By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 25, 1997; Page A25

In the 1960s, French-speaking New Brunswickers took to the streets of this town, demanding their language be respected and threatening to fracture the province with the same type of cultural and linguistic politics that, in neighboring Quebec, had grown into a full-fledged separatist movement.

Thirty years later, French-speaking children here are taught in their mother tongue. Street signs and other public services are available in French. There is local French radio, a French university, and Francophone financial institutions and other businesses occupying office space, paying taxes and creating jobs.

Along the province's northern coast, Acadian flags fly in front of houses and businesses, and there is a major push to market the dance, music and seafood of a resurgent Acadian culture.

In Fredericton, the provincial capital, politicians have begun to market New Brunswick as a bilingual and politically stable alternative to Quebec. Premier Frank McKenna's recruitment of corporate communication and calling centers is built around that bilingual work force and has yielded 5,000 jobs as companies such as Air Canada and Royal Bank consolidated telemarketing, reservations and other tasks into large phone banks.

"There is no doubt that instability in Quebec is a factor in decisions," McKenna said.

In the rest of Canada, a country founded around the idea that the French and English groups that colonized it could coexist, the politics of language are still contentious. Small French minorities in most provinces feel threatened as they battle for education and other services. In the country's one majority French-speaking province, Quebec, the threat is to separate from Canada in order to secure cultural survival on an English-speaking continent.

But here, in the province where the two language groups are most closely balanced in number, the French and English communities have not only accommodated each other, they have put into practice what Canadian orthodoxy preaches nationally with far less success: There is a sense on both sides that bilingualism can work, that Canada's "two solitudes" don't have to be.

Decades ago, "relationships were not that good," said provincial Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Bernard Richard, and a movement to form a separate province began spreading among the roughly one-third of the New Brunswick population with French roots.

However, the province's response to the Parti Acadien, as the movement was called, was unique in Canada. The New Brunswick government – led, in a coincidence of history, by its only Francophone premier – voted to become officially bilingual. It is the only province in Canada ever to do so; from that point on, schools and other institutions were created that the French-speaking community felt it needed to prosper.

"Leaders in both the Anglophone and Francophone communities have managed to convince enough New Brunswickers that our bilingual character is a plus," Richard said. "They have promoted that notion, and New Brunswickers have come to believe that it sets us apart."

That New Brunswick is unique is evident by the status of language politics in the rest of Canada.

In Quebec, although the province's 1 million English speakers – about 13 percent of the population – have school, hospital and other services available, relations between the language groups remain strained. There are long-term issues that divide them, such as the Quebec independence movement, and more immediate ones, such as local laws restricting the use of English on public signs, business cards and, of late, even the Internet.

In places such as British Columbia, governments have resisted the establishment of French school boards, even though they are considered a requirement under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Francophone groups have had to fight the provincial government in court for that concession. Along the east coast, small French settlements like Cheticamp, Nova Scotia, barely hang on, keeping their language alive by using it at home in an environment that is otherwise English.

Even in places where bilingual services are available, the rates of assimilation – the degree to which children of French-speaking parents end up using English in their work and home life – are as high as 75 percent. Essentially, the scattered groups of French families in Ontario, Manitoba and elsewhere risk losing their language within a generation or two.

"There are Francophones all over the country, and in that sense there is bilingualism" in Canada, an officially bilingual country, said Sophie Galarneau, a spokeswoman for the Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities. "Is it a beautiful, wonderful country where you can speak French or English wherever you want? No. . . .

"If your first worry is to get food on the table, you don't have time to fight for your language," she said. "There is also the attitude of saying, `I will show them – I can speak English.' It is just a reflex."

It is a defining feature of Canadian politics that these issues are often viewed through two conflicting lenses: Anglophones are weary of subsidizing French and having the issue dominate national politics; Francophones feel besieged by an English majority that has not lived up to the country's declared bilingual ideals.

New Brunswick, more than any other area of Canada, has managed to steer clear of the muddle. The use of French has almost stabilized, a product of a French school system that local Acadian leader Ronald Brun feels is the best in Canada outside Quebec – and it has happened without any appreciable backlash in the English community about funding or support for French programs. Assimilation rates have fallen to an estimated 8 percent.

Provincial legislative districts have been drawn to give Acadians roughly proportional representation. When a conference of Acadians in 1979 voted to explore again the idea of a separate province, the New Brunswick government passed a law declaring both language groups equal, and even had that local provision enshrined in the federal constitution so future provincial governments could not change it.

"This has not been producing conflict, but cooperation," said Brun, president of the New Brunswick Acadian Society.

It may be due largely to demographics that things have turned out so positively. In New Brunswick, French and English are more balanced than anywhere else in Canada. Acadians make up about 34 percent of the population – some 250,000 people, a group too large and organized to be ignored.

Additionally, Brun said, the Acadian community has for centuries considered itself distinct from both French and English Canada, and consequently has been able to argue its collective interest in New Brunswick without being lumped, in the minds of Anglophones, with the Quebec sovereignty movement.

After settling along the coast in the 17th and 18th centuries, largely in what is now Nova Scotia, the self-named Acadians got little support from France, whose colonial interests were focused mainly in Quebec. No friends of England either, they were removed from their land by edict in 1755 in a diaspora that formed the basis of Longfellow's poem "Evangeline" and gave rise to what became the Cajun communities of Louisiana.

When the Acadians were allowed back, by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, most settled in New Brunswick, establishing small coastal communities along the province's northern peninsula. A national identity developed, and by the end of the 1800s, Acadia had adopted its own anthem, holiday and flag, which is as prevalent around the French parts of the province as the national Maple Leaf.

But in the case of the Acadians, that identity has not translated, as it has in Quebec, into a widespread desire for a political existence separate from the province or Canada. "We don't have a clear geography or a political framework," Brun said, "but the people recognize themselves as being part of a nation."

That, Acadian leaders say, has sometimes made relations between Acadians and Quebecers problematic. To some extent, they said, an apparently successful and pro-Canadian French community detracts from the separatists' case. It is a point New Brunswickers are not afraid to make when they are courting new businesses.

"Part of [the separatists'] platform is that outside of Quebec it is impossible for the French culture and language to survive," said Richard. "So if we show it is possible to thrive and develop, it does not help the separatist cause."