Census data shows 300,000 Quebec kids eligible for English school, 76% attend

Nearly one million Canadian children have the constitutional right to education in an official minority language, Statistics Canada said Wednesday.

The new data, which comes from the 2021 census, shows that 304,000 children in Quebec have the right to attend regular English public schools and that 593,000 children outside the province have the right to attend regular French public schools.

The census found that nearly 70 per cent of eligible school-age children attend, or have attended, a regular public school in their official minority language.

Rodrigue Landry, a professor emeritus at the Universite de Moncton and the former director of the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities, said minority language school boards have been eagerly awaiting the data.

It's the first time Statistics Canada has reported on how many people are eligible for official minority language instruction and how many take advantage of that eligibility.

"School boards, especially, are very interested in seeing these numbers because it will allow them to open schools where they are lacking facilities," said Landry, who expected the numbers would show more people are eligible than previous estimates have suggested.

Minority language schooling differs by province

The census found that Ontario has the largest number of children with French-language rights, 350,000, while New Brunswick has the largest proportion, 36 per cent of all children.

New Brunswick also had the largest proportion of children attending an official minority language school — 80.6 per cent — followed by Quebec, where 76.2 per cent of eligible children were attending English schools.

Alberta had the lowest percentage, 49.6 per cent. Across Canada, 64.7 per cent of eligible school-aged children were attending French schools.

Canadian citizens whose first language is French or who attended a French-language primary school in Canada — not French immersion — have the right to sent their children to public French-language schools. Siblings of children educated in French in Canada can also attend French-language schools.

In Quebec, children can attend public English-language schools if their parents, or a sibling, attended English primary school in Canada. Children also have the right to continue their education in the language they started in if they move provinces.

Landry said the data also illustrates where people with minority language rights live, which will help address the biggest issue that prevents people from accessing official language minority education — "the distance to the school and the lack of schools."

He noted that he testified in a court case in Saskatchewan where the only French school available was about 100 kilometres away from the child's home, making access to that school almost impossible.

The census found that Montreal, Toronto and the Ottawa-Gatineau region each had more than 100,000 eligible children.

In Quebec, the town of Cowansville in the Eastern Townships had the largest proportion of children eligible for English-language schooling at 25 per cent, followed by Gatineau at 24.5 per cent and Montreal at 22.9 per cent.

Statistics Canada said more than 90 per cent of eligible children were living within 15 kilometres of a minority official language school in 2021.

Parents weigh benefits, drawbacks

Landry, who remains an associate researcher at the institute, said the data will also provide insight into the number of children who leave minority language schools before graduating. He said previous research has shown that parents sometimes take their children out of French-language schools in an effort to prepare them to attend English universities.

The census found that 23.8 per cent of eligible school-aged children in Quebec never attended an English-language school, while 22.8 per cent of eligible children in English Canada had never studied in French, either in a regular French-language program or in a French immersion program.

Heather Collins, a Montreal parent, said that while her two children have eligibility certificates allowing them to attend school in English, she and her husband ultimately decided to send them to a French school. She said she wants her two children, five and seven, to have a level of confidence in French that she's not sure they'll get from an English school.

"To us, it was more important that they know French to the best of their ability if we're going to stay here," she said in an interview. With English spoken at home, she said, she's not worried about her children's English skills.

Linguistic factors aren't the only considerations for parents

Pemma Muzumdar of Montreal said she is leaning toward an English school for her son because the quality of education seems higher, with smaller class sizes.

"I want him to learn to speak and write in French, I want him to participate fully in French society," she said. "I think he's going to get enough English from me at home, but I am concerned about the quality of the (French) schools that are available to him."

Her four-year-old son has English-language rights in Quebec because she was educated at an English-language school in Ontario, and she said her family is deciding between a French immersion program in the English system or a French private school.