A chance to stand up and be counted
Census questions on rights holders a win for minority-language education, Emmanuella Lambropoulos says.
The 2021 census will offer English-speaking Quebecers a chance to play an important role in protecting our English schools.
This is because new questions are being added to better identify the number of minority-language education rights holders in each province and the number of eligible children. This is the best data our community can have to protect itself against decisions about school closures or transfers to the French sectors made by the province.
As a former teacher in the English Montreal School Board and in the Lester B. Pearson School Board, it was painful to watch several of our schools be taken away from the English-speaking community and then to watch school boards in Quebec be abolished altogether.
While education is generally the jurisdiction of the provincial government, minority-language education rights are federal. As a permanent member of the Standing Committee on Official Languages, I was among those who fought, in the last Parliament, to have Statistics Canada collect information on rights holders so that linguistic minority communities across the country could better defend their right to have their children educated in their official language.
Who is a rights holder and why does this matter? In Quebec, rights holders are parents who have the constitutional right to request educational services in English under section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as modified by section 59.
In previous years, the census asked questions about mother tongue and languages spoken at home, but in Quebec these do not establish whether a child can attend an English school. Due to Bill 101, parents can only send their children to an English school if they have a certificate of eligibility. These are generally granted if they meet the following conditions: One of the child’s parents received the major part of their elementary education in English in Canada; the child’s siblings have received a major part of their education in English in Canada; one of the child’s parents attended school in Quebec after Aug. 26, 1977, and could have been declared eligible for education in English at that time. Simply having English as a mother tongue is not sufficient.
Many parents in Quebec who are eligible to send their child to an English school opt for an education in a French school for their child instead. They may do so because they feel this will leave their children better prepared for a future in Quebec, or simply because it is more convenient to send their child to the school closest to their home. However, this allows the provincial government to say that the number of students who are enrolled in English-language schools does not justify the number of classrooms available in the English system. More recently, it has contributed to the decision to close our schools.
Knowing exactly how many students are eligible to receive an education in English in Quebec (or in French in the rest of Canada) better equips the linguistic minority communities to fight these decisions. The province would have a much tougher time in court if the English-speaking community could use the number of eligible students as a factor to be considered.
And it is significant that these new questions will appear as part of both the long-form and short-form censuses in May next year. Some public servants had suggested that the questions be added only to the longform census, which goes to 25 per cent of the population, however we advocated also including them in the short-form census, so that the answers would come from the entire population, ensuring that we get a more accurate count of rights holders in the country.
These changes to the 2021 census are a big win for Quebec’s English-speaking community.