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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?)
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