Laurier and French-English Relations

Let's start with a question

Imagine your school suddenly announced that, after Grade 2, all your classes had to be taught in a language your family does not speak at home. How would your family feel? What would they do?

For many French-speaking families in Ontario and Manitoba between 1890 and 1914, this was not imaginary. Questions about language, religion, schools and Britain's wars caused some of the sharpest arguments in Canada at the time.

Wilfrid Laurier

Wilfrid Laurier was a lawyer from Quebec and the leader of the Liberal Party. In 1896 he became Canada's first French-Canadian Prime Minister. He stayed in office until 1911, one of the longest unbroken runs in Canadian history.

Laurier was famous for compromise. He believed Canada would only hold together if English and French Canadians each gave a little. He also believed in Canada's future, predicting that the twentieth century would belong to Canada.

But compromise has a cost: often neither side is fully happy. You will see this pattern again and again.

1. The Manitoba Schools Question

When Manitoba joined Canada in 1870, it had both Protestant and Catholic schools paid for with public money. Many Catholics there were French-speaking Métis and French Canadians.

By 1890, many English-speaking Protestant settlers had arrived. In 1890, Manitoba passed the Public Schools Act. It ended public funding for Catholic schools. Catholic families who wanted Catholic schools had to pay for them and still pay taxes for public schools.

French Canadians across Canada were angry. In 1896, Laurier made a deal with Manitoba's premier, Thomas Greenway, called the Laurier–Greenway Compromise:

• Catholic schools did not get their funding back.
• Religious teaching was allowed in public schools for half an hour at the end of the day, under certain conditions.
• Catholic teachers could be hired under certain conditions.
• French, like other minority languages, could be taught where there were enough students.

Later, in 1916 (after this unit), Manitoba banned teaching in languages other than English. French-speaking families kept French alive by supporting teachers who taught it anyway.

2. The South African War (1899–1902)

In 1899, Britain went to war in South Africa against the Boers, Dutch-speaking settlers who ran two independent republics there.

• Many English Canadians wanted Canada to send soldiers to help Britain, the "mother country".
• Many French Canadians did not see why Canadians should fight a British war far away. Some sympathized with the Boers as a small people resisting a great empire.

Laurier's compromise: the government would equip and send 1,000 volunteers, not a conscripted army. In the end, more than 7,000 Canadians served, including 12 nurses, and about 270 died, many from disease. At the Battle of Paardeberg in February 1900, Canadian troops were part of the first major British victory of the war.

Henri Bourassa, a young Liberal MP from Quebec, resigned his seat in October 1899 to protest sending troops without asking Parliament. He was re-elected unopposed in 1900 and became a leading voice for French-Canadian nationalism.

3. The Naval Service Act (1910)

By 1910, Britain and Germany were racing to build warships. Britain wanted help from its empire.

Laurier's compromise was the Naval Service Act of 1910, which created the Royal Canadian Navy: a small Canadian navy that, in an emergency and with the government's decision, could be placed under British command.

• Many English-Canadian imperialists mocked it as a "tin-pot navy", far too small; they wanted Canada to give money directly to Britain's navy.
• Bourassa and Quebec nationalists opposed it because Canadians could be drawn into Britain's wars. In 1910 Bourassa founded the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir to argue his views.

Attacked from both sides, and also over a free-trade deal with the United States, Laurier lost the 1911 election to Robert Borden and the Conservatives.

4. Regulation 17 in Ontario (1912)

French-speaking communities have lived in what is now Ontario for more than 300 years. By the early 1900s, many Franco-Ontarian children went to bilingual schools.

In 1912, the Ontario government of Premier James Whitney issued Regulation 17. It limited French as the language of teaching and communication to the first two years of elementary school. In 1913 it was changed to allow French as a subject for one hour a day.

How Franco-Ontarians responded:

• In 1910, they had already formed an association (the ACFÉO) to protect the French language and schools. It led the fight.
• In 1913, the French-language newspaper Le Droit was founded in Ottawa to oppose Regulation 17.
• Many teachers kept teaching in French, and many families refused to obey. In January 1916, at École Guigues in Ottawa, parents occupied the school to protect teachers Diane and Béatrice Desloges. When police came to close it, mothers fought back with hatpins. People call this the Battle of the Hatpins.

Ontario dropped Regulation 17 in 1927. On 22 February 2016, Premier Kathleen Wynne formally apologized for it. Today Franco-Ontarians have their own French-language school boards.