Pan-Canada or Little-Britain? The Sudbury Star and its Portrayal of Regulation 17

Abstract

The implementation of Regulation 17 in Ontario in the 1910s, which restricted the use of the French language in Ontario schools, spawned a Canadian identity debate. The Anglophone population in Canada generally supported an imperialist identity; meanwhile the Francophone population generally favoured a nationalist one. Historians have uncovered, in most cases, the print media written in English also favoured the imperialist argument, while the print media written in French typically espoused the nationalist ideology. However, historians have failed to examine the Sudubry Star, an English written newspaper in the city of Sudbury, Ontario, with a population nearly split between Anglophones and Francophones. Using the lens intellectual historiography, this paper will, for the first time, demonstrate that the Sudbury Star treaded against the current and promoted a nationalist argument rather than an imperialist one.