Education

Belgians in Canada have created few educational institutions for themselves, but they have been active in promoting centres of learning, particularly in Quebec. Belgian educators were considered to possess fewer “imperialist” or republican views than the metropolitan French, although the Quebec clergy did come to view them as being extraordinarily independent in their thinking. When the Université Laval was organized in 1852, it relied heavily on its counterpart in Louvain, Belgium as a model. In 1908 Auguste-Joseph de Bray of Louvain organized the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Montreal, supervised its construction, and hired its staff. It went on to great success under the direction of Henry Laureys, an economic geographer by training, who added a simulated trading establishment and a museum of commerce and industry to the institution. Alfred Fyen, a former officer in the Belgian army, headed a number of trade schools in Quebec. In 1907 he took charge of a new institution for the training of surveyors in Quebec City, and the following year he became director of the École Polytechnique in Montreal. He founded the École des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels in 1912 and subsequently the École d’architecture. To each institution he brought a strong sense of organization and discipline.

Charles De Konick played an important role in university affairs as professor and dean of the faculty of philosophy at Laval from 1934 to 1965. He surprised many by advocating a non-confessional school system to replace the dual-confession model still in place in Quebec during the reform years of the 1960s. As school enrolments in the province mushroomed, Belgium was a source of teachers from the kindergarten level through to graduate school. Because their diplomas were not always correctly evaluated, the teachers in Montreal formed the Association des Diplômés de Belgique to assert their rights. There is little doubt that their liberal ideas contributed not only to the reform years of the 1960s (commonly known as the Quiet Revolution) in the province but also to the student movement in its universities and colleges.

The work of Gustave Francq in labour relations in Quebec might also be regarded as educational. In the early twentieth century, he was active as a union executive, militant member of the Labour Party fighting for the eight-hour day and for universal suffrage, organizer of working-class clubs in Montreal, and owner and editor of the bilingual Le Monde ouvrier/Labour World, a newspaper that first appeared in 1916 with a mission to educate the public about labour, class, and gender issues. Francq served as president of the provincial Minimum Wage Commission, organized sports facilities and food cooperatives, and lobbied for minimum-wage legislation and women’s rights until his death in 1952.

Elsewhere in Canada, Belgians generally accepted the existing separate school systems and worked within them. The Sisters of Notre-Dame-de-Namur came from Cincinnati to open a school in Vankleek Hill in eastern Ontario in 1886 and later branched out to Saint-Eugene, Masson, and Chapleau. Another Belgian order, the Ursuline Sisters from Tildonk, arrived at Bruxelles in southern Manitoba in 1914 to take charge of the village school, which they ran for the next thirty years. Within the public system, they have maintained some instruction in French to the present day. Louis Hacault became actively involved on behalf of francophone Catholics in the celebrated Manitoba school question of the 1890s. Walloons in particular supported the bilingual schools that operated in the province between 1897 and 1916 and the limited French instruction in the public system thereafter. In the North-West Territories (present-day Manitoba and Saskatchewan), Bellegarde had the first francophone Catholic school, and after the province of Saskatchewan was established in 1905, the school successfully resisted provincial regulations designed to limit French instruction. The parish priest at Prud’homme, Maurice Baudoux, became a staunch supporter of French rights and campaigned successfully for radio broadcasts in that language in western Canada, before he became archbishop of Saint-Boniface.

Belgians created only one educational institution serving their own community alone, Scheppers College at Swan Lake in rural Manitoba. Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy in Mechelen planned a boys’ boarding-school and college offering basic agricultural and manual training, together with academic subjects and religious instruction, in Dutch for Flemish students. Classes began in an imposing brick structure in the autumn of 1920. Each year there were between sixty and seventy-five boys in boarding, in addition to local day scholars. The Depression played havoc with this experiment, and by 1929 the institution was in financial trouble, registration was dropping off, and immigration schemes to bring out more Flemish settlers were on hold. The school closed three years later, leaving an empty building on the outskirts of the village as the sole reminder of this attempt at Flemish education in Canada.