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Soon after its Spring 2014 election victory, the new government announced a series of austerity measures designed to meet an election promise of a balanced budget by the end of the following fiscal year. Institution by institution was hit with news of budget cuts over the course of the following months, and in November 2014, the Education Minister announced his plan to “slash 50 per cent of school boards,” as one media outlet reported it. 1 According to the government, centralization of school boards would put “millions” back into provincial coffers without affecting the quality of education offered by the school boards; the Education Minister would see the number of French school boards drop from 60 to 36, and the number of English ones drop from 9 to 7.