Much ado about petits changements
Ontario isn’t undermining francophones
Judging by the reaction of some of Canada’s top political leaders, Ontario must have imposed pretty significant cuts on services for its francophone citizens.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: “I was deeply disappointed by the decision of the Ontario government to cut services and protections for the francophone minorities in Ontario.”
Federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has “concerns” about the cancellation of a proposed francophone university.
Quebec Premier François Legault is “disappointed” by the changes announced last week by Premier Doug Ford’s government.
So what, exactly, is it that Ford is doing to raise all of this concern? It’s time to get out the policy microscope and examine the changes.
Yes, it’s true the Frenchlanguage services no longer will have a standalone office to handle complaints. The commissioner will be let go and the work of the office will be rolled into that of the ombudsman’s operation. That’s a small symbolic change, but francophones still will have an avenue of complaint if they find services inadequate. The disbanded office received about 200 legitimate complaints a year, with a budget of $1.2 million. That’s something the ombudsman, a francophone, is quite capable of handling.
The 2017 Ontario Liberal promise to create a Frenchlanguage university doesn’t stand up to logical examination. The number of post-secondary students in Ontario has been declining. That’s one of the reasons the new provincial government cancelled three other proposed university campuses. Why add universities when the ones we have are struggling to get enough students?
When it comes to Frenchlanguage education, Ontario students are far from disadvantaged.
The University of Ottawa is the largest bilingual university in the world and nearly 13,000 of its more than 40,000 students are French speakers. Frenchlanguage education already is offered at Laurentian University, the University of Sudbury, Université de Hearst, the Glendon Campus of York University and two community colleges.
The new francophone university, as proposed, would have been a petite institution indeed, starting with 300 students in 2020, rising to 2,000 over the next decade. It would have been located in Toronto, that hotbed of Franco-Ontarian culture, where the Dalton McGuinty Liberals already spent $20 million to make Glendon a centre of excellence in French-language education. The new university had a startup budget of $83.5 million, with half of that expected to come from the federal government.
The point of pride for Franco-Ontarians was that the promised university would have been fully controlled by francophones, although with the province holding the purse strings at all universities, that would have been largely symbolic.
The other piece in the assault on Franco-Ontarians is the elimination of the nominally standalone Ministry of Francophone Affairs, returning the agency that looks after francophones to a mere Office of Francophone Affairs, the same standing it had until a little over a year ago. The government will spend $6.1 million on the office this year, higher than either of the last two years.
Franco-Ontarians always are vigilant about protecting their culture, and so they should be. It’s an important part of the historical makeup of Ontario, and their percentage of the Ontario population is shrinking.
That doesn’t mean services of perceived value to francophones should be exempt from government cuts. The provincial government is on a deficit-driven mission to cut marginal spending so it can maintain essential services such as the not one, but two, types of French-language school boards Ontario supports.
Franco-Ontarians should be confident about their position in Ontario. They are still an important voting bloc, especially in eastern and northern ridings. The evidence of that is the number of political leaders rushing to score cheap political points by sucking up to them.
When most politicians see a voting bloc, they instinctively pander to it. That’s why Ontario had a standalone language commissioner, a fake francophone affairs ministry and the promise of an unneeded university. All of those ideas were predicated on attracting votes, not need or rationality.