WI there was a French neighbourhood in Toronto?

Waiting at the Sacré-Cœur #toronto #cabbagetown #carltonstreet #church #paroissedusacrecoeur #paroissedusacrécoeur by Randy McDonald, on Flickr

This church at 381 Sherbourne Street is the home base of the Paroisse du Sacré-Cœur, a Roman Catholic congregation founded in 1889 that in the intervening generations has been a nucleus for Toronto's Francophone communities.

In the past, there have been some proposals to give official recognition to the neighbourhood of Sherbourne and Dundas as a Francophone ethnic neighbourhood, an equivalent to the Little Italies and Chinatowns elsewhere in the city. The problem with that, apart from the tremendous ethnic diversity among Toronto's large and growing Francophone community, the neighbourhood has never really gelled as a "French Quarter". With the marginal exception of west-end Baby Point on the Humber, there wasn't any pre-British French settlement in Toronto, and the French Canadian migration to Toronto wasn't sufficiently intense to create a neighbourhood. Unlike Ottawa where east-end Orléans has been Francophone for some time, or Winnipeg with its neighbourhood of Saint-Boniface, there just hasn't been anything to build on.

What would it take for this to change? Upping French Canadian migration to southern Ontario is one way, but it would take significant shifts in 19th century migration patterns for this to happen. (Migration from the British Isles dries up, maybe, creating incentives for French Canadians to go to Toronto?)
 
Get the US less interested in accepting Catholic Francophones as immigrants, so more of them end up in Ontario looking for work?
 
Get the US less interested in accepting Catholic Francophones as immigrants, so more of them end up in Ontario looking for work?

The US was not interested in accepting French Catholics, in fact it was the exact opposite of being interested, the only reason it happened is that no one else was coming to that area in large enough numbers to exploit in the mills.
 
Get the US less interested in accepting Catholic Francophones as immigrants, so more of them end up in Ontario looking for work?

As a descendant of Catholic Francophone immigrants from both Québec and Acadia - even if the US was less interested, they'd still come. The only effective thing the US did was to close the borders, but by then the industrialization process was well underway in Québec and the Depression was in full swing.

As for the proposed Toronto neighbourhood - well, how did other ethnic minorities, particularly the Chinese and the Jews, survive in that city in the 19th and early 20th centuries? There would be a potential key for the survival of a French-Canadian neighbourhood.
 
As a descendant of Catholic Francophone immigrants from both Québec and Acadia - even if the US was less interested, they'd still come. The only effective thing the US did was to close the borders, but by then the industrialization process was well underway in Québec and the Depression was in full swing.

As for the proposed Toronto neighbourhood - well, how did other ethnic minorities, particularly the Chinese and the Jews, survive in that city in the 19th and early 20th centuries? There would be a potential key for the survival of a French-Canadian neighbourhood.

I've been thinking about this. In the case of those minorities, as well as of the Irish Catholics in Cabbagetown just next door, the ethnic and religious distinctiveness of these minorities in a city overwhelmingly dominant by British Protestants served to encapsulate them, territorially and otherwise. They had to build strong communities in order to shelter their members from the prejudice of the wider city, and to fulfill their own communal needs.

Perhaps greater prejudice and xenophobia, and/or a stronger identity?

Failing that, maybe the best way is to somehow build up a French Canadian settlement in the west along the Humber before the Loyalists get here. That would be the equivalent of Winnipeg's Saint-Boniface.
 
Perhaps greater prejudice and xenophobia, and/or a stronger identity?

Failing that, maybe the best way is to somehow build up a French Canadian settlement in the west along the Humber before the Loyalists get here. That would be the equivalent of Winnipeg's Saint-Boniface.

The second option is plausible. If you had a long-established francophone community it could stay put.

The first option seems less so. Why migrate to a place that hates you when there are other regions of the country in which your ethnic group predominates? There is the distinction between the French Canadians and the Chinese, Jews and others. The latter groups were going to be a minority (and probably distrusted) wherever they went, so it ultimately didn't really matter where.
 
I've been thinking about this. In the case of those minorities, as well as of the Irish Catholics in Cabbagetown just next door, the ethnic and religious distinctiveness of these minorities in a city overwhelmingly dominant by British Protestants served to encapsulate them, territorially and otherwise. They had to build strong communities in order to shelter their members from the prejudice of the wider city, and to fulfill their own communal needs.

Perhaps greater prejudice and xenophobia, and/or a stronger identity?

That could be one idea. After all, Ontario was very much in the grip ofthe Orange Order at that time, so anti-Catholicism was rife. Add to that a community that doesn't "speak the language" (even though it was the master of the area before the UELs and the Americans came), and things would be interesting enough to form a neighbourhood - one which could bring forward more explicitly some of the problems with Queen's Park's policies towards Francophones, such as Regulation 17.

Failing that, maybe the best way is to somehow build up a French Canadian settlement in the west along the Humber before the Loyalists get here. That would be the equivalent of Winnipeg's Saint-Boniface.

That could also work, either on its own or in tandem with the former in case the settlement got too big.
 
That could be one idea. After all, Ontario was very much in the grip ofthe Orange Order at that time, so anti-Catholicism was rife. Add to that a community that doesn't "speak the language" (even though it was the master of the area before the UELs and the Americans came), and things would be interesting enough to form a neighbourhood - one which could bring forward more explicitly some of the problems with Queen's Park's policies towards Francophones, such as Regulation 17.

That could also work, either on its own or in tandem with the former in case the settlement got too big.

Having Baby Point on the Humber River, in the west of the city, be the nucleus of a large Francophone community, one that might even make Toronto bicultural and bilingual, would be a significant shift. It might even require a New France-era POD.
 
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