Francophone minority rights in the west

At the time of confederation, the new polity formed had to establish a common Canadian identity while respecting minority rights. In the west, the relative strength of Manitoba’s francophones had declined during the 1870s with the influx of large numbers of anglophone settlers. At the end of the 1880s the French-speaking population was reduced to a mere six per cent of the North-West Territories. Ontario immigrants considered Manitoba and the prairie west to be British and Protestant; French linguistic rights and Catholic school privileges were abrogated little by little. Cognizant of the spoliation of French and Catholic privileges, high-ranking clergy attempted to promote immigration from Quebec and from European Catholic countries, but the number of arrivals was never enough to preserve linguistic balance in the face of the massive immigration of anglophones. The Société de Colonisation de Manitoba was set up to promote French Canadian settlement in the west. Other initiatives arose, such as the formation of a unified French Catholic bloc in the territorial legislature to establish the principle of double majority, and the creation in 1912 of the Association Catholique Franco-Canadienne de la Saskatchewan.