(Ottawa) The president of the Société de l’Acadie du Nouveau-Brunswick (SANB), Alexandre Cédric Doucet, is counting the days. By mid-February, the Premier of the country’s only officially bilingual province, Blaine Higgs, will announce whether he intends to step down or run again in the next election.
Since he became prime minister, Blaine Higgs has been constantly slapping “repeated slaps in the face of Francophones,” said Mr. Doucet, and Acadians are tired of turning the other cheek.
“Yes, it’s true that I’m counting the days,” drops Mr. Doucet on the line, joined by The Press this week. “I am only 28 years old, but this is the first time in my lifetime that I have seen a Francophone and Acadian community so disgusted by the decisions and declarations of a prime minister. Not only does it ignore the concerns of our community, but it flatly rejects them out of hand,” said Mr. Doucet.
Mr. Doucet goes so far as to ask for the support of the Government of Quebec to counter the erosion of the rights of Francophones in his province.
“Canada is an officially bilingual country. But his little pilot project in New Brunswick is going badly. And when I talk to my francophone partners in the other provinces, that worries them greatly. They don’t want to imagine what might happen in Alberta, for example, when they see our rights being snuffed out here. »
The anger is such that the SANB and about 50 organizations bought a full-page ad in the province’s daily newspapers last month to urge members of the Progressive Conservative Party to hold a vote of confidence as soon as possible. deadlines to show Mr. Higgs the way out.
Consternation
In recent months, Prime Minister Blaine Higgs abolished the French immersion program in schools – prompting the resignation of Education Minister Dominic Cardy – and left a report on reforming the Official Languages Act accumulate dust for over a year.
He toyed with the idea of abolishing the position of Commissioner of Official Languages and appointed Kris Austin, the former leader of the People’s Alliance of New Brunswick, a party hostile to official bilingualism, as Minister of Public Security within his cabinet. He later pushed the slur by appointing Mr. Austin to a committee to review the Official Languages Act.
This appointment even aroused the ire of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who considered this gesture as an affront and insisted on letting the principal concerned know it during a phone call.
But Mr. Higgs was not done causing consternation. In a statement that shocked several French-speaking leaders at the end of December, Mr. Higgs said he was taking these measures to prevent other people like him from being discriminated against because of their unilingualism…
“Higgs does not want to understand”
In the 1980s, Mr. Higgs was one of the leaders of the Confederation of Regions (CoR), a party that advocated the abolition of official bilingualism and considered the French language a nuisance in New Brunswick.
PHOTO ANDREW VAUGHAN, THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
Premier Blaine Higgs, during his victory in the September 2020 election in New Brunswick
For the majority of Acadians and Francophones, Mr. Higgs has shown his true colors since winning the majority of seats in the Legislative Assembly in the 2020 election, after leading a minority government for two years.
In recent months, there has been a strong resemblance between the decisions [Blaine Higgs] took and the proposals he wrote when he was a CoR candidate.
Alexandre Cédric Doucet, President of the Acadian Society of New Brunswick
The SANB and other organizations representing Acadians and Francophones have increased their meetings with Mr. Higgs to raise awareness over the past two years. “We did everything we could to raise awareness. But obviously he doesn’t want to understand. »
Like other regions in the country, the demographic weight of Francophones continues to decline in New Brunswick. The proportion of Francophones has increased from 31.9% in 2011 to 31.6% in 2016 to 30% in 2021.
In the last provincial elections, Mr. Higgs managed to obtain a majority mandate without garnering the support of French-speaking voters. The province was essentially split in two: ridings in the north and east of the province, where the majority of Francophones live, voted Liberal, while ridings in the south, which include the capital Fredericton and the port city of Saint John, have set their sights on the Conservatives.
Acadian demographics in freefall
Support for the Conservatives in French-speaking ridings has never been so low in 100 years, according to political scientist Gabriel Arsenault, who has conducted with his university colleague Roger Ouellette an extensive study of the results of elections in the province since 1917.
Result: Blaine Higgs can do without the support of French-speaking voters to retain power.
The 2021 census showed that Acadian demography was in free fall compared to the English-speaking community. We would therefore need a government that would be willing to adopt measures to promote the development of the Acadian and francophone community.
Alexandre Cédric Doucet, President of the Acadian Society of New Brunswick
“When you are a minority, you can never take your rights for granted. This sentence takes on a very important dimension today. We will have to stick together to defend our rights. Assimilation is a death that does not happen overnight. It’s something that happens over the long term. »
Mr. Doucet is familiar with the great moments in Acadian history. The deportation of some 10,000 Acadians by British soldiers, between 1755 and 1763, because they refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown, is one of them. For two years, the policy of the Higgs government has been akin to a “quiet deportation” of Francophones. They are stripped of their rights without expelling them from the province.