Canada's Francophone Minority Communities

By the late 1950s francophone and Acadian minority communities outside Quebec were in rapid decline. Demographic, economic, socio-cultural, institutional, and political factors that had sustained both the concept and the reality of French Canada for well over a century were being eliminated or transformed. Canada's Francophone Minority Communities shows how French-speaking minorities won the right to full and unfettered school governance with the backing of the Charter, the Supreme Court, and the Canadian government.Convinced that education was one of the essential keys to the renewal and growth of their communities, francophone organizations and leaders lobbied for constitutional entrenchment of official bilingualism and a mandated Charter right to education in their own language, including the right to governance over their own schools and school boards - a significant Canadian innovation. From those efforts a new, vigorous francophone pan-Canadian national community emerged, one capable of ensuring the survival of its constituents communities well into the twenty-first century.

Michael D. Behiels is a professor in the Department of History, University of Ottawa