French Language Minority Education in Canada

Abstract

There are almost one million (945,860) Canadians who have French as their mother tongue and who live outside of the province of Québec. These Francophones live in minority settings relative to the numerically and politically dominant Anglophone majority. The largest number of Francophones outside of Québec are concentrated in Ontario (484,265) and New-Brunswick (237,570). The rest live in the seven other provinces and territories of Canada (Bernard, 1990). The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982, recognizes in Section 23 the constitutional and legal rights of Francophones living outside of the province of Québec to receive their instruction in French as a first language in institutions where French is the first language, as well as to manage their schools. How these rights are enacted at the provincial level varies across Canada (Corson & Lemay, 1996). It is in New Brunswick and Ontario that Francophone control over minority education is the greatest. While the Charter guaranteed the rights of Francophone minority communities to instruction in French, educational provisions for French language minority education existed before 1982 and were subject to ongoing developments in policy and practice. Both historically and in the present, education has constituted an important terrain for political struggle over minority rights.