One thousand two hundred people responded to a call from Ontario’s French-Canadian elite to meet in Ottawa from January 18 to 20, 1910. The organization of this convention was inspired, as the document indicates, by similar meetings held among Franco-Americans and by national conventions organized by Acadians since the end of the 19th^. century. For the organizers of the Ottawa gathering, it was a question of taking action, especially in the field of education, where the concern was to preserve French as the language of instruction in schools. The context in which this congress was held was special. On the one hand, there were hostile clouds toward the French language gathering in Ontario’s skies. With the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from abroad and thousands of French-Canadian migrants, many English speakers feared for the future of the province’s British character. To ensure that English remained the common language, they urged the provincial government to restrict, if not ban, the use of French in schools. On the other hand, the schools attended by francophones were deplorable due to the lack of teacher training and the deficiency of English-language learning.

One result of this congress was the creation of the Association canadienne-française d’éducation de l’Ontario (ACFEO), which became the Association canadienne-française de l’Ontario in 1970. This organization was the community’s principal spokesperson until its transformation into the Assemblée de la francophonie de l’Ontario in 2006. Throughout its long history, the organization has pressed the provincial and federal governments, as well as the private sector, to respect the linguistic and cultural rights of Franco-Ontarians, as it did in the aftermath of the 1910 congress. Despite this pressure, the provincial government issued Regulation 17 in 1912, limiting the use of French as a language of instruction to the first two years of primary school. From the third year onwards, instruction would be in English only. The Ontario government finally abandoned Regulation 17 in 1927 and abolished it in 1944.