Canada: ONTARIO: Father Raspberry’s School

Near a soft-drink bar in the main building of the University of Ottawa hangs a crudely crayoned sign: “S’il vous plait—please—pas de bouteilles—no bottles—dans le—in the—gym.” Students shout to each other in English, answer in French. Professors teach all courses in two languages. Everywhere on the campus of Canada’s lone bilingual university le bilinguisme is casually accepted.

Last week Ottawa’s 3,000 regular students (one-third English speaking, two-thirds French) and its staff (125 Oblate fathers, 21 nuns, 147 lay teachers) crowded on to the campus for the university’s centenary. They put on a pageant, handed out honorary degrees to ten dignitaries, learned that Pope Pius XII had conferred an apostolic benediction on students and staff. They listened to tributes from visitors, heard Dr. Robert Wallace, principal of Queen’s University in Kingston, say: “There are clearly two different philosophies of education in Canada . . . They rest partly in religious exclusiveness—on both sides—partly on language barriers, and partly on suspicions coming down to us across the years … It should be possible to do better than we have yet done, for we have worked in separate rooms in one house.”

“The Good Fight.” The University of Ottawa, which had set out to bridge chasms of language and nationality, was born of a compromise. A century ago, Ottawa, known as Bytown, had a festering rivalry between Irish and French, and one lone Catholic school that catered to the Irish and ignored the French. A bilingual college would provide for both. As its founder, and the first Bishop of Bytown, Monsignor Joseph Eugene Bruno Guigues, put it: “These young men living and growing up together would soon come to know and to esteem each other, and while preserving their national idiosyncrasies, would learn to wage side by side the good fight for God and country.”

In Father Joseph Henri Tabaret, who took charge of the school five years after it started, Bishop Guigues had just the man to make his bilingual theory work. A start was made toward separating lay classes and students for the priesthood. Science courses were introduced.

Father Tabaret died in 1886. By that time, the city’s French Catholic population was catching up with the Irish. French influence began to dominate the university, and the traditional French emphasis on classics and seminary studies was restored. Prejudices flared up again, and so did fist fights and near riots among the students. In 1929, the Catholic Church sanctioned an Irish college (St. Patrick’s) in Ottawa for those who did not want to attend the university.

“Make No Mistake.” With the postwar church drive to expand and modernize education facilities across the Dominion, things began to hum at Ottawa. A medical school was added in 1945, and $1,212,295 raised for a building to house it. The university also got a new rector, genial Father Jean-Charles Laframboise (French for the raspberry). No cloistered scholar, Le Père Recteur is ambitious for his school. Of the $250,000 grant the Ontario government gave his medical school last year he says: “It was not a grant; it was the first grant. Make no mistake of that.”

Under him a school of applied science has been added. He plans further new schools of commerce, social sciences, agriculture, diplomacy. His aim is to make academic standards high and broad enough to attract students, whatever their national background. Of the French-English conflict in Canada he says, “How it will work out is in the hands of Divine Providence, but the situation is getting better among educated people.”