D’Arcy McGee students take French-speaking honours

/in /by

The West Quebec Post

[…] Improved French skills are a key aspiration for Quebec’s anglophone youth as highlighted in the Quebec Community Groups Network’s recent study, “Creating Spaces”. Read more…



Du bilinguisme à la dualité

/in , /by

Le Droit, Pierre-André Doucet

D’emblée, le bilinguisme outille considérablement des communautés à surmonter l’hétérogénéité, notamment en permettant aux individus qui le pratiquent de s’imprégner de deux langues, en plus de deux cultures et conceptions du monde. D’ailleurs, par sa facilitation de l’acquisition d’une citoyenneté véritablement mondiale, il est encore plus pertinent dans un xxiesiècle globalisé. Le Canada doit délaisser le bilinguisme au profit de la dualité linguistique. Certes, les deux concepts se ressemblent beaucoup: pourtant, les débats houleux opposant présentement la Société des Acadiens du Nouveau-Brunswick à leur gouvernement provincial (la première craignant une «rebilinguisation» menaçant l’autonomie de la communauté francophone et acadienne, témoignent d’une différence notoire.[…] Read more…

Advice for anglos: Stay optimistic

/in /by

The Gazette, by Jan Ravensbergen

Across English-speaking Quebec these days, “the optimists have the upper hand” over pessimists, Graham Fraser, Canada’s commissioner of official languages, said yesterday in Montreal. He was speaking to a group of more than 80 people to help fill gaps in knowledge among the anglophone community. Read more…

Optimism on the rise, Quebec anglo told

/in /by

The Gazette, by Jan Ravensbergen

MONTREAL – Within English-speaking Quebec these days, “the optimists have the upper hand,” Graham Fraser, Canada’s commissioner of official languages, said Friday […] He had departed from his prepared text to make the remarks about Sabia while speaking to a Montreal group linked with Concordia University and l’Université de Moncton. The group of more than 80 was celebrating the launch last October of the Quebec English-Speaking Communities Research Network, a fledgling network to connect academic researchers across the province. Read more…

Anglos warm to new cultural funding

/in /by

The Gaspé Spec

MONTREAL – Organizations serving English-speaking Quebec say that a new national funding program for arts, culture and heritage has the potential to nurture a cultural renaissance among official language minority communities across the country. “Recognizing the value of arts, culture and heritage opens the door to exciting new ways of strenghthening Canada’s minority language communities,” said Guy Rodgers, president of the English Language Arts Network (ELAN) following lastweek’s announcement that Ottawa will spend $3.5 million a year to help and support and strenghthen the rich cultural, artistic, and heritage expression of francophone and anglophone minorities. Read more…

Anglos warm to new cultural funding

/in /by

The Monitor, Toula Foscolos

Organizations serving English-speaking Quebec say that a new national funding program for arts, culture and heritage has the potential to nurture a cultural renaissance among official language minority communities across the country.

“Recognizing the value of arts, culture and heritage opens the door to exciting new ways of strengthening Canada’s minority language communities,” said Guy Rodgers, president of the English Language Arts Network (ELAN) following last week’s announcement that Ottawa will spend $3.5 million a year to help support and strengthen the rich cultural, artistic, and heritage expression of Francophone and Anglophone minorities.

[…] ELAN and QAHN have worked closely with the Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN) to come up with ideas on how this new fund can provide maximum impact and benefit for Canada’s minority language communities. These groups recently developed a joint policy framework that defines key areas of intervention over the next five years. The Arts, Culture and Heritage Policy Framework for English-speaking Quebec is available on www.qcgn.ca. Read more…

Que.’s anglophones battling ‘brain drain’: Group

/in /by

Canwest News Service, Mike De Souza

OTTAWA – English communities, institutions and services in Quebec have weakened over the past four decades, and are in need federal support to stop a brain drain, an umbrella group for the province’s anglophones said in Parliament on Monday.

”English-speaking Quebec faces the particular challenge of being a minority within a minority which, let’s face it, is not always recognized as such by key decision-makers and opinion-leaders,” said Robert Donnelly, president of the Quebec Community Groups Network at a Senate hearing on Canada’s official languages. ”The answer is not to divide the existing pie differently because the francophone minority is also in need of fair funding. We just need a bigger pie.” Read more…

New program to defend minority language rights

/in /by

Canwest News Service, Mike De Souza

OTTAWA – The Conservative government has told Canada’s English- and French-speaking minority communities it will create a watchdog panel to defend their language rights when ti launches a new $1.5-million legal support program, Canwest News Service has learned.

The new program, which would replace a court challenges program for minority rights that was scrapped by the Stephen Harper government in 2006, is expected to be up and running by the end of 2009. Officials from the Department of Canadian Heritage provided some of the details during a recent meeting with board members of an umbrella group representing Quebec’s anglophone population.

”The news is looking pretty interesting,” said Robert Donnelly, president of the Quebec Community Groups Network. ”The announcement will be made, we’re told, in the next few days.” Read more…

Linguistic minority program still in limbo

/in /by

Canwest News Service, Mike De Souza

OTTAWA – A $1.5 million program supporting English and French-speaking minority groups in Canada is still in limbo, nearly a year after it was introduced.

The Harper government announced the initiativelast June as part of a settelement over its decision to scrap a court challenges program for minority rights. But it has not yet announced details of the program or set up an expert panel that is required to manage it.

Representatives of anglophone and francophone groups said they are pleased the government has consulted them extensively in recent months to develop the structure of a new program, but they are growing impationt about the pace of progress.

”Obviously, anything that gets a priority could be moving faster than this,” said Robert Donnelly, president of the Quebec Community Groups Network, an umbrella organization that represents the province’s anglophone community. Read more…

Biliterate is the new bilingual

/in /by

The McGill Daily, John Lapsley

‘McGill students’ French stagnates in all-anglo environment’

McGill students seeking to integrate themselves into Quebec culture should strive for biliteracy, not simply bilingualism, according to a recent report released by a Quebec community group that represents the anglo minority in Quebec.
The report, Creating Spaces, was commissioned by the Quebec Community Group Network, and called biliteracy “a powerful tool to tackle many multi-faceted barriers English-speakers face in participating fully in Quebec society.” It also declared full biliteracy for Quebec youth as one of its top goals. Bilingualism designates functionality in both languages without specifying the user’s full capacity in either, and biliteracy is best described as full spoken, reading, and written fluency in two languages. Read more…

Encouraging news about young-adult anglos

/in /by

The Gazette, David Johnston

Another stereotype up-ended: Most young anglophones born and raised in Quebec do not want to head off to better-paid pastures elsewhere.
This news appeared in statistical form in survey results made public last month, and in personal form in a Gazette series which began yesterday.

Reporter David Johnston, talking to a number of young-adult anglos, found that most of them speak better French than their parents’ generation, and so find it easier to plan their lives here. That attitude is surely linked to 2006 census data, which said decades of decline in Quebec’s anglophone population finally stopped between 2001 and 2006, when the anglo population actually increased a bit.

It resonates, too, with what the anglo-organizations umbrella group called the Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN) is reporting. The QCGN’s survey of 400 English-speaking Quebecers between the ages of 16 and 29 found that a clear majority want to remain in Quebec, and to move past the old “two solitudes,” truly embrace bilingualism, and share their lives with franco-phone friends and work colleagues. In their different ways, many of the people our man Johnston interviewed said the same things. Read more…

Here to stay: the hip Anglo

/in /by

The Gazette, David Johnston

Ask a couple of twentysomething anglophones like Ryan Bedic and Brian Abraham hot many of their friends have left Quebec and you are likely to draw a long pause. it isn’t that they need time to count up all of those who have left. It’s that they have trouble coming up with the name of anyone in their largely English-speaking entourage in Montreal who has left.

[…] ”This psycology, this sense of persistent losses, has been broken,” says [Jack] Jedwab. Anglo community leaders aren’t so sure. They’re not comfortable with the notion of a renaissance. Their worry, as Jedwab sees it, is that governments will respond to the census findings of growth by reducing financial support to all the different little anglophone community groups in Quebec.

”That’s the concern some people have,” Jedwab says. ”And so the good news, in a perverse sort of way, is really bad news. People are afraid that governments will say, ”Well, the anglophones are doing very well, thank you very much. What kind of support do they really need anymore”?

Robert Donnelly, president of the Quebec Community Groups Network, the main umbrella group for all the anglophone community organizations in Quebec, says the census results need to be interpreted with caution. Read more…

Brain drain, brain gain

/in /by

The Gazette, David Johnston

Although the anglophone community of Quebec has started to grow again after four decades of decline, concerns about a brain drain continue.

The most recent study that looked at the education levels of “leavers” and “stayers” found a clear correlation between years of schooling and the likelihood of leaving Quebec.

The study, of 2001 census data, by researchers William Floch of the federal Heritage Department and sociologist Joanne Pocock of Carleton University, found two in every three Quebec-born anglos with master’s degrees were no longer living in Quebec in 2001. For Ph.D.s, the brain drain was equal to three in every four. Read more…

Economic downturn might keep young anglos here

/in /by

The Gazette, David Johnston

Although political and linguistic uncertainty is receding in Quebec, a new era of economic uncertainty is beginning to take hold. The unfolding new economic downturn has brought a new dimension to the decision of young anglophones to stay or leave Quebec.

“This time around, the grass won’t be any greener on the other side of the hill,” says Carlos Leitao, chief economist at Laurentian Bank Securities in Montreal. Jobs likely won’t be any easier to find in the rest of Canada, he says. In fact, he says employment prospects could turn out to be better here. Read more…

Pearson hears parents out

/in /by

The Chronicle, Raffy Boudjikanian

About sixty parents showed up a lively evening discussion at Macdonald High School focusing on Lester B. Pearson school board’s French-language, special needs and magnet school progams. (Chronicle, Éric Carrière) Teaching French at English schools, tending to children with special needs and the magnet school program were the three main topics discussed by a group of about 60 parents and Lester B. Pearson officials at a “town hall”-style meeting held yesterday night at Ste. Anne de Bellevue’s Macdonald High School. “It’s quite difficult to meet every child’s needs,” said Karen Jones, a Grade 7-8 teacher at Macdonald High School, adding it is “ridiculous” to expect teachers and parents to be able to do so, as she garnered applause from several sitting in the audience around her. Of the three issues discussed during the evening, opinions seemed to differ most sharply on the school board’s inclusion policy for children with special needs.

[…] However, one parent who did not reveal his name when speaking pointed to a recent Quebec Community Groups Network study that revealed many anglophone youth in the province want to learn more French. The network, a non-profit organization that advocates English minority rights across the province, surveyed 400 English-speaking youth in different anglophone communities and found they were looking to learn more French, he said. Read more…