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The following is excerpted from Fragile Majorities and Education: Belgium, Catalonia, Northern Ireland, and Quebec by Marie McAndrew.
Since the
creation of Canada in 1867, and even before, school structures and ethnicity
have been closely associated in Quebec. The British North America Act (BNAA),
which made education the exclusive prerogative of the provinces, provided
protection not to linguistic groups but to religious minorities, such as
Protestants in Quebec. The Act’s provisions attest to the
preoccupations of the French Canadian group who wanted to make certain it
controlled education, at least in the province where it was clearly the
majority, and to the religious sensitivities of the time. Very quickly,
however, the system structured itself on the basis of a dual cleavage that
associated language and religion, since these two identity markers were largely
congruent. Francophones attended French Catholic schools, almost exclusively,
while anglophones attended English Protestant schools. The arrival of
immigrants who fit into neither group made the situation more complex. When they
were Catholic, they chose the English Catholic schools. Non-Catholic immigrants
separated themselves almost evenly between the English Protestant schools and
the private ethno-religious schools.Beginning in
the 1970s, the choice of English schools by immigrants and their descendants,
formerly encouraged so as to preserve the “French Canadian” character of the
French Catholic schools or simply tolerated as a natural phenomenon, became identified as a major
social problem. A declining birth rate among francophones and the linguistic
assimilation of immigrants by the anglophone community seemed to threaten the
fragile francophone majority. By now this group saw itself not as a minority
group in Canada but as a territorial majority in Quebec. It refused to accept
that it did not represent the host community for the newcomers. In this context
a package of linguistic laws, particularly the 1977 Charter of the French
Language, known more popularly as Bill 101, was adopted by the Quebec
government. These laws were principally aimed not at transforming the
anglophone community’s linguistic attitudes and behaviours but at breaking its
monopoly on the integration of immigrants, which was now to become the
responsibility of the francophone community.
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