Content area
Full text
Canada is a country that prides itself on its immigrant origins. More than any other developed country, Canada continues to embrace immigration as a positive force for economic growth and cultural development. Canada's economic immigration program is the largest in the world with 135,000 arrivals in 2001 and 132,000 in 2000 (the U.S. had 107,000 in 2000). Canada's family immigration program (125,000 arrivals in 2001 ) is the largest in the world on a per capita basis. In addition, Canada has the most generous asylum and refugee programs in the developed world on a per capita basis. Taken together, since 1990 Canada has welcomed close to 2.7 million immigrants and since 1970 almost 5.4 million immigrants. Canada currently has a population of 30 million.
Needless to say, integration policies are important and language education is a crucial element. But, unlike most aspects of immigrant integration, language education can be controversial because it affects the primary split in Canadian politics, the relationship between the English and French communities. Put simply, the influx of immigrants has the potential to destabilize the linguistic balance. This in turn could affect national unity. Therefore, to understand government policies in the area of immigrant language education some understanding of the politics of Canadian federalism is required.
Canada is a federal union whose constitution gives responsibility for education to the 10 provincial governments. The national government is active in the education field, however, through the use of its spending power. This is to say that the national government creates and funds numerous programs, including the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada Program (LINC), which subsidize or supplement provincial-level adult and student language education programs. Immigration is a shared jurisdiction in which federal government has 'paramountcy' (federal legislation trumps provincial). Politically, however, the federal government has shown a willingness to negotiate agreements with provinces to address such issues as the selection of immigrants. In the case of the Canada-Quebec Agreement, the Quebec government gained the power to select immigrants for the province, giving added importance to the language spoken by those prospective immigrants.
The central divide in language education is between policies that apply to the province of Quebec and those that hold elsewhere. Quebec is Canada's second most populous province, with 7.2...