Thank you for that question, Mr. Beaulieu.
Actually, beginning in 1917, in Saskatchewan, the School Act was amended to prohibit the teaching of French in French, except for, roughly, the first half hour of the day. In 1929, a new government was elected with the help of the Ku Klux Klan. At that time they abolished the right to teach French in French in its entirety.
So the French-speaking community set up the equivalent of an independent school board funded only by the francophones themselves. French was taught at the end of the school day. There was no funding and no books were provided by the state. This was provided by volunteers, and the teachers gave the exams on Saturday. After that, you had to read the local newspaper to find out whether you had got a mark of 82% or 62%. So it was a parallel structure provided by volunteers from 1912 until 1969. It was from that date that the School Act was finally changed to allow bilingual programs where you could study in French and English.
As for me, I was able to take these French classes at school for one hour a day. English soon became my dominant language. It was only when I got to university that I relearned my language. In other words, French was the spoken language on the farm, but at school it was English. We were assimilated quite quickly that way.
It should not be forgotten that children were brought up in an environment where French was not valued at all. They were told to “speak white”. Francophones were treated, unfortunately, like the First Nations were treated in the west, where their language and culture were abolished. More or less the same thing was done to francophones. Independent high schools had to be set up, and it was mainly the Catholic Church that helped set up this system. So there's a reason the number of French-speaking villages went from 80 to 12 in Saskatchewan.
Today, the rate of assimilation is so high that there are only 2,000 students in 15 francophone schools in the province. In fact, our situation is not so different from that in Alberta, British Columbia and Manitoba. We have all been through this wave of assimilation due to politician McCarthy, who made it illegal to teach French. So we've come a long way. That's why we're saying that even though section 23 was passed in 1982, in Saskatchewan we didn't see the result until 1995, when the Conseil des écoles fransaskoises was established and they started opening schools.
The federal government helped us by providing about $17 million. We had to buy outdated schools from English school boards, and that's where we started. We had to renovate those schools. We never had a new school in the Conseil des écoles fransaskoises. We're renovating old schools, and we're still waiting for new ones. So it's very difficult to live and have pride as a Fransaskois.