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Language rights are part of a long fraught history in Canada, most notably between the French and the English. In this website page, we explore two case studies of language rights struggles in the country: The Manitoba Schools Question and the BC French Language Controversy.
The Manitoba Schools Question is a historic struggle of Francophones to assert their language rights - namely, their right to education in French - in an increasingly English-dominant country. A similar controversy happened recently in British Columbia with the Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique when the BC government negligently did not adequately fund French-language schools.
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One of Canada's most contentious issues regarding education is the Manitoba Schools Question, which lasted for decades. Since Manitoba's creation in 1870, there has always been a strong rivalry between a relatively equal population of French-speaking Catholics and English-speaking Protestants. Each language/religious group operated their own schools. When the English-speaking Protestants began to outnumber French-speaking Catholics in Manitoba, bilingualism began to fade. Other linguistics minorities such as Ukrainians, Italians, and Poles assimilated into Anglophone society rather than the Francophone minority. In March 1890, two pieces of legislation were passed that forever changed education in the province: "An Act respecting the Department of Education" and "An Act respecting Public Schools." These bills were responsible for abolishing the dual school system by combining the dual French & English education boards into one Department of Education. One major change is that they required all Catholic private schools to become self-funded and pay taxes, or become part of the public school system. In the same month, French was also removed as an official language of Manitoba.
Within a few years, tensions boiled over and reached the federal level. Francophones in Manitoba and around the country were furious. The incumbent federal Conservatives, led by Mackenzie Bowell, were split and divided over how to deal with the Catholic and French backlash. In contrast, federal Liberal leader, Wilfred Laurier, sought to strike a compromise with the affected groups. In the 1896 general election, Laurier defeated the Conservatives (who were then lead by Charles Tupper) and eventually came to the Laurier-Greenway Compromise. Although this legislation did not reverse Manitoba's 1890 policies, it allowed for religious instruction at public schools if they met certain criteria.
In 1916, the controversy exploded again when the federal government repealed the Laurier-Greenway Compromise, and the Francophones in Manitoba decided to engage in a decades-long resistance against the removal of French as the language of instruction. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, "the provincial immersion schools program and the development of the Franco-Manitoban School Division ... can accurately be said to have recovered its [French's] place in Manitoba’s education system."
French language education has also been a point of contention in British Columbia. Yet, French Immersion is popular in BC. French Immersion is derived from BC's oldest unrevised education policy since 1996.
Additionally, it is important to note that French immersion is not the same idea as BC's Language Education Policy.
The BC government is not immune from constitutional struggles over language rights. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in June 2020 that the BC government violated constitutional language rights guaranteed under Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 23 guarantees the right to receive an education in an official language (English or French), if practical. The BC government was required to pay $6 million in damages to the Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique (BC's sole French-language school board) as well as $1 million in operation fees. As a result of the decision, the government had to build francophone schools in places where they weren't any, such as Burnaby and the eastern region of Victoria. BC and the Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique will likely face challenges in meeting the high demand and cost of French language instruction schools. In Quebec, the situation is reversed, where the Charter guarantees that the province provides for English language instruction at primary & secondary schools, whereas in BC the minority official language is French. The issue has not been limited to BC, as other provinces also chronically underfunded schools for French instruction schools, due to budget constraints, lack of political will, or little demand. Less than 20% of Canada's population is bilingual, so if the ultimate goal of education is to promote linguistic bilingualism, then there is a huge deficit to fill.