Peter Black

Local Journalism Initiative reporter

Peterblack@qctonline.com

This month marks the 60th anniversary of an obscure but important event in the cultural and political life of this country.

On an October day in 1963, a trio of stay-at-home mothers living in Saint-Lambert on Montreal’s South Shore convened a meeting of like-minded parents to discuss doing something about the lack of opportunities for their English-speaking children to learn and speak French.

Olga Melikoff, Murielle Parkes and Valerie Neale may not have their faces on Canadian currency or be honoured with a statue in a park, but the three women may have done as much in their own way to build bonds between Canadians than any politician or leader you could name.

Of course, boosting national unity was not their intention, but simply helping their kids get a solid grasp of French in a majority French-speaking province.

What the three ended up doing, through dogged determination and sound academic argument, was to compel the local school board to create the first public school French immersion program in Canada, at Margaret Pendlebury Elementary School in Saint-Lambert.

That program, which graduated its first students in 1966, spawned more French immersion programs in Quebec which in turn spilled over into the rest of the country.

While the motives of the “founding mothers” of French immersion may not have been national in ambition, they aligned with the zeitgeist afoot in the land in the 1960s, with mounting concern about the state of the unique and historic French-English relationship in Canada.

Then-prime minister Lester Pearson, alarmed by brewing tensions in Quebec over respect for French language and culture within Canada, created the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963. Its core recommendation was the bolstering of access to federal services in French, as embodied in the Official Languages Act.

The Act was seen as too soft in some quarters of Quebec, and a plot to shove French down English throats elsewhere in the land. Still, whatever squabbling there might have been about bilingualism on the political level, it’s obvious a large swath of ordinary Canadians got the message and took action.

True enough, many parents were surely motivated by the fact that only demonstrably bilingual people would be eligible for top government jobs and decided to give their kids a leg up through French immersion.

More than 450,000 students are currently enrolled in French immersion programs in Canada. Ontario accounts for more than half that total, with 252,000, although Canada’s most populous province ranks sixth in the proportion of students in French immersion, with 13 per cent – tops is officially bilingual New Brunswick (36 per cent) followed by Prince Edward Island (26 per cent).

Enrolment in French immersion in Ontario increased an average 5.6 per cent annually for 14 straight years, until 2018-19. To help meet the incessant demand for teachers for all these French immersion programs, the Ontario government recently increased funding, aimed at training an additional 110 French teachers.

Several studies conclude the major obstacle to the expansion of French immersion programs in Canada is the shortage of qualified teachers. A few years ago, British Columbia sent a delegation to Belgium and France to recruit adequately fluent French teachers.

Among the growing multitudes of French immersion students in Ontario are the three children of my niece who lives north of Toronto. The kids, in their endearing shoulder-shrugging way, say they enjoy it. The eldest is likely to continue his French learning in a new high school soon to be built.

For most folks who come to Canada from places where having a second or third language is the norm and a necessity, learning French is no big deal and an advantage of living in Canada.

Yet, it’s one of the inscrutable ironies of this country that literally millions of Canadians outside Quebec are keen to have their children learn French despite Quebec’s hardly reciprocal attitude about francophones learning in English, most notably Bill 96’s restriction of access to English CEGEPs.

There’s politics, and then there’s the people, and for a consistent number of English-speaking people, learning French is a transcendent and positive thing. The founding mothers – and the founding fathers – would be pleased.