The increasing attention given to questions concerning Canada's “diverse” population and the consequent implications for the country's evolving liberal democracy reflect a distinctive shift in contemporary Canadian political science. The disciplinary import of this shift is symbolized by the advent of a new conference section entitled “Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics” within the Canadian Political Science Association in 2009 (CPSA, 2008) and serves to counter the earlier, post-war, marginalization of such themes (Stasiulis and Abu-Laban, Reference Stasiulis, Abu-Laban, Gagnon and Bickerton1990; Wilson, Reference Wilson1993; Vickers, Reference Vickers2002; Abu-Laban and Nieguth, Reference Abu-Laban and Nieguth2000). In more concrete form, this attention to “diversity” can be seen in published scholarship of the past two decades. In 1989, Alan Cairns warned that constitutional discourse brought out “new themes of ethnicity, culture, race, and identity which, apart from the French-English cleavage, have historically attracted limited attention from political science students in Canada” (118). Two decades later, Canadian political science may be seen to have heeded Alan Cairns's call to move beyond federalism and “French-English” relations to consider movements and organizations relating to a broader range of groups in the sphere of constitutional politics (see, for example, James, Reference James2006) and to have gone beyond strictly constitutional politics. From the bourgeoning theoretical work on “cultural minorities,” multiculturalism and liberalism which has contributed to both Canadian and international debate (Kymlicka, Reference Kymlicka1995, Reference Kymlicka1998Reference Kymlicka2007; Carens, Reference Carens2000; Kernerman, Reference Kernerman2005), to the growing work on indigenous peoples and the enduring legacy of Canada's settler-colonial foundation (Ladner, Reference Ladner and Smith2008; Alfred, Reference Alfred1995; Green,Reference Green1995), and to the continued calls to address the wide-ranging political implications of “race” and processes of racialization (Thompson, Reference Thompson2008; Fernando, Reference Fernando2006; Smith, M., Reference Smith, Brodie and Trimble2003; Stasiulis and Abu-Laban, Reference Stasiulis, Abu-Laban, Whittington and Williams2000) the discipline's potential subject matter and focal points have arguably broadened.
It is the contention of this article that the expansion of the discipline's subject matter to address a wider range of “groups” also introduces challenges that demand explicit consideration. At the micro level, one such challenge may be termed that of “multiple minorities.” Empirical observation of the internal dimensions of “groups” may reveal far greater complexity than may appear at first glance (see May et al., Reference May, May and Modood2004). For example, feminist political analysts, in particular, have drawn attention to the issue of “minorities within minorities” revealed when examining demands for gender equality rights within indigenous or racialized minority groups (Green, Reference Green2001; Deveaux, Reference Deveaux2006; Arneil et al., Reference Arneil, Deveaux, Dhamoon and Eisenberg2007; Dhamoon, Reference Dhamoon2009). This feature of contemporary feminist political science relates to a larger pattern, evident across many disciplines since the late 1980s, of feminist intersectional theorizing. Intersectionality attends to multiple and interactive categories of political difference, such as race, class and gender (Hancock, Reference Hancock2007; Stasiulis, Reference Stasiulis, Zawilski and Levine-Rasky2005; Collins, Reference Collins1990) and increasingly religion (Zine, Reference Zine2008; Razack, Reference Razack2008). Put differently, attention to multiple minorities (like intersectional theorizing) may attune analysts to power relations that may be dynamic and situational.
At first glance, these important theoretical developments ought to empower analysts to better attend to the complex “minority/majority” characteristics that emerge from consideration of Quebec (Lamoureux et al.,Reference Lamoureux, Maillé and de Sève1999; Seymour, Reference Seymour2001; Mathieu, Reference Mathieu2001 Labelle and Marhraoui, Reference Labelle, Marhraoui and Seymour2002; Cardinal and Hotte, Reference Cardinal and Hotte2002; Cardinal and Headon, Reference Cardinal and Headon2002; Cardinal, Reference Cardinal2008) or from consideration of social formations outside of Quebec where language is one important component of minority identity and claims from francophones (Cardinal, Reference Cardinal1997; Cardinal and Coderre, Reference Cardinal and Coderre1990). In practice however, feminist scholarship remains unevenly incorporated into the discipline as a whole (Abu-Laban, Reference Abu-Laban and Abu-Laban2008) and a linguistic division between French and English permeates both Canadian political science and feminist scholarship as a whole (Rocher, Reference Rocher2007; Arscott and Tremblay, Reference Arscott and Tremblay1999). As such, there has been insufficient scholarly attention given to how “multiple minorities” may take analytically relevant forms along linguistic lines. To begin to address this requires resurrecting disciplinary attention to the “French-English cleavage” (Cairns, Reference Cairns, Shugarman and Whitaker1989:118) but in a different way.
We argue that key to pursuing this in a different way requires attending to a macro-level challenge: to avoid falling under the spell of sometimes deceptive dichotomies. There is a lure to binary thinking and while such categories as “French/English,” “Black/White,” or “minority/majority” aid analytical thinking at certain levels and in certain phases of knowledge building, there is a possible danger that treating such categories in essentialized and frozen ways may lead us away from attending to complexity and nuance. Taken to its logical extreme, rigid binary thinking may feed constructions of enemies based on absolutist notions of good/evil (Harle, Reference Harle2000). Arguably, the idea of a “clash of civilizations” as propelled to fame by political scientist Samuel Huntington (Reference Huntington1993) may be seen as an example of rigid binary thinking, and thus has been the subject of postcolonial critique for its essentialism (Abu-Laban, Reference Abu-Laban, Aruri and Shuraydi2001).
The real challenge of binary thinking is that it can be tempting to find comfort in familiar evolutionary understandings concerning large-scale historical change and diverse others, be they “societies,” or “groups.” As noted by the late Charles Tilly, “we bear the nineteenth century like an incubus” (Reference Tilly1984: 1). By this, Tilly meant that the modern social sciences, including political science, grew out of particular understandings of such processes as industrialization and capitalism which have contributed, among other things, to seeing societies or groups as moving through “a succession of standard stages, each more advanced than the previous age” (Tilly, Reference Tilly1984: 11). Emerging from political science's foundational concern with citizen-state interaction, the subject matter of “diversity and democracy” may itself generate dichotomies about “modernity,” “secularism,” and “civic attachment” and their obverse—“tradition,” “religiosity” and “community attachment.” It is notable, for example, that Joseph Carens has trenchantly observed that “one question that one encounters frequently either implicitly or explicitly, is whether Muslims can be full members of liberal democratic societies given the strength of their communal identity” (Reference Carens2000: 141). Because this question problematically assumes, without qualification, the “religious,” and “communal” character of Muslims, as Carens argues, there is a need to attend to the real variability among Muslims (Reference Carens2000: 142). Equally relevant, however, is the way this question also implies the “secular” and “civic” character of liberal democratic states.
Survey research offers one important way of testing how questions of group identification and sense of belonging to Canada contribute to theory building (see, for example, Soroka et al., Reference Soroka, Johnston, Banting, Banting, Courchene and Seidle2007) and may be especially pertinent when groups are numerically large. We suggest that qualitative, historically grounded case studies can also be of tremendous value for understanding and theory building, and may be well-suited to sensitizing us to the range of “multiple minorities.” In this study, we use mostly qualitative evidence drawn from English and French-language sources to address the case of French language education rights in Canada—specifically in the province of Alberta and the city of Edmonton—to illustrate how the constitutional and political struggles characterizing this issue have evolved to include those of French ethnic background, as well as francophone groups of non-French ancestry. Put differently, “Franco-Albertans” are a minority that interfaces with the English-speaking majority, but this linguistic minority is also comprised of other minorities. By attending to the minorities within the Franco-Albertan minority we can better understand the evolution of French language education rights as well as the contradictions inherent in dichotomous understandings of secularism. As we will highlight, the ongoing struggles around the right to French language education are significant not only for understanding historic and contemporary dimensions of Canadian politics, but also for how we theorize Canadian politics. The details of this case challenge long-standing traditions of framing certain societies and particular groups in dichotomous terms and also reveal the relevance of attending to the complexity of French-speaking groups outside of Quebec in relation to both unequal and dynamic power relations.
In what follows we take a threefold approach. First, we highlight how academic and popular discussions may reflect evolutionary and dichotomous constructions which contribute to positioning certain societies and/or groups as bearers of “tradition” and others of “modernity.” We illustrate this by consideration of the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, so central to contemporary civilizational discourses, as well as the divide between French and English, so central to foundational discourses in Canadian politics and political science. Second, we analyze how French education rights in Canada, and the province of Alberta, were achieved through struggle against Anglo-conformity. Finally, we address how the Canadian and Alberta states, and constitutional interpretations, have produced a qualified “secularism.” This has compelled some francophones (including francophone Muslims) to seek increased secular space in the sphere of education. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the Alberta case in light of our central concern to avoid confounding our conceptual analyses with deceptive dichotomies, and our aim to potentiate the study of multiple minorities in Canada by returning to “the French question.”
Dichotomous Constructions: How Certain Societies and Groups Become Bearers of Tradition or Modernity
As we will review in this section, evolutionary and dichotomous thinking is deeply rooted and has been central to a variety of historic and contemporary discourses concerning a range of groups. Dichotomous constructions may be most easily identified in the justifications which accompanied expanded processes of colonial domination during the nineteenth century (Said, Reference Said1978). However, the scope goes still further because even among settler groups, a dichotomous construction developed around the notion of modernity and the race to reach it. Thus, in the Canadian context, the ethnic French collectivity, while a “Western” and “European” group central to Canada's settler-colonial foundation, has also been characterized in many popular and scholarly writings as “non-liberal,” “communal” and “non-modern” (Couture Reference Couture1991, Reference Couture2000, Reference Couture, Abu-Laban, Jhappan and Rocher2008). Within political science, the supposed backwardness of French Canada, in contrast to modern English Canada shows up in the work on liberalism in settler-colonies by Louis Hartz (Reference Hartz1955; Reference Hartz1964). It finds echoes in both intellectual and media portrayals of the “ethnic” character of Quebec nationalism in contrast to the “civic” character of (the rest of) Canada (Ignatieff, Reference Ignatieff1993; Mackey, Reference Mackey1999; Potvin, Reference Potvin2000) which in turn echoes portrayals of Britain's purported civic national character as distinct from that of France (Greenfeld, Reference Greenfeld1992).
Today, the influence of nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking is strongly seen in academic as well as political discussions of secularism and Islam. Consider, for example, Charles Taylor's important Reference Taylor2007 contribution, A Secular Age. Here, Taylor puts forward the idea that in Western states a “belief in God is no longer axiomatic” (Reference Taylor2007: 3). For Taylor, the Western world stands in contradistinction to non-Western societies precisely around secularism: “it seems to me evident that there are big differences between these societies in what it is to believe, stemming in part from the fact that belief is an option, and in some sense an embattled option in the Christian (or “post-Christian”) society, and not (or not yet) in the Muslim ones” (Reference Taylor2007: 3).
For Taylor then, secularism is a “modern” reality in societies where believing is an option. Taylor's quest in A Secular Age is to understand the conditions of secularism or how religion became an option in Western societies, like Canada. While setting out to interpret the conditions of secularism is a contributory task, Taylor's general presentation of secularism as a modern Western reality is not new. Rather, this thinking dominated the development of the social sciences (see Camic, Reference Camic1997; Tönnies, Reference Tönnies1887), perhaps most famously in the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Durkheim (Reference Durkheim1893) reached the same conclusion as Taylor by positing that the modern world eroded traditional norms, leaving the individual with options, but isolated and without the security of mechanical forms of solidarity found in family, community, tradition, and, not least, religion.
Rather than A Secular Age being a single instance, a similar logic runs through the discussion of liberal democracy and Islam given by Charles Taylor almost two decades ago. In “The Politics of Recognition,” Taylor argues that liberalism, and specifically Islam, are at odds.
For mainstream Islam, there is no question of separating politics and religion the way we have come to expect in Western liberal society. Liberalism is not a possible meeting ground for all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges…. Western liberalism is not so much an expression of the secular, postreligious outlook that happens to be popular among liberal intellectuals as a more organic outgrowth of Christianity—at least as seen from the alternative vantage point of Islam. (Taylor, Reference Taylor and Gutmann1992: 62)
As represented in the work of Charles Taylor then, a dichotomy emerges in relation to particular societies, and by extension the peoples of these societies, that spins on a series of dualisms: Christian/Muslim; West/non-West; liberal/non-liberal. The basic dichotomy, and its underlying dualisms, clearly resonates with contemporary discourses of a “clash of civilizations” (Huntington, Reference Huntington1993), as well as a long-standing style of scholarship that Edward Said (Reference Said1978) labelled “Orientalism.” Said's postcolonial critique of Orientalism condemned its dehumanizing failure to deal with the complexity of non-European societies and peoples, especially of the Middle East (Said, Reference Said1978; see also Lowe, Reference Lowe1993). A major consequence of dichotomous and evolutionary thinking is that “modernity” is implicitly, if not explicitly, portrayed in “societal” and/or “ethnic/religious” terms. This may help to explain the way in which—even before the events of September 11, 2001—many other academics besides Charles Taylor were especially fixated on Islam in discussions of the “limits” of liberal (read modern) multiculturalism and prone to ignoring the diversity among Muslims, as among other religious groups, (Carens, Reference Carens2000: 140–60). This framing also bypasses the tensions between religiosity and secularism that have existed historically and contemporaneously in predominantly Muslim polities (Smith, Reference Smith and Esposito1995).
The relevance of dichotomous and evolutionary thinking is not simply to be found in intellectual contemplations and abstract debates. Rather, it may be seen to infuse some of the most colourful political controversies that have occurred in Canada, especially in the post-September 11, 2001, period. Media and public attention to religion has undoubtedly increased in Canada as a result of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States—and in particular so has attention to Muslims as well as Muslim Canadians (Abu-Laban and Trimble, Reference Abu-Laban and Trimble2006, Reference Abu-Laban, Trimble, Sampert and Trimble2009). While Muslim-Canadians are a heterogeneous community whose roots in Canada go back to the nineteenth century, recent discussions tend to focus on the challenge Muslims are seen to pose to existing secular governmental practices.
For example, recent disputes in Ontario around faith-based arbitration using shari'a law, and in Quebec around “reasonable accommodation,” portray Muslims as a challenge to Canada's secular society and liberal democratic state institutions (Boyd, Reference Boyd, Banting, Courchene and Seidle2007; Abu-Laban and Abu-Laban, Reference Abu-Laban and Abu-Laban2007). The Ontario shari'a law debate began with the 2003 announcement by a small organization called the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice to open a business to offer family law arbitration according to shari'a law; the announcement implied this would be a “new” parallel legal system in Ontario (Boyd, Reference Boyd, Banting, Courchene and Seidle2007: 66). As detailed by Razack (Reference Razack2008:145–72) the ensuing debate in Ontario grew into a media and political frenzy and featured debates which relegated Islam and Muslims to the realm of the “pre-modern.” Central to this framing were “modern” gender equality rights, deemed to be threatened by Islam and Muslim communities (Razack, Reference Razack2008: 158). For Razack, then, gender equality rights have sometimes become appropriated into racialized discourses with Muslims serving as the (enemy) other. This argument is suggestive of the ways in which a focus on multiple minorities (in this case, Muslim women) by itself does not eradicate dichotomous thinking, and in fact may contribute to it.
In Quebec, the vigorous debate over “reasonable accommodation,” came to focus on non-Christian religious minorities, in general, and Muslims, in particular. As in Ontario, many of the examples purporting to illustrate the tension between dominant social values and/or rights and those of religious minorities were exemplified through gendered stereotypes (Abu-Laban and Abu-Laban, Reference Abu-Laban and Abu-Laban2007). Notably, in 2007 Quebec Premier Jean Charest convened a provincial Commission into the matter, headed by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor. The final report of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission is firmly set within the context of secularism, and it is seen as having “emerged as one of the key themes of the public debate we organized in the fall of 2007” (Québec, Commission de consultation, 2008: 133). “Secularism” also appears as a key descriptor in the Bouchard-Taylor Commission's understanding of the Canadian and Quebec states, since “the legislation in force in Québec and Canada, including the charters of rights and freedoms, and recognized by jurisprudence already assures the secularism of the Québec State” (Québec, Commission de consultation, 2008: 154). To this end, Bouchard and Taylor recommend that the Quebec National Assembly formalize, through a white paper process, what is already for them an implicit secular model (Québec, Commission de consultation, 2008).
In short then, in both recent scholarly discussions and popular and political debate, there is a way in which the Canadian liberal democratic state (in its federal and provincial forms) emerges as uniformly secular, in contradistinction to more communal (Muslim) minorities. Serious attention to identifying deceptive dichotomies—whether of Muslims or the French—requires acknowledging complexity. By examining the case of French-speaking education rights in Canada among those of French ethnic background and among francophone groups of non-French ancestry, we will illustrate both the relevance of attending to multiple minorities and the contradictions inherent in the portrayal of “modernity” and its civic and secular trappings as the purview of any one society, state or group.
Modern Civic Canada? The Struggle for Linguistic Rights in Alberta
Assumptions abound about the civic (non-communal or non-ethnic) character of liberal democracies, or more specifically settler-colonial societies like Canada that are modelled institutionally after Britain. The actual record shows something different: from the start of Canada's formation as a state in 1867 the Constitution accorded differential rights to indigenous peoples (“status Indians”) and to the “French” group (Kallen, Reference Kallen1988; Abu-Laban and Nieguth, Reference Abu-Laban and Nieguth2000). Moreover, a primary expression of a form of “ethnic nationalism” has been Anglo-conformity which has, among other effects, worked to deny linguistic rights to French-speakers (Couture, Reference Couture2000). The project of modelling Canada after Britain in institutional terms, then, also entailed cultural and assimilative measures on the part of the British-origin majority with communal attachment. Moreover, far from being merely an historic struggle, French-speaking collectivities outside of Quebec are still engaged in legal battles to have linguistic rights recognized (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004; Aunger, Reference Aunger2002). This section reviews both the Canadian and Alberta contexts, with special attention to the area of education.
While both French-origin and British-origin groups attempted to assert dominance over indigenous groups historically through distinct patterns of colonization (Dickason, Reference Dickason1992) it is important to note that Canada also proved to be an unequal union for European-origin groups (Ryerson, Reference Ryerson1973). As such, despite provisions of the 1867 BNA Act which held that French and English were the official languages of the legislature, in actuality English dominated, and the discourse of “two founding peoples” —while legitimizing the federal government's continued colonial jurisdiction over Aboriginal lands and affairs—faltered, at least as it concerned the aspirations of those of French origin (Abu-Laban, Reference Abu-Laban, Bickerton and Gagnon2009). It was not until 1969, when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau passed the Official Languages Act (which made clear that English and French were the official languages of Canada) that, in many cases, public servants could use these languages at work and most federal services were made available to Canadians in both languages (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 33–34).
The Official Languages Act stemmed from the findings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (B and B Commission), which was initiated by the federal government in 1963 in a context of growing national assertions in Quebec, and unrest in general among French Canadian groups in the rest of Canada (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 4–53). The B and B Commission had a mandate to inquire into and report upon the existing state of crisis in the 1960's regarding “bilingualism and biculturalism”Footnote 1 in Canada. It was also assumed that the Commission would recommend what steps should be taken to develop a better partnership between the two so-called “founding peoples,” taking into account the widely developed perception among French Canadians that they were in actuality second-class citizens (Frenette, Reference Frenette, Langlois and Létourneau2004: 10). Published in 1968, Book II of the Commission's final report dealt exclusively with education and recommended that minority language schooling be provided by the provinces. Many of these recommendations served as the basis of the minority education rights that were later included in the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 60).
The B and B Commission's recommendations also became one of the prime motivating forces behind the development of immersion programs everywhere in Canada. For example, in Alberta, after half a century of eradication of French education in the province, the Alberta School Act was amended in 1968 to permit French-language instruction in grades 3 through 12 for up to 50 per cent of the school day (Dubé, Reference Dubé1993: 708). The basic idea was to reproduce in Alberta the “French” immersion program developed in Quebec for Montreal's English-speaking population. Another change in the mid-1970s allowed the use of French in some Alberta schools for up to 80 per cent of the school day (Dubé, Reference Dubé1993: 710–11). For the Alberta government, French immersion was supposed to be applied equally regardless of mother tongue. According to the Alberta government, school boards needed to rely on large numbers of students whose mother tongue was other than French in order to establish viable classes where French was used as the language of instruction (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 142). But for many, this decision contravened the recommendations presented by the B and B Commission in 1968 about the specific needs of the French “founding people” outside Québec. It took the decision of the Supreme Court in the 1990 Mahé case to establish that a response by way of immersion education did not sufficiently meet the educational needs and rights of francophones in Alberta (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 274).
In order to understand the 1990 Mahé decision, it is important to go back to the 1970s and early 1980s. As a strong believer in a nation with two official languages, Prime Minister Trudeau wanted to ensure linguistic rights in the constitution and protect French-speaking and English-speaking individuals and their right to decide, if parents, which school their offspring attended including in Quebec (McRoberts, Reference McRoberts1997: 102). When the government of Quebec passed the Charter of the French Language in 1977, only parents who had gone to English schools in Quebec could have their children educated in English. Concern for the erosion of the educational rights of English-speaking Quebeckers thus led to serious legal battles. A portion of the Charter of the French Language was eventually struck down in 1984 by the courts in Attorney General of Quebec v. Quebec Protestant School Boards. Thus, anyone who had gone to an English language school in any province or territory could have a child or children educated in English in Quebec. Notably, while there was decreased minority language education in Quebec at the time the charter was adopted, several other provinces (where English Canadians were the majority) had no French language schools at all. It was only in 2002 that all provinces finally had minority language education schools (Commissariat aux langues officielles, 2002).
In both Quebec and in the rest of the country, however, the focus on the Canadian-based education of parents set up a situation in which immigrants entering Canada (irrespective of their education) did not have a constitutionally based language right. While Quebec's Bill 101 received attention for the manner in which it ensured the children of immigrants attended school in French, it is notable that in Ontario immigrants from countries of la Francophonie experienced difficulties in registering their children in French schools because they did not study in French in Canada (Jebwab, Reference Jebwab2002; Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 137). The larger point here is that the charter was not designed in a way that expressly considered language rights in relation to immigrants. This is broadly illustrative of the complex power relations that flow from intersectional considerations of Canada's settler-colonial foundation and evolution (Stasiulis and Jhappan, Reference Stasiulis, Jhappan, Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis1995) and, as we will detail, the presence of immigrants and their offspring has come to the fore in questions relating to Alberta francophone education since 2002.
The Mahé case originated in 1982, when three Edmontonians, Jean-Claude Mahé, Angeline Martel and Paul Dubé, expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of the French language education provided by the Alberta government to French-speaking Albertans Specifically, they were concerned that French immersion instruction (as opposed to strictly French language instruction) was not the answer for those who had French as a mother tongue. Accordingly, they submitted a proposal to the Alberta Minister of Education for a new French elementary school that would be administered by a committee of parents within an autonomous French school board (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 144). The Minister of Education told them that it was not in their policy to make such arrangements and suggested they try to do it through the public school board (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 146). The board rejected that idea. In response, Mahé and the others brought an action against the government of Alberta for violating their right to a francophone-run education system under section 23 of the new Charter or Rights and Freedoms (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 170; Dubé Reference Dubé1990).
Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees minority language educational rights to French-speaking communities outside Quebec and, to a lesser extent, English-speaking minorities in Quebec.Footnote 2 Section 23 reads:
23.(1) Citizens of Canada
a) whose first language learned and still understood is that of the English or French linguistic minority population of the province in which they reside, or
b) who have received their primary school instruction in Canada in English or French and reside in a province where the language in which they received that instruction is the language of the English or French linguistic minority population of the province, have the right to have their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in that language in that province.
(2) Citizens of Canada of whom any child has received or is receiving primary or secondary school instruction in English or French in Canada have the right to have all their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in the same language.
(3) The right of citizens of Canada under subsections (1) and (2) to have their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in the language of the English or French linguistic minority population of a province
(a) applies wherever in the province the number of children of citizens who have such a right is sufficient to warrant the provision to them out of public funds of minority language instruction; and
(b) includes, where the number of those children so warrants, the right to have them receive that instruction in minority language educational facilities provided out of public funds. (Canada, Department of Justice, 2009)
The limits suggested in Section 23 (3 a and b) were more precisely defined by the Supreme Court of Canada, starting with the 1990 ruling in Mahé v. Alberta. The Court declared that “a demand” created sufficient grounds for consideration of action. In particular, the Court held that section 23 guarantees that representation on an existing school board would not be sufficient, and held that there should be both a right to access French schools, (not merely French immersion) and also a right to govern those French schools (Supreme Court of Canada, Mahé v. Alberta, 1990). The court also said, since the ruling only affected language, that it should be interpreted in relation to denominational school rights under section 29 of the charter. Section 29 references Section 93 of the BNA Act which created, until the 1990s, Protestant and Catholic school boards in Quebec, and in the rest of Canada, creates public (non-denominational) school boards, as well as religious “separate” (Protestant or Catholic) school boards.
In other words, the ruling left sufficient room so that French-speaking minorities could have a system based on the principle of the two-way system that prevailed in English speaking Canada: public/secular boards or separate/religious boards (though separate boards only for the Protestant or Catholic faiths) (Dubé, Reference Dubé1991: 29). It should be noted, once again, that the Constitution itself was open to the presence of Christian school boards, but not those of other faiths, an issue that has come to the fore in light of growing numbers of non-Christian minorities and on grounds of principle.Footnote 3 In the specific Mahé case, by focusing on an existing schoolboard, new issues also emerged, because the struggle for language rights in Alberta was closely associated with the struggles of a historically Catholic minority.
A deeper engagement with history would suggest that the gains made in the 1982 charter and subsequent rulings by Alberta's francophones were really the outcome of struggles which took place since the nineteenth century (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 173). These struggles were also connected, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to Catholicism and the expressions of a Catholic minority. As such, language was intertwined with religion and culture in complex ways in Alberta's colonial history. To illustrate, in 1862, Father Albert Lacombe and Brother Constantine Scollen established in Fort Edmonton the very first school to operate on a regular basis west of Manitoba (Smith, D, Reference Smith and Kermoal2003: 16). The school taught English and French, as well as, significantly, the catechism of the Catholic Church and its method of serving mass (Levasseur-Ouimet, Reference Levasseur-Ouimet2000: 31). In 1859, the Grey Nuns opened a school in Lac Sainte-Anne and another one at Lac La Biche Mission three years later (Levasseur-Ouimet, Reference Levasseur-Ouimet2000: 29–32). These first schools mark the beginning of French Catholic education in Alberta, and show the close association between religion and French language protection (Painchaud, Reference Painchaud1986). However, by 1915, ten years after Alberta became a province, most of the French education system in Alberta was dismantled (Smith, D., Reference Smith and Kermoal2003: 31). Ultimately, it took the combined pressure of the B and B Commission, the charter, and the Mahé case, to change the restrictions of 1915 (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 192). The Alberta School Amendment Act of 1993 would in the end include all of the provisions needed to ensure the implementation of the Section 23 charter right of French-speaking parents in regards to minority language instruction and governance (Behiels, Reference Behiels2004: 193). However, this did not mean that conflict disappeared, as Canada's population was itself shifting as a result of immigration.
The Canadian State as a Secular State? Franco-Albertans as Multiple Minorities
While it is by now commonplace to recognize the dramatic impact of immigration to Canada in relation to themes of multiculturalism in Canada (or interculturalism in Quebec), less attention has been paid to immigration in relation to official language minorities outside Quebec, or the implications of this for scholarship as well as policy making (Abu-Laban, Reference Abu-Laban, Banting, Courchene and Seidle2007: 98–99). As a fuller consideration of Franco-Albertans attests, however, it is here that we can begin to see the relevance of taking multiple minorities into analytic account.
As shown in Table 1, of Albertans with knowledge of both French and English (as defined in the census as the ability to conduct a conversation in either language) fully 12 per cent are immigrants, and another 1 per cent are non-permanent residents; thus 13 per cent were born outside of Canada.
Table 1 Alberta: Immigrant Status and Knowledge of Both Official Languages, 2006
Source: Statistics Canada, 2006 Census of the Population, Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 97-557-XCB2006021, Ottawa.
Consideration of source countries were there is a significant proportion of French speakers is relevant since immigrants from those countries may be more likely to speak French. While Alberta has received recent immigrants from countries which are not formally part of la Francophonie but often know French (like Somalia and Algeria), it has also received immigrants from countries belonging to la Francophonie, with membership in this organization reflecting an extensive presence of the French language.
Table 2 reviews the leading Francophonie source countries of recent immigration to Alberta, demonstrating the diversity of world regions outside of Europe immigrants come from, including Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Table 2 Leading Francophonie Source Countries to Alberta: 2001–2006
Source: Statistics Canada, 2006 Census of the Population, Catalogue no. 97-557-XCB2006021, Ottawa.
As a consequence of immigration, Franco-Albertans are a linguistic minority that interfaces with the English majority and a grouping which is internally diverse and may contain immigrants, racialized (“visible”) minorities and non-Christian religious minorities like Muslims (see Couture and Bergeron, Reference Couture and Bergeron2002). Moreover, the urban character of contemporary immigration means that large Canadian cities (Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver) and medium-sized cites (like Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta) are typical immigrant destinations (Abu-Laban and Garber, Reference Abu-Laban and Garber2005). This background is necessary for understanding the shifting politics involved with the struggle over French language education rights.
The year 2002 marked a turning point once again in francophone education rights, and illustrates the complexity of the history of the struggle for language rights, its association with Catholicism and the shifting Albertan population. Specifically, in the context of growth in French language schools, in 2002 the School Act was amended to change the structure of governance for the French school boards in Alberta. The 2002 amendments created five regional authorities or school boards: four were defined as both public and Catholic while one, in Calgary, was defined as only public. Of the five regional authorities, the two in the south of the province were divided—apparently at the request of Bishop Frederick Henry from Calgary (Lévesque, Reference Lévesque2006)—according to lines corresponding to section 93 of the BNA act of 1867. Thus one is “public” and the other one is “separate Catholic.” Section 93 reads as follow:
93. In and for each Province the Legislature may exclusively make Laws in relation to Education, subject and according to the following Provisions:
(1) Nothing in any such Law shall prejudicially affect any Right or Privilege with respect to Denominational Schools which any Class of Persons has by Law in the Province at the Union. (Canada, Department of Justice, 2009)
The contemporary challenge emerges from the three other regional authorities, two in the north of the province and one in the centre, including the Edmonton region, which were uniquely defined as “combined” public and separate Catholic. In actual fact, in each of these ostensibly combined school boards, the Catholic component is stronger. It has a structural advantage based on numbers, that is, there are more representatives representing the Catholic faith (7) on the school board than those representing the public side (2). This system created serious problems, particularly in Edmonton where in the last decade immigration has considerably changed the composition of the French-speaking population (Lévesque, Reference Lévesque2006).
Currently, in the Edmonton region, there are seven French Catholic schools and only two “public” schools, mostly attended by students who recently immigrated and may hold non-Catholic faiths. However, until 2007, there was only one public school, École Gabrielle Roy. This specific public French school clearly reflects the impact of immigration on the creation of multiple minorities. In 2005 some 55 per cent of the students attending École Gabrielle Roy had origins in countries of Africa, and 35 per cent of students attending the school were Muslim (Jones, Reference Jones2005). A Somali parent credited the school's popular principal “with easing the culture shock that hinders the success of immigrant students, especially French-speaking Muslims who would have trouble adapting to a Catholic French school” (Jones, Reference Jones2005). In 2005, after the majority of Catholic councillors on the Edmonton combined board fired this same principal of École Gabrielle Roy, a group of parents from the school banded together to legally challenge Alberta's School Act (Jones, Reference Jones2005; “Campagne,” 2005).
The specific concern of these Edmonton parents was that, unlike in the south of the province (Calgary) where there were two autonomous systems (one Catholic and the other one public), in Edmonton the public element was basically prisoner to a structural Catholic majority (Griffon, Reference Griffon2005). According to these parents, the absurdity of the structure and the unfairness of the system were such that a section of the School Act stipulated that when the population of “public” students reached 30 per cent of the total in the region governed by a “mixed” school board, the Catholic component would have the right to become “separate” (Jones, Reference Jones2005). In specific point of fact, the School Act reads: “255.1(1) If, within a Region, the public school electors exceed 30 per cent of all public school electors and separate school electors and there are at least 500 students registered in the public schools, the Minister may dissolve the existing Regional authority and establish both a Public Regional authority and a Separate Regional authority” (Alberta, 2002: 157).
In 2005, these Edmonton parents, described in the document prepared by barrister Gérard Lévesque (Reference Lévesque2006) as representing different faiths and values (Catholics for a public system, Muslims, atheists, etc.), asked the province to ensure the French-speaking population of Edmonton had equal access to a public school system with no predominance of a particular faith (similar to what prevailed for the English-speaking majority or the French-speaking minority of Calgary). After obtaining an initial grant in 2006 from the federal court challenges program, a legal brief was presented to the Alberta government in 2006 (Lévesque, Reference Lévesque2006). The group is now seeking private money to continue its claim after the court challenge program was abolished by the Conservative minority government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
A focus on the Edmonton situation, in a nutshell, illustrates some of the tensions exhibited by a consideration of multiple minorities. A linguistic minority of French ethnic background in Alberta may be accurately described as “disempowered” when it was without access to institutions that were in theory guaranteed by the Constitution and the charter (Aunger, Reference Aunger and Thériault1999). At the same time, over the past decade, the predominantly Catholic ethnic French minority (a “Western” group) may be seen as exerting power over other non-French ancestry francophones (many from countries outside the West, and Muslim). With the complicity of the (mainly “Western”) English-speaking majority that controls the province, an ethnic French minority has been able to impose (“pre-modern”) religion in the sphere of educational governance. What then should we make of secularism and education?
The idea of secularism is frequently used as if its meaning was entirely clear, and its iterations, especially in states of the West, uniform. As noted, this tendency also buttresses civilizational arguments à la Huntington, in which “the West” is treated as homogeneous. However, as Tariq Modood (Reference Modood2007: 72–78) suggests, there is a difference between orientations based on “radical” secularism as opposed to “moderate” secularism. Moreover there are real existing differences between Western states as exemplified by Europe. “At the heart of secularism is a distinction between the public realm of citizens and policies and the private realm of belief and worship. While all European Union countries are clearly secular in many ways, interpretations and institutional arrangements diverge according to the dominant national religious culture and the differing project of nation-state building and thus make secularism a particular experience” (Modood and Kastoryano, Reference Modood, Kastoryano, Modood, Zapate-Barrero and Triandafyllidou2006: 163).
Viewed from the vantage point of particularity, Canada's version of secularism has some interesting features when it comes to education. It can be noted that at the time of the founding of the modern Canadian state there were denominational Christian schools (both Catholic and, in Quebec, Protestant) which were protected through the 1867 British North America Act (Section 93). More to the point, it was understood that the overarching culture of public schools was to be Christian since this was viewed as fundamental for unity (Seljak, Reference Seljak, Bramadat and Seljak2005: 180–81). As David Seljak summarizes, this pattern existed until well into the 1960s:
Public education in Canada was established by Christians to promote Canadian national values and integrate children into the emerging liberal-democratic and capitalist society. Public schools were essentially Christian —and religious minorities suffered. Canadians became sensitive to this injustice and, from the 1960s on, governments and the courts eliminated Christianity from the public schools, barring religious exercises, instruction, and supervision by church officials. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982, was especially important to this trend. (Reference Seljak, Bramadat and Seljak2005: 196)
We would suggest the case of francophone education in Alberta forms an exception to this general trend of “eliminating Christianity” from the public schools. As a consequence, while Muslims and other religious minorities may in some contexts struggle to establish religious-based independent schools (since they are, at best, partly funded, but in some provinces, like Ontario, not funded at all), the case of francophones in Alberta illustrates how religious minorities, including Muslims, may see secularism as a progressive space of struggle in the context of public schools. Indeed, the contemporary tendency to frame non-Christian minorities (particularly Muslims) in opposition to secularism is simplistic and fails to recognize that non-Christian religious minorities, including Muslim-Canadians, may struggle and seek empowerment through discourses (and spaces) of secularism. This is evidenced by their presence in the struggle to ensure French-speakers in the province have access to the public system with no predominance of a particular faith as noted above. Additionally, this call for a public system where no particular faith dominates has also come out in focus group discussions with female French-speaking Muslims in Edmonton who are racialized (or “visible”) minorities (Hyppolite, Reference Hyppolite2009).
Conclusion
We have illustrated how the empowerment of official language minorities in Edmonton led to an unusual—and what could be a potentially unconstitutional—outcome whereby the public and religious (specifically Catholic) French-language schools were merged under a single school board. The result, in the context of a multicultural and multi-religious francophone population, has been that today non-Christian religious minorities are struggling to have a public (that is, secular) French-language education system. We suggest, once again, that the contemporary tendency to frame non-Christian minorities (particularly Muslims) in opposition to secularism is simplistic and misleading.
We have reviewed discussions concerning religion in Canada, as well as the history and evolution of language rights in Canada and Alberta as they concern francophones. Three features stand out from our historically grounded case study that are relevant for analytic understanding. The first is that, irrespective of much media commentary, Muslim-Canadians (like Muslims in general) are not homogeneous actors who always oppose secularism. On the contrary, they may embrace secularity as a progressive space. The second is that the Canadian state, as a Western state, is not uniformly secular. In fact, while there may be a general trend toward the “de-Christianization” of public schools at work since the 1960s, there are spaces and places of exception in the educational sphere. The case of French-language school boards in Alberta shows how public schools were combined with the religious—to the advantage of the Catholic majority. Not least, our analysis reveals the analytic pitfalls of dichotomous constructions. In particular, to frame secularism as a characteristic of “the West” in contradistinction to “the rest,” is to miss the way in which tensions and contradictions between religion (tradition) and secularity (modernity) may play out within all societies and groups.
Attention to multiple minorities also has relevance for our understanding of Canadian politics in the twenty-first century. From the standpoint of Aboriginal peoples (and postcolonial theory) there is much to question about the discourse of “two founding peoples” that has shaped Canada's colonial past and colonial present. To the extent that this discourse implies two equivalent linguistic communities frozen across time, there is much to question from the standpoint of the constitution, rights, and policy making. Official language minorities, and in particular francophones outside Quebec, have also been shaped by immigration, and this immigration is coming from a number of sources. Arguably, better and more equitable policies —from settlement services to job training to education—might result from more explicit acknowledgement that francophones are a multicultural, multiracial and multi-religious community. This acknowledgement needs to come from policy makers, from researchers, and from civil society organizations. The struggle over language rights today cannot be separated from the heterogeneous character of francophones, including when it comes to religion or the absence thereof.
In the final analysis, our understanding of diversity and Canada's evolving liberal democracy then would benefit from attending to complexity, as well as to contradictions within societies and groups. In light of the discipline's expanding focus to deal with a wider range of groups, analysts need to attend to how multiple minorities may take analytically relevant forms along lines of long-standing and newer interest, and be wary of evolutionary and dichotomous constructions of diverse “others.”
Acknowledgments
For helpful comments we thank the anonymous reviewers of CJPS, as well as Bruce Berman and Allison Harell. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Ethnicity and Democratic Governance Major Collaborative Research Initiative Workshop on Secularism, the Secular State and Religious Diversity, Ottawa, October 31–November 2, 2008.
