1. The French colony of Acadia, centered in present-day Nova Scotia, was first settled in 1604. In 1713, France ceded it to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht. There followed a period of political instability which culminated in the expulsion of more than ten thousand of the eighteen thousand Acadians in 1755. After the Treaty of Paris, some managed to return to Canada. To this day, Acadian communities exist in each of the Maritime Provinces. The clear majority of Acadians is found in northern New Brunswick.
2. By 1800, the settlement patterns of the Acadians had assumed a degree of permanence after the years of instability which followed the Expulsion Robert G. Le Blanc, “The Acadian Migrations: A Geographical Perspective,” paper presented at the biennial conference of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, Washington, D. C., Sept. 28–30, 1979. For purposes of this study, the “traditional” Acadian society can be said to have endured, in spirit if not always in fact, from this time to the mid-1960's. This society rested on an agricultural base. It depended on the Roman Catholic Church, in which Acadians were the majority, for many of the services more commonly provided by the modern state. It was characterized by a high birth rate, which enabled the Acadians to maintain their proportion of the population of New Brunswick despite some assimilation to English, despite-the Acadians' inability to assimilate large numbers of outsiders to their language and culture, and despite the arrival of countless waves of mostly English-speaking settlers, beginning with the United Empire Loyalists and continuing into the twentieth century. The impact of Anglophone immigration was offset somewhat by the arrival of French-speaking immigrants from Québec in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth.
3. This provision is significant in that only in Québec, the sole province where French was and remains the majority language, are minority language rights constitutionally guaranteed.
4. Claude-Armand Sheppard,The Law of Languages in Canada, Study No. 10 commissioned for the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1971), p. 7.
5. Thus, despite the advances ofde factobilingualism in government services in the 1960's, in 1968 Mayor Leonard Jones of Moncton could refuse to hear a submission to the city council in French. When students of the Université de Moncton were put on trial in the late 1960's, they were refused the privilege of using French in court, a refusal upheld by the Supreme Court of New Brunswick.