Curious as to what year English-speakers became the majority in Canada. I've been looking up some population statistics but cannot pin down the exact year that it happened.
If anyone is knowledgeable about the subject, did the British government actively discourage French from being spoken in Upper Canada/Quebec? I know there was some population distribution around the time the colony originally changed hands to the British, but I am clueless about British policy afterwards.
Thank you!
Your question is rather broad. I don't have the exact year, but I'll edit it into the answer if I can figure it out. In any case, just as an interesting tidbit, Toronto's population surpassed Montreal's only in the 1970s.
New France was formally ceded to Britain in 1763, making it fall under British rule for good. At first, the British being in such small numbers, tolerated that the French retained their property, language and religion (Catholicism.) This was enshrined in the Acte de QUébec in 1774, which formally the province of Québec that extended from the Great Lakes to the Maritimes.
This situation remained more or less unchanged until the Durham report. It was written in the wake of the Patriotes' rebellion against the British government. The biggest demand of the Patriote was to obtain local representation, but Durham, who was sent to investigate after the rebellion was crushed, pinned the causes of the rebellion on the "fait français." As a solution, he advocated the creation of a local responsible government, but also to rescind every protection and guarantee offered by the Acte de Québec, going as far as to say that French Canadians were a small people with no history or culture and as such should be forcibly assimilated into the English culture.
As you can imagine, this did not go over well with French Canadians, but there was no fighting the British Empire at that time.
The British did not forcibly settle their own into Canada. A good part of the early English to come to Canada did so during and after the American Revolution. Though some settling occured during the following 40 years, it really got kicked off with the forced immigration of Irish settlers in the early 19th century. The avowed goal, after the Durham report, was to forcibly assimilate French speakers into an English speaking majority. This also helped kill two birds with one stone as they were also depleting Ireland's population.
I'd like to close by saying that the British did not make French Canadians speak English through force or laws, but through economic means. For over a century, to get anywhere in life in Québec and Ontario, you had to be an English speaker and this practice endured well into the 20th century.