Courtesy

By Guy Rex Rodgers

Local Journalism Initiative

I was not born in Quebec so my education options were the neighbourhood public school or a more remote, and much more expensive, private school. My parents opted for the neighbourhood school.  It was a simple choice.  I was surprised when I arrived in Quebec to learn that children educated here prior to Bill 101 had to make a choice based on religion and then another choice based on language.

Over the past few years, as I have been making documentary films about Anglos and Allophones in Quebec, I have discovered strange aspects of the pre-Bill 101 school system.  The goals of Bill 101 were logical and defensible – it is important for immigrants to share the language of their host society. The system prior to Bill 101 was neither logical nor defensible. The French Catholic schools created a demographic time bomb by turning away multitudes of immigrant children because they were non-Christian (Jews and Muslims), non-Catholic (Greek Orthodox and Protestants) or, in the case of Catholics (Italians and Hispanophones), for reasons that no one has ever been able to explain. 

Jacques Parizeau never appreciated the dark irony of blaming the 1995 referendum decision on the ‘ethnic vote’ after Quebec’s majority culture had rejected so many ‘ethnics’ from its schools. When victims of this discrimination speak about it, their experience is dismissed as an isolated incident, or as an outright lie.

Nobody knows how many immigrant children were turned away from French Catholic Schools. Was it hundreds?  Thousands?  Tens-of-thousands? The best way to shed some light on this opaque subject is to ask the students. I have received funding from the Secretariat aux relations avec les Québécois d’expression anglaise to conduct a research project. The first step is a short on-line survey. It takes only a few minutes, and you can fill it out anonymously. I am happy to note that most of the people who have filled out the survey have also volunteered to participate in an interview.

If you received your elementary education in Quebec prior to Bill 101, please take a few minutes to share your story on the Quebec Schools Question survey at   http://tiny.cc/QSQ   

The responses are fascinatingly diverse.  Some immigrants, and even a few Anglos, insisted on getting into a French Catholic school and were accepted. Other students had parents who pioneered immersion schools and bilingual education. A small number of francophone students were agnostics or atheists who did not want to enroll in either Catholic system, and they did not want to be educated in English, so they enrolled in the small French Protestant system.

The largest school boards were French Catholic, and they were quite homogenous because they accepted few ‘outsiders’.  The second largest boards were English Protestant and they were highly diverse because they enrolled Jewish students, Greek Orthodox, Chinese and most of the Black students.  The English Catholic school board, initially created for the Irish, became much more diverse after the Second World War as Italians, Germans, Ukrainians and Hispanophones joined their ranks.  The French Protestant system was quite small until the 60s when French-speaking non-Catholics from the Maghreb and Haiti immigrated to Quebec. The range of educational choices was dizzyingly complex until Bill 101 obliged all immigrant children to attend French schools, which were still Catholic until the switch to linguistic schools boards.

The raw data from the short survey will provide a sense of proportion. What percentage of students were turned away from French Catholic schools compared to the percentage that freely chose one of the non-French-Catholic options? The short survey will also indicate if patterns varied over time. Was it easier to get into a French Catholic school before or after the Baby Boom? We will also be able to test the theory that rejection was more common in Montreal than in the regions. And were there difference between parishes?

The in-depth interviews will provide invaluable data about educational outcomes.  The Italian community is a model of adaptability. Whether Italian students were admitted into the French or English system, most of them – pragmatically and sensibly – learned both of Canada’s official languages. The efforts that non-Francophone families made to acquire French language skills is not appreciated and should be celebrated.  The first step is to collect stories from former students, so I’m asking you to take a few minutes to fill out the survey. http://tiny.cc/QSQ