New census data from Statistics Canada shows that nearly one million Canadian children have the constitutional right to education in an official minority language.
The census found that 304,000 children in Quebec have the right to attend regular English public schools and that 593,000 children outside the province have the right to attend regular French public schools.
The data, which is being collected for the first time, shows that nearly 70 per cent of eligible school-age children attend, or have attended, a regular public school in their official minority language.
Ontario has the largest number of children with French-language rights, 350,000, while New Brunswick has the largest proportion, 36 per cent of all children.
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Across Canada, 64.7 per cent of eligible school-aged children were attending French schools, while 76.2 per cent of eligible children were attending English schools in Quebec.
The agency says that more than 90 per cent of eligible children were living within 15 kilometres of a minority official language school in 2021.
The percentage of people speaking French as their first language continues to fall in Quebec, leading to anxiety over the future of the language
