I just finished the Netflix series Anne with an E which takes place in Eastern Canada. One of the characters, Jerry is a Francophone farm hand who has had some racist(?) encounters with an Anglophone who called him Froggy and beat him. I also felt it was quite strange that the only Francophone character was an uneducated farmhand.
I did some digging around the show's sub to see what would cause the treatment towards Jerry and came across this interesting comment:
Being French, he's probably from a Catholic family, so higher education probably wasn't encouraged. This also probably meant that his family was very large, seeing as a-dozen-kids-or-more familes were common for Catholics at the time. Chances are he's working to support his family, and is working for an Anglophone family because the job opportunities are better than in his own community. His family is probably poor, because, well, 12 kids is a lot of mouths to feed, but also because given the historical context of Canada at the time,it was much harder for Francophones to climb the social ranks, especially with the arrival of industrialization and the creation of the middle class
From my understanding, I never though that French Canadians faced discrimination in Canada given that the second language is Canadian after all. What would've made it difficult for a Francophone to climb social ranks? What was the cause for this discrimination and how long did it last for?
You'd have to go at least as far back as the Seven Years War and subsequent British conquest of New France aka Canada or "the Canadas" to understand it. English-French relations in Canada are a complex, nuanced issue that goes to the core of Canadian identity, so this is just an overview of its historical roots.
The war in North America was over by 1760 when the French army in Montreal finally capitulated (Quebec City fell in 1759), but they had to wait until the dust settled in Europe and the peace treaty in 1763. The terms of capitulation were actually quite generous for the roughly 80,000 French Catholics in Quebec (a large swath of territory that included Quebec, Ontario and west into the Ohio Valley). The French could keep their property, language, civil code and religion. Britain chose the carrot over the stick, opting to win hearts and minds instead of using an iron hand. They had hoped that, eventually, overwhelming English Protestant settlement would change the makeup of Quebec and the colony would become less French and more British over time ... an expectation that never came to fruition in Quebec.
This went against the grain of the contemporary viewpoint of English Protestants, who were used to anti-Catholic discrimination in laws since the Tudor era. The fair treatment of Quebec angered American settlers in New England who had hoped for a land grab after the war and contributed to stoking the American Revolution.
This is in contrast to Acadia, the eastern part of New France that became the Maritime provinces. This region essentially fell to the British in the 1750's when the British military were still on a war footing against France. They issued the longtime French inhabitants there an ultimatum: take an oath of loyalty to Britain or vacate the land. Most of the Acadian population went into exile in Louisiana, French colonies in the Caribbean, or back to France.
Some remained in Acadia (now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and PEI) or returned after the war, but they now formed a minority, as waves of Protestant settlers from New England and overseas occupied lands that the Acadians had vacated. It accelerated after the American Revolution when thousands of displaced Loyalists arrived in the region in the 1780s and 90s. These colonies would evolve as firmly British and definitely Protestant just like their New England cousins, with similar institutions (assemblies, supremacy of the Anglican Church, etc.) -- unlike the dual identity, more tolerant situation in Quebec. The new Protestant settlers brought their own English language, traditions ... and their anti-French, anti-Catholic prejudices. Britain would pass Catholic emancipation laws in 1829, which lifted many of the punitive anti-Catholic restrictions in place since the Reformation. But biases remained.
In Quebec, despite the accommodations for language and religion, the highest civil and military positions were still reserved for an oligarchy of English Protestants, who also dominated the colony's merchant/business class. Local populace resentment at this disparity boiled over during the rebellions of 1837-38, when Britain finally decided to institute a reformed, more equitable responsible government in all of its Canadian colonies. This would set Canada on a gradual path to Confederation and nationhood in 1867.
Quebec's own evolution in Canada is also complex, multi-layered and likely hard to grasp or explain to the average observer (esp. outside Canada) without a lot of historical context. Within Quebec, it's perceived as a constant struggle to preserve its cultural and linguistic French uniqueness in a continent that is overwhelmingly English-speaking. A long process that began in 1763 and continues to this day.
At the time of Anne's PEI, Canada was a new dominion/country in the British Empire, with representative government and an understanding of Canada's unique English-French duality. But this was also the era of Victorian-era British imperialism, where many Canadians aka the English and Protestant ones embraced and celebrated their heritage and ties to the mother country and downplayed the contribution of others. The old anti-French, anti-Catholic prejudices would still linger, so it's no surprise that the lower-class French labourers and farmers were regarded poorly back then in English Canada.
While modern Canada is obviously more enlightened than its 19th century colonial past and French language and cultural rights are asserted, especially in Quebec, it is also fair to say that Canada still struggles with reconciling the dual identities it inherited from the aftermath of Wolfe's victory at the Plains of Abraham in 1759.