Manitoba school question

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School in Wood Lake, Manitoba

The Manitoba Schools Question (English Manitoba Schools Question , French Question des écoles du Manitoba ) describes a crisis that dominated political life in Canada at the end of the 19th century . In 1890, the government of the province of Manitoba stopped funding Catholic schools and revoked the status of French as an official language. Although a compromise was found in 1896, the unconstitutional measure meant that French was almost completely out of use in western Canada .

causes

In 1870 Manitoba joined the Canadian Confederation as the fifth province after negotiations between the federal government and the Provisional Government of Louis Riel . The law to create the province, the Manitoba Act , provided, among other things, a religious school system, as it already existed in a similar form in Québec . Shortly before the law came into force, far more settlers arrived from the English-speaking part of Canada, particularly from Ontario , than before the Red River Rebellion , which had partially been directed against them. The Manitoba Act gave the English and French languages, as well as Protestant and Catholic schools, equal rights. But as early as the 1880s, the mostly Protestant English speakers made up the vast majority of the population. Many French-speaking Métis had left the province to the west, and settlers from Québec were far fewer in number than those from Ontario. After the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway , the influx of English-speaking settlers continued to increase.

One of the fiercest opponents of separate French and English schools was Dalton McCarthy , who founded the Equal Rights Association in 1889 . By “equal rights”, McCarthy understood fairer representation in the province rather than privileges for the increasingly smaller francophone population. He was assisted by Joseph Martin , the provincial Attorney General and later Prime Minister of British Columbia .

crisis

In March 1890, Thomas Greenway's provincial government revoked French from its status as an official language and also stopped funding from the state for Catholic schools. That was a clear violation of the Manitoba Act, enacted twenty years earlier. On the advice of Prime Minister John Macdonald of Canada, Manitoba's Catholics sued the provincial supreme court, which upheld the law. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled under the Manitoba Act. The final instance, the Justice Committee of the British Privy Council , overturned the judgment and in 1895 supported the provincial government's decision. In the meantime, the government of the Northwest Territories had also abolished French as the official language in 1892.

According to the British North America Act , which created the Canadian state, the federal government could have intervened despite the decision of the Privy Council. The Manitoba school question caused a split within the ruling Conservative Party from the start , particularly because the party was not led by a strong figure after Macdonald's death in 1891. In January 1896, the government now led by Mackenzie Bowell installed a new Catholic school board. Several anti-Catholic ministers then left the government in protest and Prime Minister Bowell had to call a new election in April of the same year.

Further development

The school conflict in Manitoba was the main subject of the 1896 general election . The Conservative Party was hopelessly divided; their MPs in Québec were enraged that the French language was suppressed in the West, while the Ontario MPs sided with the Orange Order , which fomented hatred against Catholics. The Liberal Party , led by Wilfrid Laurier , a Francophone Catholic, benefited from the split in the Conservatives and achieved a clear absolute majority.

Laurier negotiated a compromise with Greenway. Catholic classes should continue to be allowed in public schools and French should be used again as the language of instruction. However, the regulation only affected schools where there were at least ten French-speaking students. A Catholic school council was also created, but had to do without financial support from the provincial government. Many Catholics rejected the compromise and even turned to Pope Leo XIII. He sent observers and, like Laurier in his encyclical Affari vos, came to the conclusion that, given the small number of Catholics remaining, the compromise was fair.

The compromise did not affect the status of French as an official language, with the result that its use continued to decline. In 1916 the guarantee of French-language teaching was removed from the compromise and English was from now on the only language of instruction in Manitoba. Along with the execution of Louis Riel in 1885, the Manitoba school issue was one of the reasons that French-Canadian nationalism took off in Québec.

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