1941. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that during those years
identification with the British Isles should have been very high, and
that on a per capita basis recruitment figures into the Canadian
Armed Forces from B.C. during both world wars should have been
the highest for any province in Canada. This was also a period during
which anti-Orientalism ran rife, and in which non-British minorities
in general would have had to keep their profiles low.

Since World War II, there has been a rapid increase in the
percentage of the population of other European, Asian and other
origins. These accounted for 29.1% of the total in 1951, 40.1% in
1961, 47% in 1971 and 54.6% in 1981, an absolute majority. To be
sure, according to the 1981 census, 63.1% of Vancouver residents
claimed English as their mother tongue, and 78.2% English as the
language of the home. But the more distinctly British strain of
Anglophone Vancouver's identity is increasingly a thing of the past.

People of French backgrounds make up a bare 4% of Vancouver’s
1981 population, and an even scantier 1.7% (or 6800 people) claim
French as their mother language. Yet the sociological position of
French today is a good deal stronger than these figures suggest. For
French has acquired increased prestige-as one of Canada’s two offical
languages since the reforms proposed by the Royal Commission on
Bilingualism and Biculturalism of the 1960’s. One need but look at
the figures for enrollment in French language immersion schools in
Vancouver for 1985 (some 1600 out of a total elementary school
population of 28,900), at the waiting lists for further admission, to be
struck by the reversal this represents from prevailing attitudes towards
French by Vancouverites of a generation or two ago. It is on the west
side of the city, where British values once reigned supreme, that
French immersion has acquired a certain snobbishness. Middle and
upper-middle class Vancouverites see French as a potential vehicle of
upward mobility or public service recruitment for their off-spring.

Is there something more profound to be read into this phenomenon?
I can only speculate, but it is my impression that the Anglophone
Vancouverite’s sense of identity now includes, for the first time, an
acceptance of French as a constituent feature of the Canadian identity.
Not only have the ties to Britain been weakened, but the former
vision of Canada as an essentially Anglo-Saxon society with an ill-
assimilated Francophone community lingering on in Quebec, has
also given way. The very dynamism of Quebec, its culture, its
nationalism, in recent decades, has forced English Canadians, even in
the Far West, to recognize that the assimilationist aspirations of Lord
Durham cannot be realized. In a more positive vein, the French fact is
seen as one of the crucial features that distinguishes Canada from its
much more populous and powerful neighbour to the south. In sucha
context, what would once have been resisted, tooth and claw, becomes
a quite positive value.

I am not suggesting that the future of the small Francophone
community of B.C., particularly of 2nd or 3rd or 4th generation
Franco-Colombiens, is a rosy one, where preservation of the French
language and culture are concerned. It is not Maillardville or the
institutions clustered around 16th and Heather that will ensure this.
At best they can help retain some vestiges of the Francophone
contribution going back to the settlement of Vancouver and B.C. of
an earlier day.

18

LIMPORTANCE DU FRANCAIS A VANCOUVER

The future of the French language in Vancouver is linked to the
continuous migration into the city of Québecois or Francophones
from Europe. It is no less connected to the reinforced status that the
French language has come to enjoy through the immersion programmes
and through the availability, courtesy of the federal government, of a
whole range of services, especially radio and television, in French.

No one would have foreseen this a hundred years ago. Nor is it
likely that this is the vision of a city that Captain Vancouver or the
founding city fathers of 1886 would have projected. Yet one also
somehow doubts that their civic vision would have included a population
which, in its majority, like that of Canada’s as a whole, was non-
British in background. As Canada’s gateway to the Pacific, as a
magnet for immigration from other provinces and from abroad,
Vancouver has increasingly acquired a multi-ethnic character.

There is less resistance to French as Canada’s other official language,
as second- and third-generation Vancouverites have grown used to
the presence of large numbers of fellow-residents of Chinese, Punjabi,
Greek, Italian or German background. Greater ethnic pluralism has
helped break down some of the historical antagonism that English-
speaking residents in the metropolis of Canada’s westernmost province
would have once directed against the language of the major group,
French Canadians, that stood as an obstacle to a unilingually English-
speaking country. It is not that Vancouver's destiny is ever to become
a French-speaking city. But in the mosaic of 1986, a growing number
of Vancouver’s younger residents and some of its older ones have
learned to view the French language as an integral part of the Canadian
equation and, therefore, of their own.

* My thanks to my colleague, Paul Tennant, for making available
historical census data on ethnic groups in Vancouver and to the
Planning Commission, City of Vancouver, publication Vancouver
Local Areas From 1971-1981 and the Communications Depart-
ment, Vancouver School Board for more recent data.

La Fédération des Franco-Colombiens

Le chronographe Volume III no. 1-2, Printemps-Eté 1986