Hon. Rose-Marie Losier-Cool:

Honourable senators, I rise today to remind you of the long fight by both of Canada's official language minorities to be educated in their own language. As an Acadian from New Brunswick, I find it my natural role to speak to you about my corner of the country. I will therefore summarize the history of French education in my province to show you how difficult it has been to arrive at our present situation.

The story I will tell today is the story of my people, the Acadians. It is the story of our history. It has influenced my entire professional life. That is why I felt compelled to launch this inquiry so that this story, our history, could be placed on the record.

It is my fervent wish that many honourable senators will take part in this inquiry and add your own story to the record.

In 1604, at the beginning of the French colonization of Acadia, led by Pierre Dugua and Samuel de Champlain, Acadia covered a large part of what we today call the Maritime provinces. The first recorded school in Acadia opened in Port Royal, Nova Scotia, in 1642. A second school, for girls only, opened next door and was run by Jeanne Brice, the first woman teacher in Acadia. However, these two schools closed their doors when the city was captured by the British in 1654.

Confessional education continued throughout the rest of the 17th century and girls were supervised by women who belonged to the Notre-Dame, Filles de la Croix and other religious orders. But the situation changed with the British conquest of Acadia in 1710 and the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The Protestant British conquerors sent many of the French elite and members of Catholic religious communities back to France, leaving the Acadian population to fend for themselves until the 1755 deportation, the Great Upheaval that ended in 1758.

In 1764, a British decree allowed for the return of Acadian families and the rebirth of education in French. Some 20 years later, in 1784, the British colony of New Brunswick was officially created. At the time, most education was provided by the all powerful Church. Girls were generally entitled only to primary education, as they were not deemed to have enough intelligence for higher education.

In 1792, the New Brunswick Assembly started to take an interest in education. The 1802 Parish School Act, the first ever dealing with education, gave responsibility for public education in parish schools to justices of the peace in each county, with school trustees taken over. This apartheid system of mostly English-speaking schools was supplemented among the ill-educated French-speaking population with an informal network of missionaries and traveling teachers.

In 1819, the first formal public education system in English was established. Some of its teachers were Acadian, including the first documented female teacher in my province, Rosalie Cormier, in the county of Westmorland, in 1830. However, this first system was underappreciated by the public and underfunded. The School Act of 1833, revised in 1837, established a structured system for parish schools, but primary school teachers were often incompetent and student attendance was voluntary.

In the 1840s, the government began to recognize French Catholic teachers. In 1847, through revised education legislation, the government tried to improve access to education and its quality, and some Acadian French schools started to receive subsidies from the province. It is interesting to note that in 1850, there were more female than male primary school teachers. The reason is sad, though, and was based only on finances: it cost much less to pay a woman's salary than a man's, which proves that today's fight for pay equity did not just start yesterday . . .

In 1848, we see the launch of two training schools in Fredericton and Saint John. There, would-be teachers underwent a 10-week training program and New Brunswick appointed its first chief school superintendent in 1852, adopting a new Parish Schools Act.

Yet, for all these improvements, education financing remains voluntary and the responsibility of parents. Unfortunately, this lead to unintended consequences. Rather than pay to educate their children, parents preferred to have them work instead, bringing in much-needed money.

In 1852, there were only 29 officially recorded francophone teachers in New Brunswick. Two years later, an all-boys' school for future priests and teachers, Séminaire Saint-Thomas, was established in Memramcook and run by the Holy Cross Fathers. Girls went to Académie de Madawaska, which was run by the Sisters of Charity of the Immaculate Conception. In the 1870s, many other girls' schools opened across the province and were run by the Hospitallers of St. Joseph, the Sisters of Notre-Dame-du-Sacré-Cœur or the Marist Sisters. I am thinking here of the very beautiful Académie Sainte-Famille, which is located in my hometown of Tracadie, where I went to school when I was young.

In 1870, the government closed all the Training Schools in the province and replaced them with a new Normal School, which centralized teacher training in Fredericton. In 1871, in response to the failure of the 1858 act, a new act, the Act Relating to Common Schools, rendered elementary and secondary schools non-denominational and made school taxes mandatory. This new legislation incurred the wrath of the province's Catholic population, including francophones who, upon seeing the removal of their Church from the education sector, feared greater linguistic assimilation. These Catholics refused to finance an atheist school system, and provincial authorities decided to crack down on them and their priests. This repression by authorities led to an incident in Caraquet that all Acadians now know as the Louis Mailloux affair.

Later that same year, in reaction to this serious school crisis and in order to ease tensions, the Executive Council granted Catholics a limited right to catechism. It also granted francophones the right to an elementary school education in French. However, everything else fell within the secular curriculum.

In 1878, the Normal School, which provided teacher training in Fredericton, began a preparatory program that specifically targeted francophone teachers. This program became a proper department in 1884. In 1898, the seminary in Memramcook officially became Université Saint-Joseph, the province's first francophone university. In 1899, the priests of the Congregation of Jesus and Mary founded the Collège du Sacré-Cœur in Caraquet. It became a university in 1914 and, in 1916, it moved to Bathurst to a magnificent building that still exists and is still used as a school today. If I seem to be dwelling on the role that religious communities played in education in my province, it is because they were extremely important to French education.

The convents run by the sisters trained many teachers who helped to educate generations of children, as well as to preserve the French language and Acadian culture. Classical colleges run by priests — as along with the francophone department of the Normal School in Fredericton and its first director, Alphée Belliveau — helped to train educators.

However, it was not really until the beginning of the 20th century that Acadians became convinced that a good education would ensure a strong future and took charge on all fronts: occupational training, textbooks, resources, establishment of classes by education level, literacy enhancement and everything else. In 1911, the first meeting of New Brunswick French teachers took place in Saint-Louis-de-Kent for the purposes of discussion and training. Around the same time, the first Acadian textbooks were published for the province's francophone minority. In 1922, the first major reform of education legislation took place.

Please remember that French was not yet officially accepted in schools at that time. The government waited until 1928 before it accepted the creation of bilingual schools in the province, thereby granting legal status to French. A year later, however, the government rescinded this status under pressure from provincial Orangemen. In 1932 the Macfarlane Inquiry, set up the year before, tabled its report on the status of the provincial school system. That inquiry recommended that primary education be given in the child's mother tongue. This would not happen until the 1940s, however, again owing to obstruction by the provincial Orangemen.

In 1936, the New Brunswick Department of Education was officially established. That same year, francophone teachers were trained during the summer at Université St-Joseph in Memramcook and Université du Sacré-Coeur in Bathurst. Also in 1936, the Association acadienne d'éducation was established; in 1946 it became the Association des instituteurs acadiens, and in 1967 the Association des enseignants francophones du Nouveau-Brunswick, or AEFNB. In 1983, I had the honour of being the first woman president of that association.

In 1960, the government of the honourable Louis J. Robichaud took office. That gave a great deal of hope to Acadians in my province and brought new reforms in the provincial education sector. The Université de Moncton, the third Francophone university — the first secular one in the province — was established. It incorporated Memramcook's Université St-Joseph and Bathurst's Université Sacré-Coeur.

In 1967, in keeping with its "Equal Opportunity for All" program, the government standardized school taxes and teachers' salaries across the province and took over funding of the education system from the counties. This ended the disparity in financial means available to schools. In 1968, the government opened the École normale francophone on the campus of the Université de Moncton, which later became the university's faculty of education.

Taking over from the Honourable Louis J. Robichaud in 1970, the government of the Honourable Richard Hatfield continued to implement his predecessor's reforms and 1972 saw the launch of the 11-campus provincial network of the New Brunswick Community College. The community college provided technical and professional training in a number of fields, thereby allowing high school graduates to train for a job without going through university. Of the 11 campuses of the NBCC, five are French-speaking, including one in the Acadian peninsula in northeastern New Brunswick. The other six are English-speaking.

In 1973, a joint (English and French) committee of the Department of Education conducted an indepth review of the province's public education system. The following year, the department was divided into three large sections: one for French education, the second for English education, and the third section for administration and finances to support the first two sections. It was duality in education. In 1980, the province was divided into 14 French or English school boards and the bilingual school boards that offended the francophone population were abolished.

In 1981, the provincial government passed legislation recognizing the equality of the official language communities. Shortly afterward, the government overhauled the school act to implement a language-based school system, signalling the end of the bilingual schools that were considered to be tools for linguistic assimilation.

The most recent education reform occurred in 1985. To obtain a secondary school diploma used to require the successful completion of mandatory courses and passing departmental exams. In 1991, the province created a public network of optional kindergartens. In May 2010, the Community College and its 11 campuses began a transition process to branch off from the Department of Education and become an independent business by March 2013.

Next summer, as part of its budget cuts, the government plans to cut the number of school boards in half and keep only four anglophone and three francophone boards.

And that, honourable senators is the history of French education in my province. You will agree that the road was hard and that the human and financial costs that were paid for such a long time to get to where we are now were fully warranted. The benefits we now enjoy are the result of a long struggle, which we hope is now over, at least in New Brunswick.

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