Abstract
The present study seeks to empirically explore the influence of language on attitudes towards one’s country. Canada is used as an exploratory case. Though language has played a prominent role in the country’s politics, its role on attitudes among Francophones remains markedly unknown. Using original survey data gathered from Francophones in Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Manitoba, the study specifically explores the influence of linguistic factors on Francophones’ attitudes towards Canada. The results reveal that being from Quebec (or not) is in fact an important determinant in attitudinal differences towards Canada among Francophones. However, this result is tempered by the fact that other variables demonstrate a greater influence. Notably, perceptions of French being threatened significantly lead to more negative attitudes towards Canada.
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Notes
There exists a sizeable literature exploring patriotism, which is described as an attachment to a country (Kosterman and Feshbach 1989). However, it is unexpectedly difficult to find studies in this scholarship that include a question expressly measuring ‘feelings’ to one’s country, such as the type of question used in this study.
Demographic data in this paragraph obtained from Statistics Canada (2012).
In Ontario, Francophones were granted a series of rights in terms of education, administrative services and language usage in the provincial legislature. Nonetheless, many of these rights are still not constitutionally protected and Ontario has not yet become a de jure bilingual province. In New Brunswick, 1969 saw a new provincial Official Languages Act that extended French language rights to the provincial legislature, the courts and the public service. Linguistic rights for French were further affirmed in 1981 with Bill 88, which provided equality for the two linguistic communities of the province. Ultimately, provincial bilingualism was enshrined in 1982 in the Canadian constitution. New Brunswick thus has the distinction of being Canada’s only truly, both de facto and de jure, bilingual province. In Manitoba, a landmark decision in 1985 by the Supreme Court of Canada effectively, and retroactively, reinstated French’s official status in the province. Though French is currently an official language for the purposes of the legislature, legislation and the courts, it is not for the executive; hence, Manitoba is not a fully bilingual province.
To the best of our knowledge, no publicly available survey has explored linguistic variables besides perceptions of French being threatened. Nevertheless, this question, asked in the Canadian Election Study, only refers to the vitality of French in Quebec and therefore does not permit to gage perceptions of linguistic vitality of Francophones outside that province.
Departmental administrators were contacted and asked to send out an email to their students requesting them to respond to the survey. The respondents were recruited from Francophone universities in the target provinces: Université de Montréal (Department of political science), Laurentian University (Department of psychology), University of Ottawa (departments of economy, and political science), Université de Moncton (departments of biology, chemistry and biochemistry, history and geography, and political science) and the Université de Saint-Boniface (Faculty of Arts and Sciences). The data for Quebec and Manitoba were collected in late fall 2013, whereas those for Ontario and New Brunswick were gathered in late winter 2014.
Missing cases in some of the variables used in the regression models further reduced the numbers of respondents to 97: 37 in Quebec, 27 in New Brunswick, 14 in Ontario and 19 in Manitoba.
The answer choices related to age available to the respondents were: younger than 20 years old, 20–24 years old, 25–29 years old, 30–39 years old, and 40 years old and older. Seeing as the survey was administered to a convenience sample of university students, the age brackets were different than normally found for surveys administered to representative samples.
These two variables were kept distinct in accordance with results from reliability and validity tests (not reported).
This regression model was also performed with the other three provinces alternating as the reference category. The results (not reported) show that a significant influence was consistently only found to relate to Quebec.
Seeing as several of the variables in third regression model were not significant, another regression model without any of the non-significant control variables was performed to explore the possibility of over-specification. The results (not reported) do not show a marked difference from the models presented in Table 1.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Prof. Patrick Fournier (Université de Montréal) and to this journal’s anonymous referees for their help and suggestions. I am also thankful for the financial support provided by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – société et culture (FRQSC).
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Medeiros, M. Not just about Quebec: accounting for Francophones’ attitudes towards Canada. Fr Polit 15, 223–236 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-017-0028-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-017-0028-7