Citizenship Concepts Among Francophone Immigrants in Ontario

ID:	HARP-586
Title:	Citizenship Concepts Among Francophone Immigrants in Ontario
Source:	Canadian Ethnic Studies, 1998, Vol. 30 Issue 3, p173, 17p
Parties:
Dispute Resolution Organ:
Year:	1998
Pages:	0
Author(s):
Keywords:	Canada, democracy, French, human rights, language, movement and residency, multi-culturalism, non-discrimination, Ontario, civil and political rights, immigration, African-Caribbean African-Caribbean, liberalism, minority rights
Abstract:	The recent influx of French-speaking immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean into Ontario is redefining what it means to be a minority francophone in that province. This process is breaking down the old dichotomy of official language minority communities vs. multicultural groups. By considering the competing discourses of various members of that nouvelle francophonie, this paper discusses, through samples of discourse collected during participant-observation in francophone events, how civil society concepts such as liberal-individualism vs. communitarianism are employed by afro-francophones to carve out a civic position in English-speaking Canada. Building on the concept of deliberative democracy by J. Habermas, it is argued that discourse plays an important role in pluralist democracies, both for the conditions in which public debate is carried out as well as for the way in which communities are constituted. Conceptually, the article brings together empirically oriented sociolinguistics with normatively oriented political philosophy.
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