Thank you, Ms. Chartrand.
Hello everyone and thank you for welcoming us here.
Like any organization responsible for providing a service, francophone school boards need to know their potential clientele. The rules for admission to francophone school boards vary from province to province. Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees three categories of people the right to have their children educated in the French language in a minority setting.
The first category are Canadian citizens whose mother tongue is French. The second category are Canadian citizens who received a significant portion of their primary school instruction at a French-language school in Canada. Finally, the third category are Canadian citizens with a child who attends or attended a French-language school in Canada. These are the three categories of rights holders. Belonging to one of these three categories gives you this right.
On a number of occasions, the Supreme Court of Canada has explained that the rights provided for in section 23 of the charter apply where numbers warrant. As a result, it is vital for minority school boards and provincial and territorial governments to have complete, reliable data so that they can understand both the size and the distribution of their potential clientele. This information is also vital in order to properly evaluate the extent of their constitutional obligations under section 23 of the charter.
Currently, the census does not provide an accurate count of rights holders under section 23 of the charter. The census is the only source of data that can be used to evaluate the number of children who are eligible to attend a French-language school. Many important decisions, including regarding the construction of new schools, are based on these data.
Unfortunately, the current census form provides an incomplete picture of the number of children eligible to attend our schools. Only the first category of rights holder parents is the subject of a census question, the question regarding mother tongue.
As a result, the census data greatly underestimate the number of parents in this category as the question discourages those with more than one mother tongue from giving more than one response.
The question is worded as follows:
What is the language that this person first learned at home in childhood and still understands? [...] 1: French 2: English 3: Other—specify
Thus, respondents are asked to indicate “the” language they learned first. This refers to a single language.
What happens though in the case of a child from an exogamous—linguistically mixed—family who learned French and another language at the same time? Those individuals are encouraged to choose between their mother tongues, and they will often choose the language they speak the most frequently. Do you know what language that is? It is English, of course.
The instructions accompanying this question also encourage individuals to choose a single language. They say that the person should indicate two languages only if they used them equally before starting school and if they still understand them.
Section 23 of the charter also identifies two additional categories of rights holders, which are not based on mother tongue, but on the language of the schools attended by the parents and children. The census does not ask any questions about this. Consequently, two out of three categories of rights holders are completely ignored by the census.
The census does not ask any questions about the language of instruction, either of parents or their children. It ignores the fact that a significant number of children of exogamous couples truly learn the French language only once they are enrolled in school, and not at home as their mother tongue. When these students become adults, they are entitled to enroll their children in a French-language school, but the census does not count them.
It also ignores the fact that French-language schools in many provinces and territories can accept students whose parents are not rights holders under section 23 of the Charter, and thus grant rights under section 23 to the parents and to the child.
These shortcomings in the census have an adverse effect on the ability of FNCSF member school boards to carry out their planning, including capital planning, and to justify their requests to government for capital funding. These shortcomings have adversely effects on the vitality of minority official language communities throughout the country.
Statistics Canada must modify the mandatory short form census questionnaire so that all rights holders under section 23 of the Charter are counted. Reliable data on the number of children with at least one parent with rights under section 23 of the Charter are necessary for that provision to be fulfilled. This was also the conclusion of the Supreme Court of British Columbia last fall in a ruling in which it found that the province of British Columbia must collect that data. It is clear, however, that the simplest, most effective and reliable way to provide access to such data is through the census.
Moreover, such data should be collected for the entire country, providing numbers of rights holders in specific areas such as school catchment areas, which only the census can do.
The Government of Canada, through the census, is therefore in the best position to ensure that minority Francophone school boards, and also provincial and territorial governments, have reliable data on the number of rights holders under section 23 of the Charter.
Thank you for your attention.
We will be pleased to answer your questions.
