Louis Corbeil, left, the writer's father, Yves Tassé, second from the left, and Michel Dupuis, far right, in September, 1975 at the Université de Sudbury, in Sudbury, Ont.Gaétan Gervais/Supplied
Isabelle Bourgeault-Tassé is a Franco-Ontarian writer. She teaches at the Université de Sudbury and publishes the blog La Tourtière.
It was 1975 in Sudbury, northern Ontario’s frontier city, where francophones strove to name themselves and to raise their voices. From that breath, the Franco-Ontarian flag was born.
My father – then a young man – helped bring it to life alongside other dreamers and rebels. Incorporating both the fleur-de-lys and the trillium, they offered it as a cri de coeur for their community.
Conceived in the spring and summer of 1975 in the Student Engagement Office at Laurentian University, the flag emerged from the imagination of five men: Gaétan Gervais, Michel Dupuis, Donald Obonsawin, Normand Rainville, and my father, Yves Tassé. Sewn by Jacqueline England, the office assistant, it took on tangible form: a trille-de-lisée in green and white, the colours of our verdant summers and snowy winters.
Isabella Bourgeault-TasseDenise Militzer/x
Created at Laurentian University, which declined to fly it until 1982, its ideators instead gathered to hoist it before the community at the Université de Sudbury, a cradle of Franco-Ontarian thought, art, and culture for decades.
Courageous and carried by the currents of history, the fathers of the Franco-Ontarian flag inscribed a new symbol into the bedrock of the North.
But this banner no longer belongs to them alone. As their generation grows older, the flag opens to others – to new generations of Franco-Ontarians, and to newcomers who carry French into Ontario as an inheritance to be lived, defended and renewed. From its first moments, youth carried our flag – rooted, lived, claimed as birthright, bursting forth like tender shoots.
Franco-Ontarians face a sombre reality. The proportion of Franco-Ontarians in the province is declining.LARS HAGBERG/AFP/Getty Images
In 1979, students raised it over the École de la Résistance in Penetanguishene, Ont., making the flag an emblem of their struggle for French-language education. In 1982, two student leaders hoisted it in the dead of a winter night at Laurentian University, turning it into a rallying cry for recognition of French in that institution.
It was carried on shoulders at La Nuit sur l’étang music festival and Festival Franco-Ontarien, its flowers tattooed on our bodies, and reimagined as a gesture of love in the colours of the rainbow by an LGBTQ youth group assembled at a Fédération de la jeunesse franco-ontarienne in 2017.
And it was raised in fists during protests, from SOS Montfort in 1997, a mass mobilization to save Ontario’s only French-language academic hospital, to Jeudi Noir (Black Thursday), when the Ontario government announced significant cuts to French-language services, historical slogans – Nous sommes! Nous serons! (We are! We will be!) – on the tip of our tongues.
And yet, Franco-Ontarians face a sombre reality. The proportion of Franco-Ontarians in the province is declining. We are aging. Birth rates are dwindling. And Canada’s promises on francophone immigration remain unfulfilled. So, how do we celebrate this flag when art funding falters, when education wavers, and when our institutions are weakened, especially when those institutions meant to defend our interests are also under threat? How do we honour our banner not only as a symbol of our endurance, but as a call to stand firm, when our future feels so fragile?
“Franco-Ontarian youth have always been on the forefront of resistance,” wrote Marie-Pierre Héroux and Philippe Mathieu in their 2022 youth manifesto, which pressed for government financing of the Université de Sudbury. In it, they called for a university that would be “a beacon of opportunity for all young Franco-Ontarians, whether they were born here or elsewhere.” Above all, they wrote that this university, “multicultural and rich in the accents of our mosaic,” had to “cultivate the heart and soul of our Francophonie.”
Three years later, that call has finally found its response. In July, the Ontario government announced funding for the University of Sudbury, part of a strategy to improve access to postsecondary education in French in the North. At 112 years old, the Université de Sudbury – a key French-language institution – welcomed its first cohort since 2021 earlier this month.
We Franco-Ontarians are a people of fête and fight. As we raise the flag at the Université de Sudbury, on the mast from which it flew in 1975, Franco-Ontarians honour the audacious young people who carried it to the wind. But 50 years later, this flag still bears renewal, reaching toward those who inherit it, who bear its weight and joy, and who will cry out, sing and struggle in their own voices.