There’s a certain peril to being francophone in Toronto. Heidi Pospisil, for example, remembers calling loudly to her daughter in French one day as they walked down the sidewalk.
“‘Did you put underwear on today?’” she hollered.
“She’s 3 – she sometimes forgets,” she explained apologetically.
Normally, a passersby in Canada’s biggest city can be counted on not to understand a word. But, as Ms. Pospisil has discovered near her home in Toronto’s east end, strangers sometimes glance her way with stifled laughter.
Those moments may be cringe worthy, but they are often one of the few ways for francophones in Toronto to find each other. Many, after all, speak perfect English, blending in among neighbours and colleagues. Only at home do they switch languages, hoping to steep their children in French.
For their children, the gradual blending-in can be even harder to fight: Despite guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, French-only schools in Toronto have historically been few and far between. For decades, a real fear for many francophones settling in Hogtown has been that they would fail to pass on their language and culture to their offspring.
A once-in-a-generation opportunity is starting to change that, and it promises a bigger cultural shift in Toronto. As enrolment in English-language schools declines, a crop of school properties is being put up for sale and the region’s two French school boards have jumped to buy. What no one predicted is the snowball effect that has followed each new school opening, drawing “invisible francophones” out of a reluctant assimilation and making new connections between them.
Lianne Doucet, a mother of three in Toronto’s Leslieville neighbourhood, laughs and lowers her voice to a spooky register. “We always say, ‘We’re all around you.’” (more...)
Can Francophone immigration renew Catholic education in Toronto?
No comments:
Post a Comment