Canada 360 | Prince Edward Island, a new Amish paradise

Anne’s Country of the Green Gable House has become, over the past five years, the most hospitable place for the Amish in all of North America. This love story between the Amish and the Island deserves to be better known in Quebec since it allows us to appreciate the contrast between Quebec interculturalism and Canadian multiculturalism. But let’s start from the beginning: who are the Amish?

The Amish constitute a religious group that could be qualified as radical Protestant, pushing further the anti-papist Protestant revolution of the XVI^e century than the Protestant churches themselves. Thus, the highest religious authority among the Amish is a bishop which is more or less drawn by lot and whose authority is limited to the perimeters of the district, an entity typically comprising about twenty families.

The Amish attend community schools until grade eight, after which the boys usually begin learning a manual trade while the girls are more often involved in tasks related to the school. care. In the United States, where approximately 350,000 Amish currently live, these schools declared legal by a Supreme Court judgment in 1972 (Wisconsin v. Yoder) remain controversial. Their detractors accuse them of making it very difficult to integrate young Amish people (and especially girls) into majority society.

In Prince Edward Island, this kind of criticism has never been made: there is a strong consensus that the state should not interfere in the traditional way of life of the Amish, especially known to the great public for their outright rejection of the car, their traditional dress and the maintenance of their Germanic language, Deitsch.

When the first Amish families from Ontario began to test the waters on the Island around 2014-2015, there was a problem: homeschooling and private schooling were then regulated by the state. In the case of homeschooling, the supervision was minimal: basically, the tutor had to have a teaching plan approved by the Ministry of Education. This obligation was, however, considered too restrictive by the Amish, who were on the verge of abandoning the migration project.

Determined to recruit them, the Liberal government of Wade MacLauchlan (2015-2019) then decided, from 2016, to modify its Schools Act to remove all forms of homeschool regulation. Amish community schools there are now 100% legal. Amish families have been flocking ever since. The three parties in the Prince Edward Island legislature agree on the importance of attracting more and making them feel at home.

Peaceful citizens

Only in the Guardian, the daily newspaper of the province, there are about thirty articles – all neutral or positive – about the Amish. The MacLauchlan government even broke new ground by developing a system unique in Canada – and the United States – allowing the Amish to have free access to the public health system without having to use a health insurance card – such ” assurance ”being in tension with their trust in God. In Ontario, New Brunswick and Manitoba, the Amish pay out of pocket when they have to go to the hospital, but not on the Island.

The Amish seem to remind Prince Edward Islanders of the myth of their idyllic past told in the novels of Maud Montgomery.

More prosaically, they are seen as peaceful citizens, paying their taxes by refraining from using several public services, including public school, but also social assistance or family allowances, which they reject for religious reasons.

Finally, settled in the east of the Island, the Amish promise to revitalize the agricultural sector of the region and, with about seven children per family, to repopulate the territory. On a North American scale, the Amish population doubles every 20 years: it is a safe bet that the Amish will establish themselves, over the coming decades, as an essential group in the public life of the province, including the It should be remembered that the total population is comparable to that of Lévis.

The attitude of the Island’s elected officials is a good illustration of the ideal of Canadian multiculturalism: society is here conceived as a welcoming land where very different groups learn to cohabit with each other without there being a group. majority to which it would be a question of integrating. In Quebec, where the supervision of homeschooling was tightened under the Legault government, Amish community schools would be illegal, respecting neither the provincial curriculum nor the compulsory education until the age of 16. . It is for this reason that there is no Amish in Quebec, where the doctrine of interculturalism prevails: society contains a majority group seeking to create a certain common culture with minority groups.

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