The Francophone population across Windsor-Essex is seething over decisions by the Ontario PC government to eliminate a French issues commissioner and halt creation of a French language university campus.
The Executive Director of the Francophone Community Centre, Didier Marotte calls it a "huge step backward" and that the Ford government "barely blinked" in making the decision.
The announcement was buried at the bottom of the economic update in Doug Ford’s Ontario budget November 15. The office of the French-language commissioner was abolished along with the plan to build the new French university in Toronto by 2020. The government cited financial issues.
"With a stroke of the pen and a simple one sentence declaration in the fall economic announcement, we found out that our commissioner is gone and a Francophone university is no longer a valuable project for this government," said Marotte. "We are disappointed, it makes no sense."
Marotte says this decision takes the Francophone community back half a century.
"We've always had to fight for our rights and, finally, when there are serious improvements for Francophone in Ontario, the government, in three separate moves, has reduced us back to where we were 50 years ago," he told AM800's The Afternoon News.
There are an estimated 650,000 Francophone in the province with many in southwestern Ontario.
Marotte points out that a number of French people settled in the Windsor area in the 1700's and have been here ever since.
"There's still a very strong, organized French community. They are distributed in the {Essex} county, Windsor-Essex-Kent. If you go toward the {Detroit} river, Pain Court, Windsor, River Canard, those are still strong French bastions," he said. "We still have a lot of Francophone families that are generations old."
Plans for the university were announced in July 2017 by the province's previous Liberal government.