Читать книгу Language planning and policy in Quebec - Jakob Leimgruber - Страница 24

The language policies at work in the province of New Brunswick shall be described in a little more detail here, for it is, like Quebec, a province that is characterised by a rather unique demolinguistic profile and language policy. New Brunswick was visited by Jacques Cartier on his first voyage in 1534, and Champlain established the first permanent European settlements in 1604. What is now Maritime Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) was claimed as part of the colony of New France and named ‘Acadia’, with settlers from France mingling with the aboriginal Mi’kmaq and Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik), with most settling in Peninsular Acadia (Nova Scotia). The colony saw its first decline after the War of the Spanish Succession, when the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) handed Nova Scotia to Britain. Mainland Acadia was conquered in the course of the French and Indian War with the fall of Fort Anne (present-day Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick) in 1759.

The British conquest of Acadia was disastrous for the French colonists. A large number of Acadian settlers were deported in the course of le grand dérangement, a programme which saw 11500 of the region’s 14000 Acadians forcibly removed to locations ranging from Quebec to Louisiana. This greatly reduced the Francophone population, which was replaced, shortly thereafter, by Loyalists fleeing the seceding American colonies. When Acadians were allowed to return to Nova Scotia in the late 1770s, most fertile land had been re-appropriated by arrivals from New England. The general wave of immigration to North America in the late 18^th and early nineteenth century from the British Isles also affected Maritime Canada and with it New Brunswick, by bringing increasing numbers of English-speaking settlers. By 1871, the former French majority had been reduced to 16 %. This number rose again after Confederation (in 1867; New Brunswick was one of the original four provinces, with Nova Scotia and Upper and Lower Canada, to merge into a larger federal unit that would eventually become the country Canada), reaching 24 % in 1901 and 34 % in 1931 (Forbes, 2008).

Data from the 2006 census show that this proportion has somewhat decreased: 27 % report ‘French’ as one of their ethnicities. There is the possibility that extra options in the census have influenced this number: for one, multiple responses are possible for ethnic origin, so that one can identify as both French and Scottish, for instance; also, the category ‘Canadian’, first introduced as an ethnic origin in the 1996 census, was chosen by 53 % of the New Brunswick population as one of their ethnicities. The term glosses over the traditional language divide and can apply to persons of English, French, Aboriginal, or mixed heritage. The language data from the 2011 census offer more reliable measures. Those with French as their only mother tongue account for 32 % of the population, those with English only 66 % (only 1 % claim both languages as their mother tongues). These numbers (one third French, two thirds English) are in line with the situation as it was in 1931, so that a certain degree of overall stability in the ethnolinguistic distribution can be observed. Knowledge of official languages, however, is unevenly distributed across language groups: 33 % of the total population of New Brunswick claims knowledge of both French and English, but while 58 % only know English, just 9 % only know French. Monolingualism in French is, therefore, a minority phenomenon in the province, whereas bilingualism, while it exists among Anglophones at the rate of 15 %, is much more common among Francophones (71 % of them being bilingual and 28 % monolingual in French).

Official language policy in New Brunswick exists under several statutory instruments. The first to be passed was the 1969 Official Languages Act, which made both English and French co-official languages and listed a number of fundamental linguistic rights, chief among them that service from the provincial government can be received in the language of choice. This act made New Brunswick the first and only province in Canada to become officially bilingual voluntarily (Manitoba, which, as explained above, was founded as a bilingual province in 1870, had to be reminded of this fact by a Supreme Court decision in 1985). The 1981 Bill 88, the ‘Act recognising the equality of the two official linguistic communities in New Brunswick’, further cemented language rights, with the creation of separate (i.e. parallel) institutions in the cultural, educational, and social sphere. In addition to these provincial laws, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (CCRF), a fundamental component of the federal constitution introduced in 1982, guarantees official bilingualism in Canada and New Brunswick (s 16ff), making the province the only one that has its language policy status mentioned in the Constitution. In addition to the two languages being termed official, and the two language communities enjoying equal rights, official bilingualism prevails in all branches of government, with parliamentary records and texts of laws available in both languages with equal authority. The Official Languages Act was revised in 2002, and the ‘Office of the Commissioner of official languages for New Brunswick’ was created in 2003. This office is the first port of call for complaints and concerns about the language rights of citizens in the province (similar to an official languages ombudsman, but with legal powers; an institution later adopted in Wales, see chapter 6). Since the early 2000s, a series of regulations and language policies have been implemented that regulate primarily issues of language at the workplace and the language of government services. Among them is a Court of Appeal decision from 2001 that mandates official bilingualism also at the municipal level. The province is, therefore, bilingual in its entirety, at all levels of government (municipal, provincial, and federal).

The official bilingualism in New Brunswick has resulted in a duplication of services in some instances, with sometimes unintended consequences. In 2015 and 2016, changes to the internal policy of Ambulance New Brunswick, the provincial Crown corporation running the first-response paramedic system, sought to ensure that at least one member of any two-person crew was bilingual. The additional paperwork and the perceived discrimination of unilingual employees led to protests from unions (Poitras, 2016). Over the same period, the question arose whether school busses needed to be segregated by language. The legal situation is such that Francophones and Anglophones are given the same rights in terms of education. Therefore, there are parallel French and English school systems, a situation which extends to separate bussing services being available in French and English, i.e. Francophones take one bus and Anglophones another one, even when the busses cover the same catchment area, travel the same route, and go to schools right next to each other. The idea of making this parallel system more efficient, mooted by an anglophone provincial politician, was met with strong opposition from francophone quarters (Hazlewood, 2015; Bissett, 2016).

Nevertheless, New Brunswick stands out among Canada’s provinces and territories for being the one with official language communities closest to each other in terms of size. A quick look back at Table 2.1 shows that New Brunswick has, proportionally, the largest official language (mother tongue) minority; its French-speaking community (31.9 %) is larger than any other province outside Quebec, larger even than Quebec’s own English-speaking minority (7.8 %). In fact, as far as mother tongue is concerned, Francophones in New Brunswick are proportionally more numerous than speakers of non-official languages in even the most immigrant rich provinces (27 % in British Columbia, 26.3 % in Ontario). Only Nunavut has a larger proportion who declare a non-official language as mother tongue (mostly Inuits). In short, the vitality of the French language in New Brunswick, if not to be taken for granted as in Quebec, is not under threat from governmental policies, quite to the contrary – a fact visible in the continued census data showing knowledge (and usage) of French in the province.