During her tenure as minister of education, she proposed lifting the two-decades-long tuition freeze on higher education in Quebec. This proposal was met with fierce resistance from students' federations who initiated the 1996 Quebec student protests. In the end, the PQ government reinstated the tuition freeze, but Marois introduced policies that would charge an out-of-province fee to non-Quebec Canadian students, and a fee for failing CEGEP courses. She also successfully piloted Bill 109, replacing of confessional school boards by language-based ones implementing a bilateral amendment to the Canadian constitution with the Jean Chrétien's Liberal government in Ottawa in 1997.