial budget was tabled at the end of March.

A few days later, in early April, approximately 25,000 CEGEP students went on strike to demand that the Legault government reinvest the $250 million linked to the premature end of the Perspectives scholarship program in the form of financial compensation for students on internships.

According to student associations, 84% of students are not paid during their work-based training in the public sector.

The remuneration of internships in these fields is a measure estimated at between $500 and $600 million, Minister Déry indicated on Tuesday.

For his part, Solidarity MP Sol Zanetti denounced a "generational betrayal." "At a time when the housing crisis is raging and almost one in two students needs food banks, paid internships should be a priority," he said.