Quote:
Originally Posted by Dengler Avenue
Huh okay...
I thought the strip of Renfrew County in UOV would also be bilingual just because of its proximity to Québec (although there are only 3 crossings between Renfrew and Pontiac).
If Renfrew’s largely unilingually English, is it because there’s nothing much going on on the Québec side? I’ve seen the map that, past Pembroke, it’s just mountain range in Québec (hence Zone d’exploitation contrôlée).
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The Quebec side of the river is actually (sparsely) populated with small towns and villages for about 20 km up(river) past Pembroke and in the other direction all the way down the north shore towards the Gatineau-Ottawa area.
The Upper Ottawa Valley (Ontario side) actually did have a pretty significant francophone population 100-150 years ago as evidenced by some of the place names and surnames that you find here and there. I believe francophones may even have been the majority or close to it in the town of Pembroke at one point.
But the Ontario Catholic church a century or more ago was very influential in people's lives in the region (via churches and schools) and extremely anti-francophone under the influence of a number of Irish-origin bishops that effectively ran the area. So most of the francophones ended up being assimilated after a while.
The Catholic church officials based in Pembroke even had a great deal of influence on the Quebec side of the river (including running the schools there for a time), which was quite isolated from the rest of the province, and as a result the francophone population of the Pontiac underwent an inordinately high assimilation rate as well - at least when you consider they were living in Quebec territory. That's one of the main reasons the Quebec Pontiac is a majority anglophone region today - pretty much the only one in the province in fact. (Francophones are about 40% of the population in the Pontiac.)