Identity and Politics

Central to Acadian life since the opening of the eighteenth century has been their struggle for recognition as a people. Even today the Acadians have trouble convincing others that they are a truly distinctive community, not merely an appendage of Quebec or a peculiar, long-lasting fossil of seventeenth-century France. They are often considered, as Antonine Maillet has remarked, a people whose best characteristics are those of strong French cultures rooted elsewhere and whose worst derive from their own innate weakness. For many, they are charming but not an important part of modern North American society. Their behavioral patterns are believed to be those of a classic, almost mythic, folk culture, one dominated by ideas of the traditional, the spontaneous, and the personal. They are given credit for no unique political structure and there is no understanding of the extent to which Acadians have either reflected or created any distinctive cultural or intellectual heritage. As a speaker at a conference in France in the early 1980s remarked, the Acadian communities of the Maritimes are perceived as a fragile decorative lace on the stuffy business suit of North American culture, an embroidery with a probable half-life of another generation.

Such attitudes are nothing new. One of the major causes of the deportation of 1755 was the refusal of both English and French to accept the self-proclaimed definition of the Acadians as “les Français neutres.” At the international conferences that settled its fate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Acadia, like other colonial settlements, was treated as nothing more than a part of a larger empire. The fact that the majority of its inhabitants spoke French and were Catholic served only to confirm this impression. French officials, whether they lived along the Seine or along the St Lawrence, believed that the Acadians ought to have a first loyalty to France, and English officials, whether they lived in Boston or in London, were equally convinced that the Acadians were indeed loyal to France.

As the Seven Years’ War ended there were some thousand Acadian exiles in England, held in camps near to or in Liverpool, Southampton, Penryn, Falmouth, and Bristol. Despite a long exile that had culminated in five years’ imprisonment in England, they retained enough spirit to inform His Majesty’s government that when hostilities were concluded they wished to return to their lands, to be compensated for the grief they had suffered, and to receive a promise that they would be given due warning should England and France propose to use their territory as a battlefield again, in order that they might evacuate for the duration of the hostilities. Little notice was taken of their wishes by either the French or the English and in 1763 these Acadians resumed their travels, this time bound for France. Yet even there, where the surrounding culture was both French and Catholic, the Acadians’ perception of themselves as a distinctive people remained, as did their ability to work within the local political system. At one point, the French officials proposed the organization of all Acadians in exile in that country (there were perhaps some two thousand) into four villages on Belle Île, a rocky island just off the south coast of Brittany. The Acadian response was, “We will discuss this with the heads of nation.” Outraged, the French replied, “There is only one nation and that is France.”

In the opening years of the nineteenth century, the political impact of the Acadians upon the Maritimes was minimal. It was not until 1830 that the Test Act, legislation barring from public office all Catholics as well as Protestants outside the Church of England, was repealed. The first Acadian members of the Nova Scotia legislature were Simon d’Entremont from Pubnico, elected in 1837, and Frédéric-Armand Robichaud from Metaghan, elected that same year but prevented from taking his seat by illness. In 1846 Amand Landry of Westmoreland County was elected to the New Brunswick legislature, and he was re-elected in 1853, 1854, 1856, and from 1861 to 1871. Stanislas Poirier was elected to the Prince Edward Island legislature in 1854.

The Acadian attitude towards Confederation was as complex as that of any other Maritime group but the majority appears to have opposed it. In the election of 1867 the only New Brunswick counties that returned anti-Confederates were Westmoreland, Gloucester, and Kent, all of which had large numbers of Acadian voters. Acadian opposition to Confederation has been ascribed to their perception of Quebec as a foreign land, but a more likely explanation is the Confederation agreement’s lack of any recognition of Acadian rights. In any case, it was in the years following 1867 that the Acadians showed a new awareness of the possibilities of political action.

The Acadians’ heightened political consciousness was first evident in the context of the national conventions of 1881 (Memramcook), Miscouche (1884), and Pointe de l’Église (1890). At these conventions the Acadians selected both a different patron saint and a different flag from those of Quebec francophones. However much representatives from Quebec, and in particular Father Camille Lefebvre, the well-loved head of the Collège Saint-Joseph, urged them to emphasize the common past of all French-speaking Canadians, the Acadians insisted on their own distinct identity. Thus, in the same way as Acadian petitioners, during the years of exile, had chosen specific events from their past for the purposes of argument with civil authorities, so their descendants in the nineteenth century emphasized that part of their heritage which separated them from the French migrants to the St Lawrence valley.

During the 1880s and 1890s the Acadian portrayal of the deportation stressed the essential neutrality of the local population and, therefore, the needlessness of their exile. According to this version of events, the Acadians were victims pure and simple, people who had been unjustly treated but were still undefeated: their story was one of moral victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Strikingly, this interpretation contained no festering anger against the perpetrators of the deportation, just a sense of Acadian righteousness. It is a myth not of conquest but of survival. Though it was by no means the sole unifying myth for Acadian political action – hostility to the English certainly existed – it certainly was the dominant one. Just how pervasive it was is indicated by the Acadians’ adoption in the late nineteenth century of Longfellow’s Evangeline as their national poem.

In the years to come, the Acadians would need every ounce of conviction about the uniqueness of their identity, for anglophone hostility to their emerging political power was strong in all three Maritime provinces and Quebec’s understanding of Acadian ambitions was often less than sympathetic. In spite of these challenges, between 1880 and 1960 Acadians gradually took their place within the political arena of Canada at all three levels of government, municipal, provincial, and federal. In Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, the Acadian percentage of the voting population has been too small to allow them to play a determining role in the political process. However, in New Brunswick, at both the federal and provincial levels, Acadians have had greater political influence. Their political allegiance has, perhaps, been given more often to the Liberals than to the Conservatives, but this has by no means been a hard and fast rule.

In New Brunswick, Lévite Thériault was elected for Victoria in 1868 as a Conservative and was the first francophone to serve within the provincial cabinet, from which he resigned in 1871 in the wake of controversy surrounding his initial support of the Common School Act that restricted francophone rights. The first Acadian cabinet minister in Nova Scotia was Charles Boudrot, elected in 1883. Two years later Pascal Poirier was appointed to the Senate, where he remained until his death in 1933. Since 1907 there has also been an Acadian in the Senate from Nova Scotia, and from 1922 there have usually been three Acadian senators from New Brunswick.

The Acadians reaction to conscription in World War I was mixed. Like the Acadian choice of symbols at the time of the Acadian national conventions of the previous century, their position in the conscription crisis was entangled in the web of Acadian-Quebec relations. There are two important issues that must be addressed in considering this issue: the extent to which the Acadian elite and the generality of the Acadian population disagreed with one another; and the degree to which the Acadians’ response to conscription differed from that of other Maritimers. As to the first question, there is no doubt that certain members of the Acadian elite strongly supported participation in the war as well as conscription; however, such views were not universal among the elite – Acadian newspapers, for example, expressed differing opinions and divided along party lines. With regard to the second issue, a distinction has to be made between support for enlistment and support for conscription. From 1915 Acadians supported their own battalion, the 165th, and enlisted in other Maritime battalions, including the 132nd, mobilized at Chatham, New Brunswick, and the 105th, which was mobilized at Charlottetown. The evidence suggests that Acadian enlistment equalled that of their anglophone neighbours in New Brunswick – anglophone enlistment in that province was much weaker than it was elsewhere in the Maritimes –-and considerably higher than that of francophones in Quebec.

Many of the leading opponents to conscription in the Maritimes were of Irish Catholic background. As for the Acadians, their reaction to conscription was in accord with that of their neighbouring co-religionists and also resembled the position of Quebec francophones. Acadians were opposed to the idea of coercion, and their views on the subject played an important role in determining the results of the New Brunswick election held in February 1917. The Acadian vote, which was organized by Peter Veniot, an Acadian himself, was seen as the reason why the Liberals came to power in the province that year. Later in 1917, in the federal election fought on the conscription issue, the Acadians voted massively for Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberals, who were running on an anti-conscription platform. All that said, however, the Acadian voter was not swayed only by the conscription issue and Veniot’s power did not rest exclusively on Acadian support.

Born in Richibouctou in 1863, Veniot did not learn French until the age of twenty-four. He sat in the provincial legislature from 1894 to 1900, when he resigned to become the collector of customs at Bathurst. In 1912 he became one of the two full-time organizers for the provincial Liberal Party, and this position proved to be the base from which he would rise to power. Re-elected in the election of 1917, Veniot, as minister of public works, helped deliver the Acadian vote to the Liberals in the provincial election of 1920 and became the first Acadian premier of the province in 1923, a post he retained until the defeat of his party two years later. Afterwards, he was elected to the federal parliament and he continued sitting as an MP until his death in 1936. The votes he marshalled throughout his career were not only Acadian ones; many Catholic Irish and English Protestants in the rural areas also supported him. Veniot was above all a New Brunswick politician, and the issue of Acadian rights – though important to him – was only one of the public issues that concerned him.

A number of other Acadians sat in the New Brunswick legislature in the 1920s, including Seraphin Léger from Caraquet, Henry Diotte from Restigouche, and John Robichaud from Shippegan, all of whom tended to supported the interests of rural New Brunswickers in general – subsistence farmers, lumbermen, and fishermen – rather than Acadians only. Acadian politics took on a harder edge, however, after the defeat of the Veniot administration in the election of 1925, a campaign in which the Ku Klux Klan, making its first appearance in provincial politics, tapped into a significant strain of anti-Catholic and anti-French bigotry in the Conservative Party. Over the next fifteen years, ethnic relations grew steadily worse, mainly because of the issue of francophone education. In 1929 the Conservative government adopted Regulation 32, which recognized the bilingual nature of New Brunswick’s school population. Soon, however, opposition generated by the Orange Order led to the regulation being rescinded. After winning the 1930 election, the Conservative premier, J.B.M. Baxter, appointed a royal commission on education, but its report, tabled in 1932, was ignored, an outcome that was as much due to the impact of the Depression as to the lack of political will for implementing its recommendations. The 1935 election was fought as bitterly as that of 1925: language, religion, and patronage were the major issues and the Ku Klux Klan was once more involved. The Conservatives went down to defeat, electing only five members of the legislature, while A.A. Dysart, an Irish Catholic from Bouctouche, led the forty-three Liberals. But the Depression continued and no new legislation to address educational issues was brought forward.

From the defeat of Veniot to the outbreak of World War II, the Acadians used their vote in provincial and federal elections to elect their own representatives in both political parties, although they tended to favour Liberals. At the same time, the growing Acadian business and professional class supported groups and associations dedicated to ensuring the betterment of the social and economic life of Acadians. The foundation for future political strength was laid by the development of Acadian organizations as effective lobby groups, no matter what political party held power. One of the most important people involved in the process was Calixte Savoie, born in Saint-Maurice-de-Kent in 1895, who had become principal of the Edmundston high school in 1917. He resigned from this position in 1925, when it became clear that the mill owners would fight any attempt to give French the same consideration as English in New Brunswick schools. That year he moved to Moncton, where he was soon appointed the general manager and secretary-treasurer of La Société Nationale de l’Assomption. Within two years he was able to report to the tenth convention of the organization, meeting in Moncton, that its membership had reached 10,000.

At the same meeting, Dr Albert Sormany of Edmundston was elected president, a position he held until 1951. For the next three decades, Savoie and Sormany were in the forefront of almost all Acadian activity in New Brunswick aimed at securing the recognition of Acadian rights. Both men were aware of the aspirations of francophones elsewhere in Canada. It was owing to Sormany’s efforts, in particular, that Acadians were linked to Quebec intellectuals through the establishment of branches of L’Ordre de Jacques Cartier, founded in Ottawa in 1926 to promote francophone representation in the public service and as a counterweight to the Order of Freemasons. Its organization in New Brunswick provided a catalyst for discussion of Acadian tactics and strategies in the political arena.

During World War II, national issues overshadowed provincial ones. The Acadian reaction to the war was, in some ways, similar to their reaction to the 1914–18 conflict. They enlisted in much the same proportion as their anglophone neighbours; the Acadian members of the House of Commons, all of whom were Liberal, voted in favour of conscription on 23 July 1942, but 70 percent of the Acadian population in the three Maritime provinces voted against conscription in the referendum held that same year, a figure that was 15 percentage points lower than the level of opposition to conscription in Quebec. Conscription was not as much of an issue in Acadian newspapers as it had been during World War I. There was no separate Acadian battalion and Acadians were absorbed into a number of different regiments. In many ways, military service for the Acadians represented much the same thing as it did for their neighbours: food, clothing, shelter, and regular wages after years in which only few, and badly paid, jobs were available to young men.

With the end of the war in 1945, the Maritimes, like other parts of Canada, turned to rebuilding its economy. In the political arena, the provincial election of 1952 was a watershed for New Brunswick’s Acadians, because for the first time in twenty years francophones obtained significant representation in a Conservative government. Premier Hugh John Fleming gave cabinet portfolios to Edgar Fournier of Edmundston, who became chairman of the New Brunswick Hydro Commission, and Roger Pichette of Campbelltown, who was given charge of the Department of Industry along with the Fisheries Loan Board. Both these men were Quebec-born, a fact that would be mentioned often by the Opposition. Among other francophones on the government benches were Joseph Bourgeois from Moncton and Lucien Fortin from Edmundston. They were joined by William Bird, a bilingual anglophone from St Leonard.

At the opening of the legislature in February 1953, ten of the sixteen members of the Liberal Opposition were Acadians. One of these was Louis Robichaud, twenty-eight years old, from Richibucto, who in 1960 became the second Acadian premier of New Brunswick. More than 50 percent of his first cabinet was francophone but his party had won not only the French counties of Restigouche and Madawaska but also the English ones of Charlotte and Sunbury. Robichaud’s policies were shaped, to a large extent, by the report of the royal commission on municipal taxation. The commission toured the province for two years, receiving 102 briefs, 25 of which came from French organizations, municipalities, and counties. Its report (known as the Byrne Report, after its chairman Edward J. Byrne) was made public in February 1964. Though it highlighted the social and economic difficulties of New Brunswick francophones, its main focus was on the problems of the entire population, and in this regard it called for major changes in the way which education and social services – particularly the health-care system – were financed. Robichaud took time to prepare his response, which appeared as a white paper on 4 March 1965. The premier declared that all New Brunswickers were entitled to a basic level of public services and that this necessitated central-government financing of municipalities as well as a new approach to taxes on major pulp and paper companies. There was strong opposition to the white paper, especially from K.C. Irving, one of the major businessmen of the province. His influence on the English-language press made it appear that there was an English-French divide over the issue. Robichaud’s advisory staff was mostly English, however, and much Liberal support was now to be found in York and Sunbury counties, among anglophone Baptists. The necessary legislation to centralize financial responsibility for municipal affairs was passed during the 1966–67 sessions. In the provincial election of October 1967 Robichaud took all twenty-eight seats in which the French vote was dominant or substantial while the Conservatives won twenty-six of the thirty predominantly English ridings.

In many ways the mid-1960s were the high point of traditional Acadian politics in New Brunswick. Until this time, while Acadians who entered politics did so with a clear understanding of the need to improve the position of their people, they worked within the political system of the majority and sought to gain benefits for Acadians by broadening their concerns to encompass the concerns of the population as a whole. After Robichaud, however, the Acadians’ demands for recognition – and for concrete measures to ensure the survival of their culture – dominated their political efforts. Though outside influences, notably nationalist agitation in Quebec over that province’s status in Confederation, had an impact on New Brunswick politics, Robichaud’s ideas principally were a response to local conditions. The extraordinary revolution that he oversaw was, in several respects, the last act of a united Acadian elite; indeed, Robichaud benefited from a wave of Acadian activism on the part of a newly emergent middle class.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Robichaud’s success was seen by many anglophones as a sign of excessive French power. Yet, for many young Acadians, Robichaud was moving too slowly to redress old grievances. As a result of the federal royal commission on bilingualism and biculturalism, New Brunswick passed in April 1969 the Official Languages Act. This measure gave both French and English equal status but only in a general sense. Moreover, the government’s delay in fully proclaiming the legislation fed the anger of young Acadians. Those in the northeast of the province had a good vehicle at hand through which to vent their frustration. The Conseil Regional d’Aménagement du Nord-Est (CRAN) had come into being in 1966. This was an organization of young university students whose purpose was to set up local study groups in order to investigate how Acadians could make use of all financial-aid programs that were available for the Maritimes through provincial and federal agencies. It was hoped that an “integrated plan of action” for the betterment of northeastern New Brunswick would result. What CRAN actually produced was a political education for young Acadians such as Michel Blanchard of Caraquet.

Blanchard had first come to public notice as one of the most articulate speakers at the Ralliement de la Jeunesse Acadienne, a convention held at the Université de Moncton in 1966. Two years later, Blanchard, among others, became involved in a dispute with Mayor Leonard Jones of Moncton over the refusal of that city’s council to use French in its proceedings. The students considered that far too little had been done by their elders to protest against this obvious injustice, Moncton being a city whose population at that time was more than 35 percent French. From then until 1972, Moncton was rarely out of the limelight in New Brunswick as the city where Anglo-French relationships were at their worst and Blanchard was frequently at the centre of the battle. As well, in 1969 he was one of the organizers of a sit-in on the campus of the Université de Moncton to protest the disparity between the government grants given that university and those given the University of New Brunswick. One of the results of this action was that the Université de Moncton obtained an injunction to ban him permanently from the campus. His appeal against this injunction was not heard for three years, but when it was, in May 1970, Blanchard requested that the proceedings be in French. By this point, New Brunswick had passed the official languages act but it had yet not been fully proclaimed. Though Judge J. Paul Barry, before whom Blanchard was appearing, ordered translation services, he ruled that the trial must be carried on in English. The official languages act was finally proclaimed on 20 December 1972 and from that point on the use of French in New Brunswick courts was legal. But it was not mandatory until ten years later.

In the meantime, the Nutter-Leblanc task force on social welfare had reported in September 1971. Robichaud’s government had gone down to defeat in the election of October 1970, and the Conservative government of Richard Hatfield had now to cope with what the task force had discovered. Its report showed that the welfare rolls in Caraquet, Tracadie, and Shippegan ranged from 29 to 33 percent of the population, three times the provincial average. While the report dealt with the entire province, it emphasized the need for a timetable to improve Acadian education as well as radio and television services in French and to proclaim in full the official languages act. The Hatfield government immediately began to implement much of the report but by now steps had been taken to found the Parti Acadien. Born on 11 November 1972 with Euclide Chiasson as its president, it was in many ways less a political party than a movement, a quintessential lobby group to make the Acadian voice heard. At its height, it had 450 paid-up members and a survey in 1977 showed that its membership, like that of most political parties, was predominately male. Nevertheless, the Parti Acadien represented the new militancy of the generation that had grown up during the 1960s. Its members were young: 67 percent of them were under 35 and only 12 percent older than 50. They were also highly educated: 62 percent had studied at a university and 42 percent had some form of post-secondary degree. More than 67 percent were civil servants, teachers, and students. The great majority of the members, 86 percent, had never before joined a political party. Its strength was in the northeast of New Brunswick, which accounted for 73 percent of the membership; in contrast, 19 percent of the members came from the southeast of the province and only 6.9 percent from the Madawaska region of northwestern New Brunswick.

The Parti Acadien had only a limited impact in the New Brunswick election of 1974, fielding thirteen candidates and nowhere coming close to winning a seat. By the time of the next election, in October 1978, René Levesque’s Parti Québécois had come to power on a platform of sovereignty-association between Quebec and the rest of Canada. In responding to this turn of events, New Brunswick’s Acadians had three options: the maintenance of the status quo, with a renewed drive towards bilingualism and civic equality; throwing in their lot with Quebec; and the creation of an Acadian province. The Parti Acadien chose the last idea. In the election of 1978, it ran on a platform that called for the decentralization of government offices and the eventual creation of an Acadian province by splitting New Brunswick from northeast to southwest. It fielded twenty-three candidates, five of them women, and although it again failed to a win a seat it did poll 11,562 or 7.9 percent of the popular vote in the province. Approximately 12 percent of Acadians voted for the fledgling party.

The following year, the Convention d’Orientation Nationale des Acadiens was held in Edmundston, organized by the Societé des Acadiens du Nouveau Brunswick. This body had been formed in 1973, when many New Brunswick Acadians had become conscious of how very much their situation differed from that of the Acadians in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. That year, the percentage of the population of French origin was 37 in New Brunswick, 10 in Nova Scotia, and 14 in P.E.I. The convention brought together more than a thousand delegates and 53 percent of those who voted indicated than an Acadian province would be their first choice for the future. Yet in the provincial election of 1982, the Parti Acadien fielded only 10 candidates: they received a total of 3,331 votes, 4.3 percent of the popular vote. This result was in large measure due to the work of Jean-Maurice Simard, the Conservative member for Edmundston and a cabinet minister in Richard Hatfield’s government. In 1981 Simard was to introduce a bill in the New Brunswick legislature which, the following year, made New Brunswick Canada’s only officially bilingual province. In 1993 the provisions that made English and French of equal status within the legislature and governmental institutions of New Brunswick were incorporated into the Canadian constitution.

Despite the collapse of the Parti Acadien, one should not discount the possibility that Acadians will make another effort to establish a separate political space for themselves. Yet, given that the Acadians represent no more than 60 percent of the population in any part of the Maritimes, they are likely to continue to be politically wary and to support a variety of organizations that will exert pressure on their behalf at all political levels rather than attempt to form an Acadian province.