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rfmcdonaldAlthough the embattled southern Ontario city of Windsor managed to keep its local CTV affiliate station, the Francophones of that city haven't been so lucky with their electronic mass media.
What are these Franco-Ontarians doing, living in such numbers so far away from the regions of northern and eastern Ontario where the province's Francophones are concentrated? Simply put, they're native to the area; more, their settlement predates Anglophone immigration, stretching as far back as New France.
There's a remarkable conference paper, by Jay Gitlin with S. Heath Ackley, "Freemasons and Speculators: Another Look at the Francophone Merchants of Detroit, 1996 to 1863", which calls for a reevaluation of local and American history that either ignores Francophones descended from the settlers of this part of New France or relegates them to folkloric characters. French, as is noted above, is dead in Detroit. On the Canadian side of the river, however, Franco-Ontarians survive, or at least have survived: In the long or even medium term, it's difficult to imagine how the community's near-complete assimilation is not likely.
Supporters of CBEF 540 AM were seeking an injunction to stop Societe Radio-Canada from cutting local programming at the station. Justice J. Templeton rejected the application on the basis that she did not have the jurisdiction to grant the injunction.
In a recent round of job cuts at CBC and Radio-Canada, CBEF saw its staff slashed from nine employees to two.
Nicole Larocque, president of SOS CBEF, a citizen's committee working to save the station, said the group is disappointed with the decision.
CBEF serves a francophone community of about 35,000 people, and has an audience of between 1,000 and 2,000 people per week. Local content has already been severely reduced. Before the cuts, the station produced a three-hour morning show. Now, Windsorites get only 20 minutes of local content on the show, which is piped in from Toronto.
What are these Franco-Ontarians doing, living in such numbers so far away from the regions of northern and eastern Ontario where the province's Francophones are concentrated? Simply put, they're native to the area; more, their settlement predates Anglophone immigration, stretching as far back as New France.
Le Détroit was originally a French colony that included the area on both sides of the Detroit River. To this day, three hundred years after its foundation, French language and culture still survive in the area, primarily on the Canadian side of the river. There are francophone communities in Windsor and in several little villages throughout Essex and Kent Counties — places like Rivière-aux-Canards (River Canard), LaSalle, McGregor, Tecumseh, Belle-Rivière, Pointe-aux-Roches (Stoney Point), St-Joachim, Pain Court, Grande Pointe, among others. But who are these Francophones? Where did they come from? How have they kept their language and their culture alive in the very centre of English-speaking North America?
The French founded a colony at le Détroit du lac Érié in 1701. Détroit means “strait”, and that’s exactly what the Detroit River is: the strait between Lake Erie and Lake Saint Clair. The colony was the brainchild of Antoine Cadillac, first commander of Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit. He brought soldiers, farmers and merchants, as well as members of several First Nations, to settle in the area, in order to help defend the Great Lakes and French possessions in the interior against advances by the British and their Iroquois allies. Initially, the colonists settled on the north shore of the river (on what is now the American side). But from1749 on, they began occupying the south shore as well. Some of the settlers came directly from France, others from the Saint Lawrence River Valley. They practised a bit of agriculture, but most of them relied on hunting and fishing and the fur trade to earn a living. The colony became a British possession in 1760, but Francophones continued to settle in the area. Even after the north shore became part of the United States in 1796, the Detroit River remained for all intents and purposes a French river.
After the War of 1812, new French settlement in the area pretty much came to a halt. Essex and Kent Counties began to fill up with Loyalists and new settlers from the British Isles. On the American side of the river, thousands of settlers from New England headed for the newly opened Michigan territory. The French-speaking population quickly became a minority. At more than a thousand kilometers from Montréal, they were cut off from the rest of the French-speaking world. On the American side, the French language all but died out.
But on the south shore, a new wave of immigration from the Saint Lawrence River valley would reinforce the French population. Beginning in the 1850s, because of a severe economy depression in Lower Canada, hundreds of families headed for the rich agricultural farmland of Southern Ontario. Many came to work on the construction of the Great Wester Railroad that now linked Windsor with Montréal. These new settlers cleared land all along the Canadian shore of Lake Saint Clair, east of where the first group of Francophones had settled. Most of them came to farm the land. They brought with them many of the ideas and institutions of Lower Canada and established an important French-Canadian presence from Tecumseh to Grande Pointe.
There's a remarkable conference paper, by Jay Gitlin with S. Heath Ackley, "Freemasons and Speculators: Another Look at the Francophone Merchants of Detroit, 1996 to 1863", which calls for a reevaluation of local and American history that either ignores Francophones descended from the settlers of this part of New France or relegates them to folkloric characters. French, as is noted above, is dead in Detroit. On the Canadian side of the river, however, Franco-Ontarians survive, or at least have survived: In the long or even medium term, it's difficult to imagine how the community's near-complete assimilation is not likely.
