Woodstock leaders question province’s push for French school

Community leaders in Woodstock say the Holt Liberals need to make a better effort to explain why they are studying the idea of a francophone school in the area.

The announcement in December’s capital budget caught the overwhelmingly anglophone town by surprise and provoked some pushback.

“What we were hearing was a lot of confusion, and people just outright initially thought, ‘that has to be wrong,’” Mayor Trina Jones said in an interview.

At a Dec. 16 council meeting, Coun. Julie Calhoun-Williams said anyone in Woodstock “knows that you can probably count on two hands at the most” how many francophone families live there.

The town is urging the province to consider alternatives, though the ideas are unlikely to satisfy the province’s legal obligations on minority-language education under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

So far, the Liberal government has been slow to explain those obligations and head off some of the confusion playing out.

“If they were a little bit more forthcoming of where they see the numbers, that would probably relax the community,” said Jones, who sent a letter to Education Minister Claire Johnson on Jan. 14 laying out the town’s concerns.

A spokesperson said the minister was not available for an interview and did not say whether she’ll accept the letter’s invitation to visit and “continue this dialogue.” 

Statistics Canada's last census in 2021 triggered the feasibility study after identifying 295 people in the region around Woodstock who have a constitutional right to a French-language education.

“This number is sufficient to justify a study in the Woodstock–Hartland–North Carleton region,” the minister said in a written statement.

Under Section 23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, if at least one New Brunswick parent’s first language is French or if they went to school in French, their children have the right to be educated in French.

The data the province used is drawn from a wide territory around Woodstock, from as far north as Bath and Florenceville-Bristol and as far south as Nackawic, Canterbury and North Lake, a rural parish about 50 kilometres south of Woodstock.

The capital budget set aside $75,000 for the study, but the school is not a foregone conclusion.

The province will measure “the level of interest” in a school “to determine the appropriate level of service for the population,” the spokesperson said.