Canada's Francophone Minority Communities: Constitutional Renewal and the Winning of School Governance

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

If there is one word to describe the experience of Canadian
francophones, it is la survivance—survival. Those within Quebec were
fortunate to be able to use the state as a vehicle for their ambitions;
those outside that province, with the possible exception of New
Brunswick, had to look at other strategies. Ironically, they couldn’t
expect much help from Quebec in meeting their aspirations because that
province didn’t want to place itself in a position where it in turn
would be pressured by outsiders on how it treated its anglophones.

It didn’t take Canadian francophones outside Quebec too long to
discover that they would be slowly assimilated into their English
surroundings unless they succeeded in educating their children in a
completely French environment, and as a corollary, controlled the
educational facilities available to them. Thus the importance of school
governance to francophones.

Behiels, a senior professor of history at the University of Ottawa and
a distinguished scholar in Canadian constitutional, legal, and minority
language issues, is just the person to write this book. Despite his
book’s inclusive title, he focuses on developments in Ontario,
Manitoba, and Alberta, but is nearly silent on the successes of
francophones in Saskatchewan and British Columbia in achieving the same
results as their counterparts elsewhere. And while Behiels’s research
is exemplary, his prose is not exciting, and readers who don’t
understand French will not comprehend some of the book’s key passages.
It might also be argued that the last two chapters, which discuss the
involvement of francophone organizations in the failed Meech Lake and
Charlottetown Accords, are peripheral to the main focus on education.
Finally, this is an organization history, with very little focus on the
personalities involved, so that the readers are left with little
understanding of the passions that motivated many of the players.

That said, Behiels has given us a monograph that shows how these
organizations worked with their communities, with governments
(especially the federal government), and with the courts through Charter
challenges to win school governance in the provinces he examines.