Читать книгу Language planning and policy in Quebec - Jakob Leimgruber - Страница 18

The official bilingualism in Quebec that came with the British North American Act 1867 was practically limited to that province, with the exception of Manitoba, which was created as an officially bilingual province in 1870. New Brunswick is, today, the only officially bilingual province with a numerically significant population of Francophones. It is also the only province to have its bilingualism enshrined in the federal constitution. The case of New Brunswick will be dealt with in more detail in section 2.4.

Federal legislation gives some protection to official language minorities in the provinces, i.e. to speakers of English in Quebec and to speakers of French elsewhere. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms spells out, in section 23, what are ‘minority language educational rights’: it ensures that Canadian citizens have the right to receive primary and secondary education in their first language (s 23(1)), a right extended to the siblings of any citizen’s child who has received education in that language (s 23(2)). This right, however, is limited by section 23(3), which says that it ‘applies wherever in the province the number of children of citizens who have such a right is sufficient to warrant the provision to them out of public funds of minority language instruction’. This phrasing has led to several court decisions on what is ‘sufficient to warrant’ French instruction, notably in Alberta (1990) and Prince Edward Island (2000). Often the importance of protecting the linguistic minority despite the small numbers was taken into account. The provisions of section 23 of the Charter do not apply to Quebec, a fact discussed below (section 2.3).

The issue of an education system in the minority language is also what is at the heart of Manitoba’s language policy. Manitoba was a prime destination for and is still host to a large community of Métis, a mixed Aboriginal-Francophone ethnic group whose languages include several Aboriginal languages, French, and Michif (a mixed language of Cree and French origin). The province, having been established as an officially bilingual province by the Manitoba Act 1870, quickly saw demographic change to the disadvantage of the francophone population, which translated into a gradual slide towards de facto monolingualism by the 1880s (Bothwell, 2007, 243). A new provincial government abolished the official status of French and its schools in 1888. The federal government intervened in 1896, but in 1916 French public education was scrapped again, to be reinstated only in 1966. As far as the official status of French is concerned, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a landmark case in 1985 that both English and French are required as official languages per the Constitution Act 1867 and the Manitoba Act 1870 and that ‘[a]ll of the unilingual Acts of the Legislature of Manitoba are, and always have been, invalid and of no force or effect’ (because of the legal vacuum that this decision alone would have created, all legislation is deemed ‘temporarily valid and effective’ for the ‘minimum period necessary for translation, re-enactment, printing and publishing’). Manitoba is, therefore, an officially bilingual province.

Official bi- and multilingualism is also found in the three territories. Yukon is officially bilingual in English and French. While the aboriginal languages spoken in the territory (Gwich’in, Hän, Upper Tanana, Northern Tutchone, Southern Tutchone, Tagish, Inland Tlingit, Kaska, cf. Council of Yukon First Nations 2016) are recognised as ‘significant’ in the territorial Language Act, only French and English are used and available in all branches of government. The Northwest Territories (NWT) passed its Official Languages Act in 1984, making English and French co-official, and ‘recognising’ the Aboriginal languages of the territory. In 1990 the Act was amended to recognise as ‘official aboriginal languages’ the following nine languages: Chipewyan, Cree, Tłı̨chǫ (Dogrib), Gwich’in, North Slavey, South Slavey, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, and Inuinnaqtun. Like in Yukon, the Act does not require their use in the legislature and the executive, but they may be used in court. The third territory, Nunavut, was carved out of the Northwest Territories in 1999, taking with it the NWT Act. This was replaced in 2008 with a new Official Languages Act, which removed references to NWT languages not in use in Nunavut – a step made possible by the large Inuit majority. The territory has now four official languages: ‘the Inuit language’ (comprising both Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun), English, and French. A lot of effort has been going into language maintenance and revival, in the education system as well as in public life. Among them is a recent (2015) proposal to replace the alphasyllabic writing system used by Inuktitut1 (but not Inuinnaqtun) by a Latin-based system, in order to increase literacy in the language.

In contrast with these multilingual territories, the government of British Columbia provides no services in French beyond federally-guaranteed French education. Historically, the province has had little direct contact with French, much of the non-Anglophone (and non-Aboriginal) immigration coming in the form of Chinese labourers recruited from Hong Kong for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. In fact, recently efforts at regulating the linguistic landscape in the province emerged in the wake of media reports of Chinese-only adverts in public space: the city of Richmond has now entered into agreements with advertisers that stipulate that English should be present on their signage (Chan, 2016). While these contracts are not legislation per se, there is an ongoing discussion in the city and the province on whether a more statutory provision is needed (Wood, 2014; Hoekstra, 2014; Chan, 2016). At the other end of the country, Newfoundland and Labrador, the last province to join the confederation in 1949, also provides virtually no French services.

Alberta has a Languages Act 1988 which, presumably in the wake of the Supreme Court decision concerning Manitoba’s laws, explicitly mentions that any law (or act, ordinance, regulation) enacted prior to the Languages Act is valid ‘notwithstanding that they were enacted, printed and published in English only’ (s 2(1)). Nonetheless, both English and French may be used in the legislature and before court, and both the English and the French versions of the Languages Act are equally authoritative (s 8). Education in French is available to Francophones, and there are independent French school boards. Services from the provincial government, however, are available in English only, a state of affairs that is currently being addressed by a newly elected government (Orfali, 2016a; Orfali, 2016b).

Saskatchewan has a Language Act, also from 1988, with the full title ‘An Act respecting the use of the English and French languages in Saskatchewan’. It, too, begins with a section declaring all existing acts, regulations, etc., valid notwithstanding that they were originally enacted in English only (s 3). Unlike in Alberta, however, it has a section 4 which says that all ‘Acts and regulations may be enacted, printed and published in English only or in English and French’ – English is clearly dominant, but at least French is mentioned (the Alberta Languages Act only says ‘may be enacted, printed and published in English’ (s 3)). The use of both languages before court is guaranteed, as it is in the legislature. Assembly records, however, are kept only in English (s 12(3)). There is a minority of Francophones in the province, called the ‘Fransaskois’, which account for around 1.6 % of the population. A French education system has been in existence again since the 1960s; it had previously been banned in 1931. There are currently 13 francophone schools in the province (Conseil des écoles fransaskoises, 2016).

Nova Scotia, previously settled by Acadians that were expelled beginning in 1755 (in the course of le grand dérangement), has a small minority of Francophones (3.4 %) left; the municipality of Clare at the southwestern tip of the province is the only with a clear majority of French speakers, though there are speakers on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, too. There is no provincial legislation on language, but the government does operate an Office of Gaelic Affairs and an Office of Acadian Affairs, both of which try to raise awareness and interest in the linguistic and cultural heritage of the respective ethnic group; there is some interest in improving government services in French (Acadian Affairs, 2015). The government maintains a French presence online (http://novascotia.ca/bonjour).

Prince Edward Island (PEI), the smallest province of Canada, was also home to Acadians, many of them refugees from Nova Scotia’s 1755 expulsions, who were in turn deported three years later. Today, 3.8 % of the province’s population indicate French as their mother tongue (2011 census). French education is available in six schools islandwide, run by a French language school board. Like Nova Scotia, PEI does not have an act regulating the official language; English is dominant and the de facto official language used in government. It does, however, have a French Language Services Act, first passed in 1999, with a new version coming into force in 2013. It lists a number of government services that shall be made available in the French language; but begins with a hedge that ‘nothing in this act […] shall be construed as dictating or otherwise limiting the working language of the Government’ (s 2(2)), which, obviously, is English. The services in question cover mainly written communication received by the government and the response to be given (s 4). Signage is addressed in section 5, where consultation with the appropriate ‘Acadian and Francophone’ communities is mandated in the case of ‘signage giving notice of a community name’. An Acadian and Francophone Community Advisory Committee is established, which supports the ministry in its language-related duties. Perhaps most important symbolically is that, in a province whose legislation is entirely English, this act was the first to be enacted in both languages, with both versions being equally authoritative (s 18).

With over 13 m inhabitants, Ontario is the most populous province. Its capital is Toronto, the country’s largest city. Ottawa, the federal capital, is in the province, bordering Quebec’s Gatineau city, and forming with the latter the Ottawa-Gatineau Metropolitan Area, officially designated as the National Capital Region. The Francophone presence in present-day Ontario goes back to early New France, as traces in toponymy reveal to this day (Sault Sainte-Marie, Embrun, Champlain, Saint-Eugène, Lefaivre, Limoges, etc.). The 1763 creation of the Province of Quebec included much of settled Ontario (and beyond, encompassing the Great Lakes all the way south to the Ohio River); however, upon the creation, in 1791, of ‘The Canadas’, the Province of Quebec was partitioned into two colonies, Upper Canada and Lower Canada, with the border between the two roughly where the current Ontario-Quebec border lies.

The two languages, French and English, were (and are) in the majority on their respective sides of the border, but pockets of Anglophones in Quebec and of Francophones in Ontario remain. In Ontario, many of these communities are located in eastern Ontario, close to the Quebec border, but others are found throughout the province, including in the Cochrane, Algoma, and Sudbury districts located between Lake Superior and Quebec, and in the Golden Horseshoe area at the western end of Lake Ontario. In the 2011 census, 3.9 % of the provincial population declared French as their mother tongue, though only 2.2 % report using it as their home language. The largest populations are in Ottawa and Greater Sudbury, whereas the counties of Prescott and Russell, on the border with Quebec, have the highest proportion of French speakers (66.2 %).

Ontario, too, had a period in its history in which it was openly hostile to the French language. This was particularly visible in educational provisions, which were halted by ‘Regulation 17’ in 1912. Teachers were forbidden to use French with pupils beyond the first year, French textbooks were banned, and anyone wishing to pursue a French education had to do so in the expensive private system. It was only in the late 1960s that provincial funding for French language schools was reinstated. In 2016, the Premier of the province formally apologised for the ban, saying it ‘showed a disregard for Franco-Ontarian identity and equality’ (CBC News, 2016a). The policy also resulted in lower educational achievement for Francophones, translating into lower socio-economic status in adult years.

Nowadays, Ontario has a language policy based on a territorial system in which parts of the province where French is spoken by a given minimum proportion of the population are considered bilingual and services have to be offered in French as well as English. Communications from the provincial government to the population as a whole generally happen in both official languages (e.g. the government website is bilingual). However, the right to French language services only exists in designated areas. An area can be considered bilingual when 10 % of its population is made up of Francophones; urban centres must have at least 5000 Francophones. Twenty-five areas are currently designated bilingual. They are found all over the province, and include urban municipalities such as Toronto, Kingston, Windsor, Sudbury, and London. The National Capital Region is also designated bilingual in separate legislation. The language political situation is in constant flux, as evidenced, by way of example, by recent calls to include French in the emergency child abduction alert system ‘Amber’ (Branch, 2016a). French schools exist throughout the province, but in higher numbers where francophone residents make up a certain proportion of the population. Immigrants generally have freedom of choice regarding the school system (i.e., its medium of instruction, English or French);2 the arrival of Syrian refugees in Ottawa in 2015 resulted in 7 % of them opting for French schools, a development deemed significant enough to have made it into the French-language press (Branch, 2016b).

The province of Ontario does not have statutory official languages. The French Language Services Act 1990 gives everyone the right to use both languages in the legislative assembly (s 3(1)), stipulates that bills and acts shall be introduced and enacted in both languages (s 3(2)), and that pre-existing acts shall be translated (s 4). There is a right to receive ‘available services’ in French from the provincial government in designated areas (s 5). In these designated areas, citizens have these language rights with regards to municipal government as well (s 14), and there is a French Language Services Commissioner (s 12) that oversees compliance with the act. The act’s preamble, however, does mention that ‘in Ontario the French language is recognised as an official language in the courts and in education’; education is now available in the public system, with five secular and nine Catholic school boards that operate in French. There are French colleges and some of the province’s universities offer instruction in French. Ontario is home to the largest Francophone population outside Quebec, with just under half a million. This is more than in New Brunswick, although Francophones account for a third of the population in that province (see section 2.4).

Table 2.1: Percent of responses to mother tongue and language spoken most often at home (single mother tongue responses only, i.e. excluding respondents indicating more than one mother tongue), in the 2011 census, by province/territory.

To conclude this section on ‘English’ Canada, it is worth pointing out the presence of many non-official languages in these provinces, like in the rest of the country. Anglophones are clearly the dominant group, but in all provinces except Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Quebec, it is the speakers of languages other than French, taken together, that come second in terms of demolinguistic weight. Table 2.1 illustrates this. These so-called ‘Allophones’, whose mother tongue is neither English nor French, account for a fifth of Canada’s population, only 1.5 percentage points behind Francophones, a lead only due to the large French-speaking population of Quebec. The difference is most obvious in the provinces west of Quebec; the Maritime provinces (NL, PEI, NS) all have above 90 % Anglophones. The home language offers another glimpse into the English-dominant nature of the ‘ROC’: over 95 % of respondents in the Maritimes use mostly English at home. In Ontario, Western Canada, and the Territories, English also benefits from a shift away from both French and non-official languages. Only in Quebec is the shift from mother tongue to home language also benefitting French, though more Allophones shift towards English. The high number of ‘Other’ languages retained in the home in Nunavut is explained by the vitality of the two aboriginal (and official) languages Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun: 68.5 % had it as their mother tongue, and 52.2 % claimed to use it as their main home language. Nonetheless, English is popular, since the 28.4 % mother tongue Anglophones are outnumbered by the 45.5 % for whom it was the language spoken most often at home. The special status of these aboriginal languages will be taken into consideration next.