Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
252 Bloor Street West
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 1V6

March 2000
CERIS Working Paper No. 11

This study discusses education initiatives that address diversity in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) since the 1960s. An overview of this topic—covering education for adults and children, the players involved, ranging from the federal government to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as various groupings in the population, over the timeframe of the 1960s to the 1990s—has not been undertaken before. Therefore, a core contribution of this study is its documentation of policies and activities that have been created and have evolved in the GTA. As detailed analysis of a complex topic should begin with a clear picture of known data, this report focuses on documentation and anticipates of further analysis of themes raised by broader social data and theory. We present a general analysis of trends over time and suggest implications for future research and its application.

The potential scope of this topic is vast, including, at least half a dozen major governmental bodies at both the federal and provincial levels; eight school boards in Metropolitan Toronto, until recently, with more in the surrounding areas; other educational institutions; and a large but unknown number of NGOs. Much of the information we would like to have, especially from school boards, colleges, and NGOs, is in scattered sources, ephemeral, or not documented at all. Also, diversity as related to education can be and has been seen from a range of perspectives such as religion, economic systems, language, race, culture, and gender. The diversity of the immigrant and domestic population has constantly grown and changed over this period. Each immigrant and native-born Canadian in this city has a unique relationship to issues of diversity, such as identity, role, and success, in terms of needs and aspirations, which are difficult to assess. Germane research comes from virtually all the social science disciplines. Thus, this report's approach to the topic represents more a development of a thick description of the period than a theoretically organized argument. One report can only begin to document or analyze this complexity. In essence, it presents history through notable events, highlights research, and analyses several broad features.

The report is organized as follows. First, this introduction covers the scope of the paper and basic definitions. Next, as background for the documentation of policies and activities, the report outlines major factors that contribute to the role of education in integrating diversity. Each decade from the 1960s to the 1990s is then considered separately with an introduction to the context, documentation, references to research, and a summary. Finally, conclusions and implications are drawn in terms of trends and their impacts.

Immigrants. In this report, the term immigrants refers to both immigrants and refugees to Canada and their immediate descendants. As mentioned above, it is important to appreciate that immigrants in the city are a divergent group, the composition of which is constantly changing demographically and in other ways, such as by the establishment of local ethnic communities and institutions. We also emphasize that the target population of education to integrate diversity must be considered not only in terms of immigrants but also the rest of the population.

Education. For current purposes, we have restricted the concept of education to activities carried out in schools under the Education Act of Ontario and more and less formal training carried out by schools, other educational institutions, and various bodies such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with funding and/or other resources coming at least partially from governments. Brief mention will be made of privately run education. Because education has broad applications for most institutions in society, many topics that could be considered educational must be dealt with elsewhere under health, the economy, and so on. The more formal and regulated education is, the easier it becomes to document and assess. However, it should be noted that much of education is also self-directed learning, which is probably not recognized as education but certainly represents learning.

Policy and activities. We define policy as legislated activities or other programs supported at least in part by government(s). The term "activities" has been added to the scope of our study because significant actions reported here would not normally be seen as a policy in the formal sense—a one-time event, for example. Policies and activities are considered, as much as possible, in terms of not only the initiators' interests but also those affected. However, government policies and programs are, in effect, interventions by the state and, as such, more likely to be documented from the initiators’ point of view than that of all the stakeholders.

Our research into integrating diversity through education in Toronto has drawn our attention to global, national, and local contexts or factors woven into the narrative of events described below. The most salient, in our view, are considered here both as background information for the reader and important influences that come out in practice. They reappear, where relevant, in summaries for each decade and in the concluding section of the report.

Only in the past century or so has public education (often compulsory as well as a right) for children become the norm in a considerable proportion of the world. The high value of education is now an axiom in many nations and cultures, including Canada. In addition, adults, when frustrated by a social problem, have tended to insert it into the curriculum, supposedly to resolve the issue in the next generation. More recently, when adults in positions of power want other adults to change, they are inclined to institute relevant training programs or public education campaigns. It is not surprising, then, that issues of integrating diversity have manifested themselves more in education policy than other spheres of life.

That education had great value, especially for children but also for adults, then, is virtually an axiom. However, does or should education merit our trust in it to achieve the results expected by so many parties? To what extent is (open-minded) research conducted to assess the outcomes? Is it practically possible to judge the outcomes of diverse programs that deal with such abstract goals as attitudes, self-concept, or even general language proficiency?

Any society is diverse and changes over time, and its processes are more complex than science has even been able to account for. In times and places of significant migration, diversity is magnified, as in the period in Toronto considered here. Simplistically, social change can be expected to move towards assimilation (in the direction of the mainstream), diversification (in the direction of characteristics brought by the newcomers), or synthesis (a blending or entirely new creation resulting from both). All three possibilities are likely, and none is good or bad in its own right. As just noted in the discussion about education, many immigrants want or at least expect a considerable amount of assimilation. The diversity they bring is valuable to them in terms of their own identities and human resources, and enriches the host community's perspectives and resources. As well, some synthesis is inevitable. On the other hand, assimilation can force newcomers into mainstream molds, and diversification can threaten the social fabric with more novelty or variety than current social institutions can handle. Synthesis can create new conflicts as well as resolve old ones.

To many, synthesis offers a way to avoid binary conflicts. An interesting consideration in the study of diversity is the extent to which diversity can be contained within a sustainable unity. For example, we know that language differences can be overcome because people can become bilingual, but bilingualism and multilingualism have their costs and require effort for individuals and societies to maintain them (see, for example, Fishman 1989). Knowledge about the potential and costs of multilingualism is rudimentary, but how much less do we know about the real capacities and burdens of containing and treating equally/fairly multiple cultures, religions, and races?

In integrating diversity in Toronto, interventions and actions by government institutions and others can be seen as assimilationist, pluralist, and sometimes even synthesizing. These intentions cannot be matched directly with the needs and desires of individuals or groups either of immigrants or people in the mainstream because the latter are so difficult to assess. A government policy that intends to assimilate may be welcomed by immigrants because it meets some of their needs—which may be quite different from those imagined by the initiating government.

To be even more simplistic, conflict arises when characteristics specific to (a group of) immigrants become barriers for immigrants in achieving their goals of assimilation, diversity, or syntheses. Discrimination can block immigrants' access to their goals. In the pursuit of equality of condition, ignorance and inactivity can fail to consider that not all opportunity seekers start from the same place. However, attempts to create these two kinds of equalities have been called into question. Fleras and Elliot (1992, 189) "propose a typology that essentially reflects both a temporal sequence of multicultural initiatives and a cross-section of perspectives in use throughout Canadian schools at present," which they call compensation, enrichment, enhancement, and empowerment. In addition, the "introduction of antiracist education adds another complication" (189). Such actions are central to the study of integrating diversity in Toronto.

None of these barriers or inequalities is value or interest free—some group's interests are always threatened by changes. Equity means making the game fair for all the players, but who makes the rules for the game? The concept of excellence diverts the focus from the binary, win-lose metaphor of games to the possibilities of achievement in any direction, not just those preordained from one source. Thus, we should look for ways in which immigration enriches and encourages positive changes in education as well as provisions for equity (Harris and Ford 1999).

Whose interests, then, so the interventions or barriers serve? Is assimilation of immigrants into the mainstream an obvious goal? Are immigrants’ needs addressed by gaining access to mainstream system(s)? Are alternative systems being created, and/or are interventions designed for growth and integration on the part of the mainstream as well as the immigrant population?

In 1867, the time of the signing of the British North America Act, Canada’s original constitution, political focus was on making provisions to take into account citizens of British and French origins. According to Neatby (1992, v-ix), in the nineteenth century the legal expression of rights for the "English" and "French" populations was on religion rather than language, culture, race, class, political affiliation, or other possible distinctions. However, as discussed below, political attention to identification of differences between groups had shifted by the middle of the twentieth century largely to language, with growing attention to culture, race, gender, and even raw sovereignty. This identification was not entirely paralleled in the United States over the same century; for example, race was a high-profile issue at the time, mid-century, when language was a central focus in Canada. We should bear in mind, then, the constant influence of federal preoccupation with language in French-English relations in Canada, since the ongoing and changing character of those negotiations colours a great deal of decision making at all levels of state-sponsored activity.

Having said this, integrating immigrants into modern western countries tends to be assimilationist because of the power differential between the newcomers and the old guard as well as the integrative motivations of the immigrants. Especially in the current urban, globalized ethos of western societies, an ability to speak the dominant language of the host group is prioritized over all other pressures on immigrants to assimilate. In other words, the host country, to at least some extent, expects immigrants to bring transferrable skills and knowledge in most aspects of life, but identifies communication in the dominant language as a prerequisite for such transfer; and immigrants, on the whole, expect this requirement. Thus, training in English as a second language (ESL) is by far the major component of education initiatives for non-English-speaking immigrants, as contrasted with skills training, multicultural considerations, or anti-racism measures, in all the large, western, English-dominant countries (Herriman and Burnaby 1996). In Canada, immigrants’ learning of the dominant language as a means to access the life of the country appears to take precedence among immigrants and mainstream stakeholders over cultural or race provisions (e.g., Special Committee of Parliament on Participation of Visible Minorities in Canadian Society 1984).

On the whole, competence, not culture, is the major concern of minority-group parents. While the two are not mutually exclusive, it is foremost the mastery of modern knowledge, as well as the retention of functional aspects of their own traditional knowledge, to which parents most aspire (Musgrove 1982). The former serves their instrumental, survival needs, which are the priority in the country of adoption, and the latter their expressive needs, for which they themselves assume responsibility. Whereas diverse cultural inclusion in the school curriculum is an important device for raising the self-concept of minority children, most minority parents see their children as educationally deprived rather than culturally deprived. ... In many instances, these expectations [of minority parents for access to mainstream educational success] were the prime reasons for leaving the country of origin (Moodley 1995, 817).

Thus, a large proportion of the policies and activities documented in this report relates to English language teaching and learning. The role of minority languages can be found in the arena between resistance to assimilation and promotion of pluralism. Culture, race, and other aspects of difference are slower to be recognized. We must continue to ask, though, whether a suitable balance exists in attention to various kinds of differences between the immigrant population and the mainstream.

The British North America Act of 1867 and its renewed form, the Constitution Act of 1982, divided power between the federal and provincial governments. Responsibility for education was vested in the provinces, while that for citizenship and immigration was largely given to the federal government. In practice this division of powers means that in situations where issues relating to both immigration and education arise, responsibility must be negotiated. Approaches to such situations include: both sides claiming that the issue is the responsibility of the other; one side or the other negotiating to act on the other’s territory; and/or both sides acting on the issue in a coordinated or uncoordinated way. The division of power between education and immigration is a greater stumbling block for integrating diversity in Toronto than are the federal/provincial divisions of power related to other immigration issues.

More fundamental than this constitutional particularity of Canada, of course, is the impact of demographics and political activity on the voting potential of various groups in a democratic country. Also, each level of government has a different mix of voters within its constituency. Thus, the facts and issues considered below are strongly influenced by the (perceived) voting and political lobbying power of the immigrant population as a whole or of groups within each level. Over the period under consideration in this report, changes occurred in the proportions of immigrants in Toronto, their characteristics (e.g., race, levels of education, political experience), and the numbers who had obtained the right to vote. Furthermore, communities of immigrants have evolved along ethnic or other lines to various levels of institutional development (Breton 1990), including political organization. The influence of this factor, while not discussed in depth here, has contributed greatly to trends in policymaking over time in this city.

Is education that supports immigration, then, a hot potato tossed around between levels of government, or is it dealt with at the various levels appropriate for the issues involved? Do the immigrant and majority populations’ interests receive a balanced hearing in the political process?

Chiswick (1992, 5) notes that "Economics was more important for shaping immigration policy in Canada than in the United States, and American policies were more closely tied to foreign policy questions than were Canadian. ... [I]mmigration has been dealt with in the same ministry as manpower or employment matters in Canada, whereas most immigration issues are handled by the Justice Department in the United States." As noted below, this federal interest had varying impacts on immigration policy. First, given the importance placed by Canada on the role of immigrants in the labour force, it was to be expected that training immigrant adults specifically for roles in the workplace would be a major policy initiative. Has this investment in training immigrants had an impact on their integration into the country’s economy? Second, policies on the choice of immigrants have been influenced by expectations not only about the effects of immigrants on the economy but also about the absorptive capacity of the mainstream population in receiving those immigrants. Have enough or the right educational efforts been supported by government to prepare the mainstream population to accept the newcomers? Have NGOs and other facets of the third sector been left carrying too much of this burden?

Third, and in a somewhat different vein, the economics of education influence everyday pedagogy. Especially after WWII, Britain and the United States developed large export industries in teaching English as a Foreign Language in non-English-speaking countries. One effect was that their already strong, foreign-market-oriented publishing products dominated not only their own domestic, second-language markets but also those of less aggressive countries like Canada. Therefore, comments below about the development of expertise and materials, particularly for second-language teaching, must be appreciated against the backdrop of this powerful flood of offshore products.

Between WWII and the 1960s, the state, at various levels, made its first significant interventions through education to integrate immigrants and alter Canadian institutions to recognize their presence. This section discusses these initiatives according to government level. Since issues cross government levels, laying out the discussion in this fashion—though it seemed the clearest way to cover the material—is not entirely ideal.

Immigration to Toronto up to WWII predominantly consisted of Caucasians from English-speaking countries. Immigration from northern Europe rose after the war, and southern Europeans with occupations considered suitable were permitted to enter. Refugees came from Hungary in the 1950s and Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, along with those impacted by the Six Days War in the Near East and North Africa. Not only was the ethnic mix increasing across the country, but the geographic spread of immigration was changing, with many more immigrants coming to the cities, and to provinces from Quebec west, rather than the Maritimes. Toronto was becoming the country’s major immigrant destination. As early as 1960-61, the Toronto Board of Education reported that 28 percent of children in their senior kindergarten classes spoke English plus another language, and 6.7 percent could not speak English when they entered school (Research Department 1965).

From early days in Toronto, integrating immigrants who did not speak English and/or whose cultures set them apart from the mainstream had been in the hands of NGOs (Burnaby 1998a; Pal 1993; Selman 1987), school boards, and individual citizens. In 1940, through pressure from NGOs, the Canadian Council of Education for Citizenship (later the Canadian Citizenship Council) was formed, which advocated for immigrant assimilation. From the end of WWII into the 1960s, the federal government shuffled responsibilities for processing immigrants. In the end, the federal Department of the Secretary of State held responsibility for the Citizenship Act (1946) and the Department of Manpower and Immigration dealt with the Immigration Act (Pal 1993, chap. 4; Whitaker 1991).

Secretary of State policy was formed in 1947 to manage, in particular, the influx of "displaced persons" (war refugees). A series of programs called the Citizenship and Language Instruction and Language Textbook Agreements (CILT) starting in 1947, under the aegis of the Citizenship Act, provided federal funding to provincial departments of education and, through them, school boards and NGOs (such as the Canadian Citizenship Council and many others; see Pal 1993). In 1953, the Ontario government signed a further agreement relating to CILT (Go 1987, 18; Sub-committee on Language Training, n.d., app. 5). One part of the program paid the entire cost of textbooks for citizenship and language classes, while the other paid half of direct costs for instruction. The ostensible focus was preparing immigrants with the language and knowledge (and allegiance?) to pass the citizenship test, but it is difficult to know how this intention translated into instruction in classes themselves. There was no cap on the amount nor much restriction on eligible activities that the provinces could claim. The provinces billed the federal government after the money had been spent, and the federal reimbursement went into provincial general revenues. Therefore, it is virtually impossible to trace the amounts actually used under this program.

In this assimilationist-intended action, both language training and "citizenship instruction" to obtain Canadian citizenship were provided. The federal government responded to voters’ concerns about the loyalty of new citizens and national unity through pressure from NGOs (Ciccarelli 1997). Whatever interests adult immigrants might have in learning English and about Canada may also have been addressed. We cannot tell what volume of programming on ESL and orientation training generated through CILT was actually delivered by NGOs and school boards. Certainly, demand for both ESL and settlement information by immigrants exceeded supply. Constitutionally, the federal government stood well back from the provincial responsibility of deciding the educational content of such programs and providing actual service.

In 1967, the Immigration Act was substantially revised, foreshadowed by changes in regulations in 1962; discrimination on the basis of race, colour, and religion was to be eliminated, and, instead, a point system—based on an individual’s characteristics of interest to the Canadian economy (including skills in English and French)—established. The federal government, concerned about human resources for the country’s booming economy, emphasized in the Immigration Act not only the selection of the most suitable workers and their dispersal to where they were most needed in the country, but also cooperation with the provinces in bearing the costs of immigration. In 1966, it passed the Occupational Training Act for Adults, which survived until the late 1980s under various names and reformulations. Most commonly called the Manpower Program, it provided funding for a range of full-time occupational and pre-occupational training for adults. With this move, the federal government came close to trespassing on the provincial governments’ constitutional rights to education; it sidestepped confrontation by calling the services "training" rather than "education" and by having the provinces provide the training through classroom seats purchased for students who were chosen by federal officials (Thomas 1987, 112). English as a second language comprised a large proportion, but by no means all, of the training offered. Adult basic education (below high-school level) was also included originally, but was dropped in the late 1970s. ESL students received about 24 weeks of full-time training with a living allowance. To some degree, as a response to this federal program, community colleges were developed to house and staff it.

The newly established community colleges, called Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs) in Ontario, started receiving Manpower ESL students in 1967 (e.g., Seneca had three classes in 1967). There was a scramble to get experienced teachers, materials, and even classrooms for these classes, which multiplied quickly in Toronto's CAATs over the next few years. These programs were in high demand by immigrants because of the training allowance they received for attending and the possibility of being sent for further training. Federal officials chose the immigrants for the courses and further training, while colleges controlled the curriculum.

Throughout the 1960s, the federal government was increasingly occupied by the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and its demands for the French language rights that were at least suggested in the framework of the Canadian government, the British North America Act of 1867 (Neatby 1992). Growing immigration in Quebec as elsewhere in the country undoubtedly played a role in rising demands for French language rights (Burnaby 1996, 162-165). In 1963, the federal government established the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the main result of which was the declaration of English and French as Canada’s official languages in 1969. The country watched closely for any impact this Official Languages Act would have on their lives and communities. Issues of immigrant languages were sidelined as, for example, mainstream parents demanded French immersion schooling for their children similar to the program started in St. Lambert, Quebec in 1965 (Lambert and Tucker 1972). The ability to speak both official languages was widely thought to be a great economic advantage, especially for youth.

The fourth book of the Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1969) addressed the cultural contributions of the other (i.e., neither English, French, nor Aboriginal) ethnic groups. With respect to language and education for these "other" groups, the Commission developed three principles:

members of these groups should have opportunities to maintain their own languages and cultures within the education system if they indicate sufficient interest in doing so;

such maintenance must be seen within the broader context of bilingualism and biculturalism and therefore third languages should not be taught at the expense of the second official language;

the elementary school years are the most vital for the teaching of languages and the most extensive effort should be made at this level.

The Commission believes that it is not feasible for the public education system to employ languages other than French and English as languages of instruction. ... Nevertheless, the use of other languages and opportunities to learn them should be encouraged (Canadian Association for Adult Education in cooperation with the Citizenship Branch, Department of the Secretary of State 1967, 11, emphasis in the original).

While acknowledging immigrant groups' potential pluralist interest in maintaining their original languages, the second official language remains prioritized over any nonofficial language, especially as media of instruction. These statements warned the federal government against pressure to fund nonofficial language teaching in the school system. However, one federal responsibility on language teaching for immigrants (not a constitutional federal responsibility) was suggested in this book: "the federal government, as the government of the country as a whole, rather than provincial or local governments, should be responsible for providing the funds required for the teaching of English or French to children who enter school with an adequate knowledge of neither language" (Recommendation 4, p. 12). (See below for further discussion of this issue.) The report also rejected the idea that "private ethnic schools" that teach ethnic children their ancestral language and culture should receive public funds.

Thus, up to the end of the 1960s, the federal government took fiscal action to integrate diversity. The two educational programs that were created, aimed to prepare adult immigrants to meet mainstream norms, related to federal interests in national loyalty, unity, and a labourforce accessible by mainstream employers. The actual educational services and decisions on content were left to the institutions that delivered them. The work of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism raised several issues on recognition of and support for languages and cultures other than English or French in Canada, a matter that might encourage immigrants to maintain, rather than relinquish, diversity. Its recommendations, nonetheless, firmly favoured supporting English and French rather than other languages. The Report of the Royal Commission did open the door to federal funding to teach ESL and FSL to children not fluent in either language in schools (not a federal responsibility in the constitution).

Like the federal government, until the postwar period the Ontario government had left educational institutions to address the impact of immigrants through and on the educational system. Thus, it was up to individual school boards, schools, and teachers to take any reasonable action on immigrant children and adults in their jurisdictions. Scant documentation is available on what such provisions might have included, although there are records of night-school classes in some school boards aimed at basic education and business training for immigrant adults. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, the numbers of immigrants in some parts of Toronto, at least, were great enough to stimulate more concerted efforts.

In 1961, Ontario created a Department of the Ontario Provincial Secretary and Citizenship. The Citizenship Division of this provincial body went through many name changes (e.g., Citizenship Branch, Newcomer Services) and was subsequently housed in various provincial ministries from Community and Social Services to Culture and Recreation (which itself had further name changes) until it was disbanded in 1996. The division's name and location changes meant that it was always housed in a small ministry without power in cabinet, thus maintaining a low profile for its mandate and minimizing the potential for political demands for large-scale policy or funding. From the outset, it undertook activities that could be reimbursed through the CILT monies (via a new Language Textbook Agreement signed in 1962) and established various other community programs for immigrant settlement. Perhaps the best known of its early activities was the publication, under the leadership of Carson Martin, of a series of textbooks for teaching adults English as a second language (e.g., Martin 1963), which were widely used given the dearth of such materials and the surging need for them. These books were organized around highly structured grammatical principles, an approach greatly in favour in adult ESL at the time (e.g., Fries 1945). This format made the materials easy to use for the many untrained teachers and volunteers pressed into service. Academic research on ESL in this period was dominated by (British and American) linguistics and behavioural psychology rather than learners’ individual or group psychosocial needs and contexts (Rodby 1992) and focused on teaching one language to uniform groups of speakers of one other language (Mewhort, Milloy, Sweetman, and Gore 1965, 9-10).

The Division also began an organization called the International Institute, which offered adult ESL full-time (morning and afternoon shifts) classes. This institute opened in the early 1960s and operated until the federal government’s Manpower training programs got underway in the late 1960s, at which time many of the teachers from the International Institute went to teach Manpower ESL at community colleges, especially George Brown College. Late in the decade, the Division also instituted a series of bulletins for ESL teachers, called TESL Talk, which later became a full-fledged journal sponsored and edited by the Citizenship Division/Branch in collaboration with other ESL professionals. In addition, it supported and facilitated conferences for ESL teachers starting in 1967. In about 1968, it started working with the Ontario Education Communications Authority on a television program called Castle Zaremba, which aimed to help immigrants learn English at home (see TESL Talk 2, no. 1 (1971): 28-31). Though this program did not air for long, it was considered highly effective. TESL Talk (3, no. 1 (1972): 28) reported on 40 half-hour programs in each of Greek, Portuguese, and Italian orientating newcomers to government and community services. These programs were developed by the Citizenship Branch in cooperation with five broadcast cable companies. Also in the 1960s, the Citizenship Division piloted classes for immigrant parents and preschool children in which the parents were offered ESL training while their children were taught English and introduced to Canadian ways. These part-time classes were taught by volunteers who were trained by ESL and preschool program supervisors under contract. While such activities may seem minor, they represented the only visible government activity on ESL or settlement issues at the time and provided an example and rallying point for those many teachers, settlement workers, and others overwhelmed by the needs and challenges that immigrants brought to Toronto's public and nonpublic institutions.

The Ontario Department/Ministry of Education implements the Education Act (1890, rev. 1912) in the province’s elementary and secondary schools and influences the provision of continuing education programs offered in schools as well. In the 1960s, the Education Act required Ontario teachers to use English (or French in the early grades for Francophone students) with pupils unless another language was being taught as a subject, or if pupils did not understand English. This latter proviso could have opened doors to various kinds of assimilationist and pluralist special programs for immigrant children in elementary and secondary schools who do not speak English, but, as will be seen in discussion of later decades, it generally did not (see Cummins and Danesi 1990, chap. 2). The secondary curriculum in the 1960s allowed for the teaching of French and Latin as compulsory subjects and five "modern" languages (most commonly German) as subjects of instruction. Languages other than those on the department’s list could be taught upon local request.

In the 1960s, the department did not have policy to integrate the new diversity in the student body, nor did it have experts among its staff in this field. It was up to the school boards, under the general department guidelines for the conduct of schooling, to deal with specific issues such as ESL and cultural differences among children. There was little expertise among teachers and administrators about ESL or other facets of integrating diversity in the schools other than experience gained by individuals in actually working with immigrant students (Mewhort et al. 1965; discussed further under school boards). However, the department did recognize an imbalance in the needs of different boards that were not being recognized in its funding formula, so it weighed factors to compensate boards for various conditions (see below, under the 1970s, for more on the implementation).

Probably because of the incentive of CILT funding, in 1958 the Department of Education started a summer program to train teachers to teach ESL. It employed the expertise of members of the Citizenship Branch, many of whom had experience in teaching adult ESL, to organize the summer program, which was taught in a Toronto Board of Education school (some years in Hamilton and Ottawa as well). The course included the experience of learning some basic oral proficiency in a foreign language, linguistics, English grammar, and second-language teaching methods. Throughout the 1960s, the students in these courses were mostly people intending to teach adults, although a growing number of elementary and secondary teachers took the course (Ashworth 1975, 147-148; Mewhort et al. 1965, 42). The focus on teachers of adults was clear, for example, in the fact that students were not required to have a teaching certificate.

In sum, the province took its lead, and considerable funding, from the federal government with respect to undertaking assimilationist language programs and settlement support for immigrant adults. Some of its initiatives went further, using minority languages in settlement work and developing specific outreach strategies to establish communication with immigrant groups. Training and professionalization of ESL teachers began, as did funding for school boards with special needs.

Until recently, there was a considerable division of power in Ontario between the Department of Education and school boards, which had locally elected officials and their own financial resources through property taxes. In the 1960s, the department did not create policy on teaching ESL or other means of integrating immigrant children in schools. School boards developed their own strategies to deal with immigrant children who entered schools not speaking English and/or having significant cultural differences from the Canadian children in their classes. Mewhort et al. (1965) surveyed junior and senior kindergarten children and their schools in the Toronto Board in 1965 concerning immigration-related issues, and synthesized a number of Toronto Board reports since 1960 including other similar surveys and literature reviews. They reported, among other things, that: 1,926 students from non-English-speaking countries entered board schools between July 1964 and May 1965; their linguistic and cultural needs differed overwhelmingly; current assessment practices were largely ineffectual; those children with more familiar with city life seemed to have fewer problems assimilating; not all immigrant children were happy being in Canada; setting criteria for identifying a "non-English-speaking pupil" was, in practical terms, impossible; in many schools, the basis of ESL methods was a warm, sympathetic, "English" environment; ESL provisions across schools varied so greatly that any summary tended to be misleading; some teachers had taken the provincial, summer ESL teacher training course and the board in 1965 started in-service training for teachers of immigrant children; almost half of the immigrant children in grade 8 in 1965 were several years older than usual for their grade, likely because they had been placed below their normal grade level when they arrived; and relations between school, parents, and community were a challenge. The report recommended that the board: strike an Immigrant Education and Citizenship Advisory Council with broad representation from governments, the community, and NGOs; set up staff committees on ESL methods, teacher selection and training, educational counselling services for immigrants, and the relationship between ESL and culture conflicts; create a community-sponsored reception and social service centre; and grant a budget for multimedia outreach to the community.

In this time of experimentation and coping, school boards created a number of programs. For example, beginning in1963, the Board of Education for the City of Toronto held summer schools in which immigrant children could work on learning English in a low-key program aimed at orientation and personal growth. Starting with three school sites, the program rapidly expanded (Ashworth 1975, 59-61). The same board established the Main Street School in 1965 where immigrant children over the age of twelve could study with teachers, many of whom were bilingual. Students could choose Main Street or local reception centres in regular schools, normally designated rooms or portables especially for immigrant children. Students stayed in these programs for varying lengths of time and were gradually integrated into regular school classes. A comparison study of graduates of both kinds of programs found few differences (Ashworth 1975, 63-66; Board of Education of the City of Toronto 1969). Of course, some boards were more affected than others according to whether their catchment areas had greater or fewer immigrants.

Boards also had their own policies about teaching ESL to adults through their continuing education programs. A good deal of what became adult ESL in evening and adult day classes started with adaptations of adult basic education and business classes. The Toronto Board of Education had three adult day schools for academic upgrading subjects and basic business-related courses. In 1965, the school at Jones Avenue became a school for teaching ESL to adults on a full-time basis. Other adults took ESL in evening classes in schools as part of the boards’ continuing education programs.

School boards, schools, and teachers, then, as the point of contact between immigrants and the formal education system, formed a major locus of integration between immigrants and mainstream society. Along with locally developed approaches to classroom situations, some boards conducted their own empirical and literature research on immigrant children and their impacts on the schools. Other than the kinds of details just described, documentation is hard to access on what actually happened in terms of the quality and quantity of programs or the attitudes and principles with which it was delivered or received.

NGOs and other organizations initiated a significant range of activities in integrating diversity. For example, a major NGO in Toronto, now known as COSTI-IIAS, offered educational programs for adults at the start of the 1960s. The Centro Organizzativo Scuole Tecniche Italiane (COSTI), founded in 1962 with support from the Italian government, offered daily courses in English and mathematics so that immigrant workers could obtain credentials and skills to enter the Canadian labourforce. The Italian Immigrant Aid Society (IIAS), founded in 1952, complemented the work of COSTI for providing settlement services to Italian families. Over the years, these organizations have grown to include eleven sites around the city and provide many services. As early as 1974, it collaborated with other ethnic organizations and now serves immigrants of any background (Bronte 1990). In addition to COSTI, there were many other local NGOs that provided settlement services, English as a second language (ESL) classes, classes in languages other than English for children (O’Bryan, Reitz, and Kuplowska 1975, 36), or other programs for immigrants, with funding from government and private sources.

Each group described above had certain constraints, interests, and resources. The federal and provincial governments, school boards and schools, NGOs, immigrants themselves, and voters were the major players, and highlights of their activities reveal patterns of response. To begin with, the federal government's voter base at that time did not urge support for immigrants; indeed, the federal government was under pressure to support national unity (assimilate immigrants and even express xenophobia) and labour development. Therefore, the CILT agreements and Manpower training programs addressed settlement of immigrants and their integration into the labour force. In doing so, it even managed to hide the expenditure on immigrants from public attention in that CILT went directly to the provinces, and language training for immigrants operated under the umbrella of a large program for labourforce development. Furthermore, the federal government was not under public scrutiny for the quality of implementation of these programs, since it did not deliver the actual services in either case. It used no base of expertise in immigrant issues, except perhaps that of the NGOs that pressed for CILT, to implement or justify these programs. Political attention in terms of language, culture, and national unity was focused instead on French/English relations, the Royal Commissions on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (drawing on many sources of expertise in intergroup relations), and the Official Languages Act. On these matters the government was under intense pressure from voters, and every detail of the implementation of the Official Languages Act was watched closely. Thus, any deviation of federal attention from support of the status of French, such as support for ESL for immigrant children much less heritage languages, was avoided.

The provincial government was not under much more voter pressure than the federal level to support immigrant needs and interests, except, perhaps, for conflicting messages from a few constituencies with high numbers of immigrants. It was prepared to use the CILT money from the federal government and some of its own to support a range of innovative programs for immigrant adults including direct ESL and settlement services and support for teachers now having to learn to teach ESL. A special unit was created to do this, which drew on what expertise it could find from NGOs and others experienced in working with immigrants, but this unit was kept at arm's length from the centre of power in a small government department. This sort of activity did not attract much voter attention. Similarly, the provincial role in the Manpower adult ESL program was not noticed amidst the other labour-oriented programs, and the new colleges that delivered it had to do their best to find expertise in the ESL field, which was virtually nonexistent.

Ontario was much more constrained in reacting to the impact of immigration on education under the Education Act, which drew public interest especially in the days of the baby boom. The province became aware of issues that could be contentious through the school boards and other interested parties in education, perhaps more than from voters, who reported on issues of language, culture, access, and racism arising in schools. Individual school boards, schools, and teachers created and researched their own responses from their experience, as there were no ready-made models. The province responded with services for adult immigrants, teacher training, and considered specific funding for school boards with special needs. It avoided any solution that would impact the structure of the Education Act, such as creating policy on ESL for schools or even hiring department staff with ESL expertise, since that would raise the issues to public consciousness and might create long-term obligations for spending specifically on immigrants. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism hinted at federal funding for ESL for immigrant children, but this was not forthcoming.

In adult ESL and settlement, NGOs continued to provide and develop expertise and models for dealing with diversity from their own experience. Some financial support explicitly for immigrants came through CILT and the province via the Citizenship Branch and even foreign governments. It is not clear how effective they were in lobbying the provincial governments for change.

Expertise for deciding what kinds of interventions would be effective was scarce at most levels in this educational scenario. Those who had and were developing experience in the field were the front-line personnel in the NGOs and schools. Academia had no appropriate pedagogical solutions. Theories about second-language teaching for adults were growing in the U.S. and Britain along rigid linguistic and psychological lines. They were based largely in theory or were developed from scenarios of adults learning English as a foreign language overseas or in American or British graduate schools. Questions of marginalized groups accessing mainstream institutions, much less mainstream integration of diversity, were not directly addressed.

If we assume that mainstream institutions in the simplest terms wanted immigrants to fit into the social and economic life of the country to the benefit of mainstream goals, and that immigrants wanted access to the social and economic life of the country but not at the cost of their essential identity and values, then the resolution to any differences arising could be a bottomless pit of human and/or economic costs to be paid by both/either side. The responses from mainstream institutions, the only ones we can easily document, were: (1) to provide minimal resources, mostly directed at assimilation; (2) to minimize the public visibility of these actions; (3) to avoid entrenching these initiatives in instruments such as legislation that would be hard to change; and (4) to maintain control of the amount spent so that willingness to spend, rather than need, dictated the budget.

Throughout the 1960s, the booming economy of Canada and the world political and economic climate continued to draw immigrants to the country and Toronto. Alterations in the Immigration Act were resulted in major changes to the racial characteristics of new immigrants. Immigrants from the Caribbean came in such substantial numbers that educational service providers began to talk about teaching standard English as a second dialect (SESD) as well as ESL, and the blanket terms for language training was often English as a second language/dialect (ESL/D). The numbers of immigrants who did not speak English increased. For example, the Toronto Board of Education reported that in 1970, 25 percent of its students were not born in Canada, and 41 percent either did not have English as their mother tongue or had another language as well as English as their mother tongue. By 1975, these figures rose to 30 percent and 46 percent respectively (Deosaran, Wright and Kane, n.d., 44). During the decade, significant refugee groups came from Uganda, Chile, and Southeast Asia. Interventions such as ESL and settlement services to integrate diversity in place by the end of the 1960s were only minimal as a response to such growth, and no government institution had prepared for changes in the direction of pluralism.

The federal Manpower and CILT programs for adults to support ESL learning and orientation to Canada, especially the labourforce, continued throughout the 1970s. However, in 1970, attention at the federal level with respect to language was still greatly focused on the effects of the Official Languages Act. That year, the federal government established the Official Languages in Education (OLE) program, which has provided financing for official-language minority schooling (i.e., schools in French for Francophones outside of Quebec and in English for Anglophones in Quebec) and for second-official language programs in school (i.e., core French and French immersion classes outside of Quebec, and anglais langue seconde in Quebec). Many of the changes funded under this Act meant that second languages were taught in elementary schools, a change from previous norms. (See Peat, Marwick, and Churchill 1987, for a review of these programs.) Thus, although the federal government has no mandate with respect to education, it could provide funding for schools that were a result of its official language legislation. With this funding and fueled by parent enthusiasm, French immersion and core French programs burgeoned in Toronto schools, from kindergarten to the end of high school, throughout the 1970s. There is no comparable federal funding for immigrant children learning ESL or FSL as their first official language.

With all the political focus on French/English relations, language and culture was a sensitive matter for those who had investments in other cultures and languages. In the face of this backlash against the declaration of official languages, on October 8, 1971 the federal government declared itself, by policy but not legislation, to be multicultural (rather than just English/French bicultural) within a framework of bilingualism. The original policy included, as its fourth tenet, that "the government will continue to assist immigrants to acquire at least one of Canada’s official languages in order to become full participants in Canadian society" (Saouab 1993, 4). However, other than the programs for adults already described here, there were no further funds from the federal government for ESL or FSL for immigrants under the name of multiculturalism—none at all for children, even though the latter was recommended in the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism report. Taking this latter step would not only be very costly for the federal government, but it would also reduce the impression of special status for the official languages and entail complex regulations about which children were eligible. This absence of action on ESL for immigrant children by the federal government did not draw visible political attention at the time. In a more pluralist vein, the multiculturalism policy did open the door of the state for debate about the value of cultural and linguistic diversity and concerns about discrimination. The policy evolved, funding arrangements for ethnocultural organizations in the 1970s to support the development of nonofficial languages and cultures, some activities of which were in schools.

During the 1970s, there were several major waves of refugees, among which the "boat people" from Southeast Asia towards the end of the decade made the most public impression. Since the federal government took more responsibility for refugees in their first year in Canada than it did for immigrants, it needed to find some way of delivering settlement services to these groups. In 1979, it created the Immigrant Settlement and Adaptation Program (ISAP) under the Settlement Branch (on the immigration side) of the Canada Employment and Immigration Commission which contracted with NGOs to provide services. (See below under NGOs.)

Thus, in the 1970s, the federal government continued its previous ESL programs for immigrants, delivered through the provinces, and established a new one for settlement and ESL for refugees contracted through NGOs. The multiculturalism policy, although containing rhetoric about supporting newcomers in learning English and French, provided no funding in that direction. However, it had some activities supporting the maintenance of nonofficial languages.

In response to the Official Languages Act, Quebec declared itself officially monolingual in French, while New Brunswick announced that it was officially bilingual in English and French. Ontario took a more subtle route and included French language rights in various ways during the 1970s (Cartwright 1998; Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages 1992, Part II). However, for the most part, these initiatives continued separately from those directed towards immigrants. The Citizenship Branch (under various names and ministries) continued to be the most pro-active arm of the provincial government with respect to immigrant education services. In 1970, it supported the creation of TESL Ontario, an organization of ESL teachers and other interested parties, to support the provision of ESL to immigrants. The Citizenship Branch provided a good deal of the funding to keep this organization and its conferences going until about 1978.

In 1973, TESL Ontario established a subcommittee to study provisions in TESL teacher training and standards. Monica Robinson (1975) reported on a meeting the various types of training available were described. The summer programs funded by the Ministry of Education and conducted by the Citizenship Bureau (Branch) continued, but questions were raised about the ways in which certified teachers who took the course would be credited in terms of specialist status. Other available courses were described as in place or about to begin. Discussion at this meeting and elsewhere (TESL Ontario 1978) stressed the need for coordination of program offerings and standards. To appreciate fully the diversity of efforts at this time in teacher training for ESL, one should take into account the decision was being made to require elementary school teachers to have an undergraduate degree (taking effect in 1980). This decision necessitated a major restructuring of teacher education under the faculties of education at the universities and the closing of the teachers’ colleges. It also meant the creation of standard ways in which teachers would be credited with specialized learning. The final outcome for ESL, starting in about 1976, was the evolution of the old Department of Education summer course in ESL into the three-part Additional Qualification program in ESL still existing today, taught by faculties of education. With all three parts of this program, a certified teacher is considered to be an ESL specialist. Teachers with even Part I of this program are preferred for certain positions in schools. Teachers without teaching certificates were permitted to take these Additional Qualifications courses or attend university (non–faculty of education) or college courses. In addition to training in language and second language teaching methods, the program required teachers to study sociocultural issues related to ESL learners. The impact of this teacher certification was substantial in that school boards and other institutions could assess candidates for teacher positions for ESL skills and even require qualifications. These developments were, in effect, the professionalization of ESL teachers and their integration into the schools, with significant but less impact on the colleges and NGOs.

In the 1970s, the Ministry of Culture and Recreation, the home of the Newcomer Services Branch (yet another name for the Citizenship Branch) formalized a number of services it offered. In 1970, TESL Talk became a regular journal rather than just a news bulletin; Newcomer News was started as a newspaper in simplified English that could be read by ESL learners and used as material for learning in ESL classes. In that year too, the parents and preschoolers classes became a regular program. In 1971, reception services were established whereby newcomers were met, often at the airport as they arrived, and offered help in the most basic aspects of getting started in the city. It should be noted that the 1970s saw significant movements of refugees (e.g., Ugandan Asians and Chileans) many of who were particularly unprepared for starting a new life here. In 1973, by creating Ontario Welcome House, the Branch consolidated a number of services under one roof, such as ESL training, translations services, orientation programs, reception services, and volunteer training. Newcomer Services also developed Help a Friend Learn English, a telephone tutoring program using volunteer tutors. The Ontario Ministry of Education in 1971 separated off its responsibilities for post-secondary formal education to form the new Ministry of Colleges and Universities, which became, among other things, the liaison with the federal Canada Employment and Immigration Commission (CEIC) for the implementation of Manpower adult ESL programs in colleges.

For most of the decade, the Ministry of Education maintained its low profile on ESL by letting school boards decide how to teach ESL in schools under the general guidance of ministry policies. However, a problem arose with respect to the interface between high school graduation and further education. Universities and colleges had always accepted Ontario high-school graduates with high enough marks on the assumption that they must speak English well in order to graduate. However, the situation was complicated for high-school-aged students who arrived in Ontario with little English. In 1977, the Ministry of Education had to make a public statement on ESL by publishing English as a second Language/Dialect: Curriculum Guide for the Intermediate and Senior Divisions. This document allowed for students to take several credit courses in ESL and/or ESL and a subject, but required them to pass certain regular courses in English as well in order to graduate. A number of support documents were published soon after, giving teachers ideas for teaching integrated programs in ESL/D, and using the media and newspapers in ESL/D teaching at the secondary level. For part of the 1970s, the Ministry of Education hired a person explicitly as an ESL specialist, but that position disappeared and has not been replaced.

As noted above, in the 1960s, the Ministry of Education began finding ways to fund school boards differentially depending on various pressures in their respective environments. From 1970, it initiated a system of weighting factors through which school boards with certain characteristics were given proportionately more funding (Committee on Costs of Education 1975, 224-223). As of 1972, one of these factors, called compensatory education, allowed additional funds to boards through a formula that combined the percentage of the population receiving welfare funds, the percentage of the population reporting incomes of less than four thousand dollars, and the percentage of the population with neither English nor French as their official language (from census data); in 1974, the number of public housing units per capita was added to the formula (Committee on Costs of Education 1975, 260-262). Furthermore, in 1978, the ministry weighed another factor, called the language of instruction for New Canadians weighting factor, which was based on the number of full-time equivalent ESL teachers above the basic level of four per ten thousand pupils for elementary and two per ten thousand pupils at the secondary level (Ontario Ministry of Education 1978, 7). Such funding formulas for support from the Ministry of Education to school boards for child or adult ESL programs are notoriously complex and limited (see Greater Toronto Southeast Asian Refugee Task Force 1981, 52), so it is difficult to follow the levels over the years; however, some form of this funding remains.

Throughout the decade, school boards pressured the Ministry of Education to recognize and use nonofficial languages in various ways. As discussed below under school boards, in 1977 the Ministry established the Heritages Languages Program for teaching languages of immigrant communities as subjects of instruction in schools. It sidestepped demands to use nonofficial languages as medium of instruction in schools or require full teacher certification for these language teachers, but it did commit funding. (See below under school boards and the 1980s for more discussion.)

With respect to multiculturalism, Maseman and Cummins (1985) note that "It is important to emphasize that language legislation is one of the very few areas in which any concerns relating to multiculturalism have become law." However, they go on to say that "Many other aspects of multicultural programs have been written into clauses of statements of educational philosophy (Ontario The Formative Years), or written into curriculum guidelines published by ministries and departments of education which aid teachers to prepare their teaching materials" (20). The Formative Years (1975) was a Ministry of Education policy document on elementary education.

In sum, in the 1970s the Ontario government continued quietly to administer federal funding for adult ESL through CILT and Manpower. Also without fanfare, it provided extra support for ESL through its granting formulas to school boards. Since the certification for all teachers was being reorganized, the Ministry of Culture and Recreation helped creation an NGO for ESL teachers, and the Ministry of Education used the advice of this body to certify training and professionalization of ESL teachers and specialists for the schools. Also, the Ministry broke its silence on ESL policy by publishing a guideline for ESL/D in the secondary schools. In the context of the federal multiculturalism policy and with pressure from school boards, the Ministry of Education permitted and funded the teaching of "heritage" languages in the schools. The Ministry of Culture and Recreation expanded its programs in various ways including coordinating and delivering a variety of settlement services to newcomers through Ontario Welcome House. Overall, the provincial government increased its activities, visibility, and funding for ESL and settlement, and stepped beyond compensation and assimilation to permit heritage languages in the schools.

As noted above, school boards had little direction from the Ministry of Education to decide how to deal with ESL/D students in elementary and most aspects of secondary school. The highly assimilationist climate of previous years, in which teaching immigrant children English was the main way to integrate them into Canadian schools, was influenced not only by rapid demographic change but also perhaps by the federal multiculturalism policy and the growing presence of French in schools. Concerns about race and culture as factors to be attended to as well as equality of access to programs and successful outcomes of schooling were raised at the school board level. According to Moodley (1995, 812):

Of the few school boards that have included anti-racism as part of their goal of multicultural education, Toronto and North York have led the way since the late ‘70s, and Vancouver followed suit in 1982. Toronto and North York addressed manifestations of racism within the school system by establishing race relations subcommittees and consulting school personnel, students, and the community.

After collecting data throughout the 1960s on the numbers and placements of immigrant children, the Toronto Board of Education’s Special Committee on Educating New Canadians requested the initiation of a periodic survey (The Every Student Survey) of all the students in its system to see if birthplace, home language, or socioeconomic status influenced access to school programs. While the data on the 1970 and 1975 surveys were underanalysed, Canadian-born students with English as a mother tongue and from families of higher socioeconomic status were most likely to be in higher level programs and vice versa. Cummins (1981) disagreed with the conclusion by Toronto Board researchers (Ramsey and Wright 1974), based on these student survey data, that immigrant children who arrive in Canada at a young age achieve better English proficiency than children who arrive when they are older. Cummins (1981, 148) reanalysed Ramsey and Wright’s data to include length of residence in Canada and concluded that:

The finding that it takes at least five years, on the average, for immigrant children who arrive in the host country after the age of six to approach grade norms in [second language cognitive/academic language proficiency] has important educational implications. In many school systems ESL assistance is given to immigrant children only during their first two years in the host country. The present data suggest that, from an educational perspective, this figure is arbitrary and may not reflect the needs of ESL children.

A second implication is that psychological or educational assessment of immigrant children in [the second language] within their first five years in the host country is likely to seriously underestimate their potential academic abilities.

Detailed information about how the school boards responded to such information is ephemeral and hard to locate.

Issues of race and culture were also addressed in the boards. The Toronto Board of Education, in 1974, published The Bias of Culture, and in 1975 The Draft Report of the Work Group on Multicultural Programs (discussed in Ashworth 1975, 42). In 1976, TESL Talk (7, no. 1) published a special issue called Black Students in Urban Canada. In it, D’Oyley reports on an extensive 1974-75 survey with respect to black students in three selected "families" of schools in three school boards in Toronto. He found: a lack of provisions for orienting or receiving immigrant students when they first arrive and more confusion on the part of counselors as to how to place black students than how to place immigrant students; a considerable proportion of instructors found teaching ESD more challenging than ESL; common strategies for dealing with language difficulties of black students being a succession of lower grade placement, ESL classes, and remedial classes; general student satisfaction with the school’s help for academic problems and an appreciation for tutorial assistance and career counselling from a community project outside of school; and a need for black content in history and materials relevant to students’ home cultures, the establishment of counselling in schools for black students and in-service training for staff, more appropriate extracurricular activities for black children, and more sensitive home-school relations. Again, it is not possible to track the impact of this kind of information on actual school practices; however, in the 1970s, some school boards established units to specifically liaise with immigrant communities to advise boards on programs, assist in student orientation and assessment, provide in-service training to teachers, and support home-school and school-community relations.

As noted concerning the 1960s, for years many children had attended classes to learn or develop their ancestral languages through programs based in and funded by the community. The Education Act virtually prohibited the use of languages other than English or French as media of instruction except when another language was being taught as a subject. This position was reinforced by the position taken in Book IV of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (quoted above). It became clear, however, that certain elements in Toronto saw the value of (1) using children’s first language as the medium of instruction to help them make the transition to the English medium program and (2) teaching children’s ancestral languages as school subjects as part of the school curriculum. In about 1972, permission was granted on a strictly experimental basis to use an Italian bilingual program to ease children’s transition, and to have short classes in Chinese (during school hours) and Greek (after school hours) taught in schools (Cummins and Danesi 1990, 34). The Italian and Chinese programs were implemented for at least a year and were favourably evaluated (Deosaran and Gershman 1976; Shapson and Purbhoo 1974). In 1975, the Toronto Board’s Work Group on Multicultural Programs issued a draft report recommending, among other things, a request to the Ministry of Education to amend the Education Act to permit nonofficial languages to be taught as medium and subject of instruction. However, significantly strong reactions from some sectors of the public caused the Work Group to withdraw its stronger recommendation in its final report in 1976 (Cummins and Danesi, 35).

In 1977, the Ontario Ministry of Education announced the Heritage Languages Program (HLP) through which nonofficial languages could be taught as subjects of instruction, with Ministry funding, either on weekends, after school hours, or integrated into the regular school day, which would be extended by half an hour to accommodate it. Cummins and Danesi (1990, 36) note that the Ontario government was probably pressured at least in part by the fact that the Italian government had been funding Italian language programs through the Metropolitan Separate School Board for a number of years and there was the spectre of other foreign governments doing the same. HLP classes were considered part of Continuing Education rather than the regular curriculum, so they could be taught by teachers who were not regularly certified and also they did not violate the provisions of the Education Act. Although there was considerable hostile reaction from the public, the first year of the program (1977-78) involved 42 school boards in providing 2,000 classes in 30 languages to over 50,000 students (Cummins and Danesi 1990, 37). Surprised by the size and cost of the response to HLP, the Ministry tried to reduce the amount of funding, but was prevented from doing so by strong ethnocultural support (Cummins and Danesi 1990, 38).

Thus, in the 1970s school boards undertook major research on immigrant populations within their schools and created units to support its programs through better multicultural and multilingual resources. They lobbied the provincial government heavily for more support in language and cultural areas, and even challenged the Ministry of Education by implementing programs not permitted under the Education Act. All the while, they continued to develop and expand ESL/D and multicultural programs.

The shock to the infrastructure for absorbing and integrating newcomers in Toronto came in the late 1970s when the "boat people" started to arrive, Southeast Asian refugees in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Operation Lifeline was set up with government support to match the swell of volunteer effort to settle these refugees. Perhaps because of the emotional impact of the television coverage of the Vietnam War, the large numbers of refugees involved, or their perilous means of escape, many private organizations and families came forward to sponsor them, where, in the past, most refugees had been sponsored by government. Somehow, their neediness and the challenges of getting them settled in Canada drew attention at all levels of society to general issues of reception of immigrants. Although NGOs had been working all along to provide various settlement services, and new ones had been created to serve ethnic groups as they arrived, the importance of their role in linking newcomers to the community became clear. In 1978, the Parents and Preschoolers program was used as a model for the Ministry of Culture and Recreation to create the Newcomer Language and Orientation Classes (NLOC) program through which the Ministry funded community agencies and employers to coordinate language programs while school boards paid supervisors to work with volunteer teachers. NLOC monies were used to support programs in the workplace, for orientation, standard English as a second dialect, ESL for those who were not literate in their first language, parents and preschoolers classes, citizenship ESL, and bilingual ESL.

In 1979, the federal CEIC created ISAP to subsidize language training and other services through a number of voluntary agencies. "While provision of language training is not the primary purpose of these programs, these community-based activities have proven effective in reaching target groups who would otherwise be difficult to serve" (Canada Employment and Immigration Commission 1983, 7). Since the Settlement Branch of CEIC was heavily involved in settling refugees, especially during their first year in Canada, its relationship to such agencies, and its financial support of them, was very important to the success of its programs.

Thus, between NLOC, ISAP, Operation Lifeline, Local Initiative Projects grants, and community based support, NGOs became major entities in the network of institutions to support the education and other services of immigrants. Government funding enlarged some NGOs by contributing to their administrative as well as service delivery costs, and created others to provide (specialized) services to immigrants where none had existed before. In 1978, the Ontario Coalition for Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) was formed to coordinate the work of NGOs and to lobby governments for better services and support. Many NGOs lobbied governments at least to some extent as well as providing services; for example, D’Oyley (1976, p 16-21) describes the activities of the Black Education Project (started in 1969) and the Black Heritage cultural school (started in 1970) to research issues among black youth in Toronto, lobby for educational changes, counsel parents and youth, provide classes in basic education and black culture and history, and raise awareness of educational issues within the black community and the education system.

Throughout the 1970s, the federal government maintained the low profile of its funding of adult ESL through the Manpower and CILT programs. A major federal priority was the implementation of the Official Languages Act; it supported French and English schooling and second-language learning in terms of the Act, but there was still no federal language education money for immigrant children who spoke neither French nor English. The federal multiculturalism policy of 1971 failed in its promise to support ESL and FSL for immigrants, although for a time it funded projects to develop nonofficial languages. On the other hand, public sympathy for refugees made it possible to launch the Immigrant Settlement and Adaptation Program, which provided settlement services through NGOs. Clearly, more pluralist influences were reaching the government to take their place alongside the older, more purely assimilationist ones.

In Ontario, specific needs in the education of immigrants as communicated through school boards and NGOs were forcing the provincial government to take more overt action. The Ministry of Education normalized ESL teacher training for teachers with certificates, published ESL guidelines for high-school courses, and provided extra funding for school boards with high immigrant populations. It got embroiled in a conflict, largely with the Board of Education for the City of Toronto, over the teaching of heritage languages, the result being a guideline for a Heritage Languages Program, but it resisted pressure from that board to make changes in the Education Act to allow nonofficial languages as medium of instruction. The Citizenship Branch expanded its services, especially by consolidating a number of activities in Ontario Welcome House and coordinating responses to the influx of refugees from Vietnam. Some of its programs contributed to the growth and financial stabilization of NGOs through support for administration as well as service delivery.

One outcome of the decade was the professionalization of ESL teachers in that their skills were specifically recognized for employment purposes through the school boards and to some extent in other educational institutions. ESL teacher training for certified teachers and others was expanded and consolidated. With help from the Citizenship Branch, ESL teachers organized their own NGO. Another event was the growth and expansion of NGOs to provide language training and settlement services that the two higher levels of government wanted to provide through them. While this development served to move many educational and settlement services into the community where they could be better accessed by many immigrants, it also created the risk of dependency by NGOs on core, sustained funding. NGOs lobbied governments on issues related to immigrants, and were consulted to a considerable extent by the "softer" units in government such as the Settlement Branch of CEIC and the Newcomer Services Branch of the Ontario Ministry of Culture and Recreation and, to a great extent, by school boards.

With major changes to the Immigration Act in place for almost a decade and waves of refugees, especially the Southeast Asians, Toronto in the early 1980s felt the impact of being a truly multicultural and multiracial city as never before. Children under 15 years who spoke a language other than English at home in 1981 comprised 14.2 percent of their age group and adults 16 to 65 were 19.6 percent of their group. Also from the 1981 Census, .4 percent of children and 3 percent of adults between 16 and 65 reported speaking neither official language. Especially because of refugee movements, Toronto received many people from rural origins and some with very low levels of formal education. Racial tensions rose in the 1980s focusing attention on cultural pluralism and anti-racism as well as language issues. There was no longer any possibility of hiding the "immigrant fact" in politics or education.

The 1970s were more economically unsettled than the 1960s, so there were fewer immediate niches into which newcomers could fit for employment. The 1980s were more uncertain still in terms of the economy. Not only were there several major downturns, but the end of the baby boom created tremendous pressure on employment opportunities at the younger end of the job market. Also, the structure of the economy was turning towards information and service work and away from manufacturing and resources. Higher skill levels, especially in communication, were in demand (see, for example, Speaker of the House of Commons, n.d.). The unquestioned expansion of the welfare state changed to concern about government deficits and debt and the need for fiscal belt tightening.

Into the 1980s, the federal government’s political struggle with Quebec and other Francophone populations over national hegemony continued, providing various visible fora for public opinion to raise questions about the interests of non-English and non-French groups. Also, there was a growing awareness of immigration issues in the voter population and pressure from NGOs and other sources in the wake of the implementation of the Official Languages Act and the Multiculturalism Policy. In 1982, the Constitution Act was passed, replacing the British North America Act of 1867 and giving the country a home-grown constitution. Linked to it was the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which, in terms of language, entrenched many of the rights for English and French that came out of the Official Languages Act, but added nothing to support substantially any other language or the right to education to learn one of the official languages if one did not already speak the other. It did have a backhanded gesture of support in one clause that stated that the Charter was to be interpreted "in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of all Canadians" (Clause 22). Note that culture, not language, is specified. There was also a clause prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability. The Charter changed somewhat the way in which decisions could be made in Canada because one could now challenge laws and policies through the courts on the basis that they did not meet the standards of the Charter. This new role of the courts was seen favourably by some who advocated for change. In another development, the revision of the Official Languages Act in 1988, in the preamble, mentioned the intention of support for teaching nonofficial languages in the school systems.

Meanwhile, federal commissions, federally funded research, and public lobbies on government expressed criticism of federal language training, other policies, or lack of government action. The Report of the Commission on Equality in Employment (Abella 1984) considered barriers to employment for women, visible minorities, Native peoples, and disabled persons. A great deal of the discussion focused on the inaccessibility of language training for immigrants, especially women, and that much of the training was basic and short term, intending to stream immigrants into low-paying jobs in which they would be isolated from opportunities to truly integrate with the rest of Canadian society. (See also Giles 1988; McDade 1988; Paredes 1987.) At the same time, a Special Committee of Parliament on Participation of Visible Minorities in Canadian Society (1984) gave as its first recommendation of 80 that "given that language is the key to success for refugees and immigrants in their new country, it is essential that they are given adequate language training upon their arrival in Canada" (13). It lists, among many concerns about social and economic barriers and discrimination against immigrants, a variety of ways in which existing language training is inaccessible or inadequate. As parliament was considering these issues, the multiculturalism policy was moving away from support for nonofficial languages and cultures towards anti-racism. In 1988, the policy was put into law as the Multiculturalism Act, under the Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship.

Virtually every report on ESL issues complained of the arcane and incomprehensible system of language-training funding and delivery (e.g., Burnaby 1992a; Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council 1991, 51-54; ESL/D Work Group 1987; Go 1987; Greater Toronto Southeast Asian Refugee Task Force 1981; Sub-committee on Language Training, n.d.; TESL Canada 1981; and others). The ESL full-time program with a stipend for adults, which we have been calling the Manpower program up to this point, was renamed the National Training Program (NTP). It had been criticized because it was directed towards immigrants who were destined for the labourforce at the discretion of the counsellors who chose them (Abella 1984, 157; Belfiore and Heller 1992), and thus many women were excluded. Indeed, a Charter challenge was initiated against the NTP on the grounds that it discriminated against women (Doherty 1992). Independent-class immigrants received stipends, while family-class immigrants (more likely to be women) did not (Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council 1991, 5). Refugees had been included, but many of them had lower levels of formal education and training, and thus they had difficulty in the standard programs (Klassen 1992). In general, older people, youth, people already employed, people with low levels of education, people in rural areas, and people seeking higher education were not being (well) served (Burnaby 1992a; Canada Employment and Immigration Commission 1983; Greater Toronto Southeast Asian Refugee Task Force 1981; Sub-committee on Language Training, n.d.). The CILT programs were also criticized since they were ostensibly aimed at immigrants before they gained citizenship, although many got citizenship but still needed more language training. Further, for some purposes NGOs would be more appropriate places to house language training than formal educational institutions since the latter were threatening to some groups of potential learners (Canada Employment and Immigration Commission 1983).

Therefore, in 1983, CEIC sent out a discussion paper proposing to amalgamate the NTP and CILT and create two new programs. The main one would be a general purposes program for all newcomers right after their arrival in Canada. Stipends would not be available, but services such as childcare and transportation might be arranged. NGOs as well as formal educational institutions could offer programs, some aimed at groups with specific needs. A second smaller program would be made available for those who needed specific language training before they could enter the labourforce (Canada Employment and Immigration Commission 1983). The delivery model for this proposed language program was similar to that used by the Settlement Branch for ISAP funding for the settlement of refugees in that it would contract directly with NGOs or, in this case, educational institutions rather than going through a provincial government. Doing this for educational programs such as language training permitted the federal government to: (1) make its own decisions about service programs and delivery agencies; (2) avoid the wage scales of unionized teachers in provincial educational institutions; and (3) keep delivery agencies competitive and accountable on one-year contracts without having to be responsible for sustaining administrative costs.

In 1986-87, the Settlement Branch of CEIC launched a pilot of the general program for newly arrived immigrants, called the Settlement Language Training Program. This initiative was at least partly inspired by pressure from the National Coalition of Visible Minorities and Immigrant Women, who lobbied against the inequities in the current language-training system (Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council 1991, 17). Sites in educational institutions and NGOs were chosen by regional groups of federal, provincial, and NGO representatives on the basis of proposals. The programs ranged widely in terms of the objectives, clientele, and outcomes of the classes. Different sites variously attracted groups such as newly arrived refugees, people with low literacy levels, people in isolated areas who had never had a chance to study English before, elderly people, and so on. On the whole, the pilot was judged to be successful except that delays in the financing caused severe problems for some of the delivery agencies (Burnaby, Holt, Steltzer, and Collins 1987).

Despite this experiment in the direction of the 1983 proposal towards a more general yet flexible federal language-training program, the federal government revamped the National Training Program in 1985 to become the Canadian Jobs Strategy. This program, with its delivery still purchased through community colleges, offered a wider range of courses aimed at specific employment targets, including some training in workplaces (Canada Employment and Immigration Advisory Council 1991, 10-22). Thus, the federal government was still tied to provincial educational institutions with an "expensive" unionized labourforce of teachers and administrators. However, in 1988, following recommendations from a federal report, the CILT program was eliminated, thus reducing the sources of funding from the federal government from two to one. The federal government was getting very little recognition for its expenditures through CILT and had virtually no control over what the provinces would charge back against the program.

Concerns about high unemployment generated studies (e.g., "The Allmand Report," Speaker of the House of Commons, n.d.; Canadian Association for Adult Education 1982) on employment and training issues in general. Adult literacy, once considered a negligible problem to be dealt with by charitable NGOs, was raised as a concern in relation to national productivity. In 1985, the federal government announced as a policy that adult literacy was worthy of government attention. In 1986 it established the National Literacy Secretariat, housed in the Department of the Secretary of State, to promote adult literacy efforts and research and to help coordinate provincial and local projects. Unlike in the United States (Burnaby 1998b), adult literacy in Canada was pointedly kept separate for policy purposes from official languages as second languages for immigrants.

In sum, in the 1980s the federal government was drawn into open discussions about inequity and racism and put the Multiculturalism Policy into law. In light of the changing economic climate, for the first time it recognized adult literacy as an issue because of the potential impact on labourforce productivity, but it was careful to keep ESL and literacy apart in policy to try to prevent a demand on literacy funding for ESL purposes. It was also moving slowly towards uncoupling its ESL funding for adults from the provinces through experiments with contracting out delivery directly to NGOs and educational institutions. In this way it could control the costs of labour, and keep the individual delivery agencies competing with each other and accountable.

The Ontario government in the 1980s divided education issues to contain spending in areas that could be controlled. During the decade, the province divided education and training delivery into two and then three Ministries: the Ministry of Education, responsible for the schools; the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, responsible for post-secondary, mainly credit education and training; and the Ministry of Skills Development with responsibility for mainly non-credit training relating to the labourforce, including adult literacy and private sector interests. Adult literacy had been dealt with, before the creation of the Ministry of Skills Development, by the Ministry of Culture and Recreation (i.e., along with community-based adult ESL). However, all three of these jurisdictions still included adult non-credit programs for immigrants and others, and the funding and conditions for these needed to be sorted out among the three ministries.

In about 1980, the Ontario Ministries of Education and Colleges and Universities published a discussion paper about continuing education, that is, formal education that is neither elementary/secondary nor post-secondary (colleges and universities). Like the national/federal reports noted above, this paper focused rather narrowly on employment issues, need for employment related training, and adult literacy. It did not mention English as a second language. The underlying issues appeared to have been which ministry(ies) would have responsibility for continuing education. In 1986, after six years of silence, the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities published Continuing Education Review Project: Project Report: For Adults Only. This publication established separate responsibilities for secondary schools, colleges, and universities with respect to adult literacy, ESL and FSL, Franco-Ontarians, older adults, and special groups. It ensured that school boards could not charge a tuition fee for adult basic education or ESL and that universities and colleges would be restricted in the amount that they could charge (26). A clear distinction was drawn between credit (e.g., towards a high-school diploma) and non-credit courses; ESL and adult literacy were largely in the latter category for continuing education. A result of this division of responsibilities was that people teaching adult non-credit courses did not have to be certified teachers. Although the report commented on the need for well trained ESL teachers, it did not specify what suitable qualifications might be (38). Thus, in school boards today, instructors of adult non-credit ESL are a distinct group from those teaching credit ESL to children enrolled in the regular school system or adults taking accredited ESL high school subjects. The former usually receive less pay and less job security although they often have good credentials (Sanoui 1996, 1997). In 1990, the Ministry of Education published guidelines, English as a Second Language: Developing Non-credit Courses for Adults.

While trends in methods of teaching ESL, as opposed to English as a Foreign Language, or Heritage Languages, or Modern/International Languages, had advanced a great deal by the 1980s from the grammar-based approaches of the early 1960s, they were still evolving. We raise the subject here because it relates to the professionalization of teachers. In the 1970s, second-language teaching methods endured a period of pressure on teachers to slavishly adhere to one of many highly restricted "methods" that were being advanced by "specialists" of all stripes and promoted by publishing companies. In the 1980s, the validity of such "methods" and the authority of those who propounded them was debunked by Stern (1983) as ineffective and criticized by Pennycook (1989) as a means of maintaining inequalities between language education theorists and practitioners. One approach (rather than a method), the communicative approach, came into favour in Canada and internationally in the late 1970s and 1980s; it encouraged a focus on learning not only the grammar rules of the second language but also the sociolinguistic rules of use (Canale and Swain 1980). The expansion of this approach began to break, to some extent, the reliance by practitioners on expert dictums. This issue will arise again in the discussion on the 1990s.

With three ministries related to education and training along with the continuing efforts of the Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, it becomes difficult to follow all the provincial programs that related to training for adult immigrants in the 1980s. For one thing, although the political and policy distinction was maintained federally and provincially between adult literacy and ESL for immigrants, in fact many immigrants who could not access ESL programs for various reasons ended up getting help in literacy programs (e.g., Turk and Unda 1991). Another source of confusion was overlapping programs. For example, there was considerable emphasis on employment and employability issues that resulted in training in language and other skills for immigrants. The Ministry of Colleges and Universities had a program called Training in Business and Industry (TIBI) that supported training in the workplace, dividing the costs between the employer, the employee, and TIBI. NLOC funding from the Ministry of Citizenship and Culture was involved in some of these programs. TIBI also provided support for the Centre for Labour Studies at Humber College and the Metro Labour Education Centre at George Brown College. Concerned about the lack of support for teachers in workplace programs, the Ministry of Citizenship and Culture organized a summer institute for English-in-the-workplace teachers in 1984, drawing on expertise from Britain (Reid 1984). A major focus of this institute was that the point of interventions in the workplace was not just to "fix" the immigrants, but to find ways in which all parties could improve their communication patterns through language and culture (pp. 9-11).

This emerging change in emphasis in the early 1980s from English in the workplace for immigrants to multiculturalism in the workplace for all workers was followed through later in the decade (on the strength of earlier recommendations of Abella and McDade, discussed above) that a significant reason that immigrant workers were not getting employment or appropriate employment was not their lack of skills but protectionism on the parts of employers and professions. A Task Force on Access to Professions and Trades in Ontario, initiated by the Cabinet Committee on Race Relations and supported by a number of provincial ministries, was established to look into barriers to employment, especially for immigrants. The task force’s report (1989) lists five barriers: lack of prior learning assessment; problems with licensure testing; problems with language testing; need for appropriate retraining; and issues facing the medical profession. The remedies suggested for most of these barriers involved not more "fixing" of immigrants but developing fairer ways to assess and credit their skills and abilities. The work of following through on this report went to the Ministry of Citizenship and its successors.

With respect to the Ministry of Education and programs related to schooling, upheaval that started in the 1970s in Ontario, mostly in Toronto, about heritage languages spilled over into the 1980s. The Ministry of Education’s Heritage Languages Program turned out to be more costly than the Ministry had anticipated and the entire concept created tensions between ethnic communities, which were promoting the idea, other parties who objected to it, and teachers who found it a complicating factor in the organization of their work. Several ethnic groups proposed to the Board of Education for the City of Toronto that "alternative language schools" be set up in which not only could the ethnic language be taught regularly under the Heritage Language Program but also other language enrichment activities could be done in the school. Such a move would require legislation from the Ministry. The Toronto Board established a Work Group on Third Language Instruction, which in 1982 published its final report that included, among broad indications of support for a high profile of heritage languages in the school in general, that the school day be lengthened to integrate heritage language programs. The result was a great deal of controversy, including a work to rule by the Toronto Teachers’ Federation. In the long run, and after a change of provincial government, the Ministry of Education (1987) proposed a heritage language program that could be implemented on the request of 25 or more parents and did not require legislative change. Thus, the program was permissive in that it required initiative from the community level in order to be activated and funded. In 1989, the Ministry published a curriculum guide for heritage languages that has remained in effect (Cummins and Danesi 1990, 38-43).

On the basis of pressure in the 1970s from groups such as the Canadian Society of Muslims, the Black Liaison Committee, and the Toronto Board of Education, the Ministry of Education added anti-racist and multicultural concerns to its list of matters to be considered when scrutinizing textbooks to be included in the Ministry’s Circular 14—books vetted for use in Ontario schools. In 1980, the Ministry published Race, Religion, and Culture in Ontario School Materials: Suggestions for Authors and Publishers so that authors and publishers of children’s education material, anxious to get on Circular 14, could conform to the Ministry’s criteria. In 1983, the Ministry published Black Studies: A Resource Guide for Teachers. Like the Heritage Languages program, Black studies was focused on subjects of instruction aimed largely at immigrant children rather than spreading multilingual, multidialectal, multicultural, and anti-racist matters across the curriculum.

In sum, the Ontario government divided up responsibilities for schooling, post-secondary education, and labour-related training, placing the newly recognized issue of adult literacy largely in the labour area. Non-credit education and training was finally resolved in 1986 by funding some programs such as ESL and adult literacy but keeping them carefully separate from credit programs in provincial institutions. Thus teachers of non-credit courses were divided from regular professionalized school personnel. A focus on the labourmarket brought a variety of overlapping ESL and literacy programs into or to prepare learners for the workplace. Meanwhile, the highly contentious Heritage Language Program was given final form without requiring changes to the Education Act and that kept it largely as an appendage to the regular school program. Moves were made to increase attention to multicultural and anti-racist matters in the schools.

In the previous discussion, a number of issues directly affecting school boards were mentioned. For example, efforts to develop community relations units within the school boards to liaise with immigrant communities were jeopardized, at least in the Toronto Board, over the controversy on heritage languages, which led to the closure of its School–Community Relations Department in the mid-1980s as part of the hassle over heritage languages (Cummins and Danesi 1990, 40). In 1987, the Toronto Board again recommended support for community workers especially for the earliest stages of reception of immigrant students into the school system (Toronto Board of Education 1987). The same report raised the ongoing need for coordination, in this case particularly among area school boards. It proposed that Employment and Immigration Canada be approached to smooth the entry of children into the school systems, and that provincial and federal agencies be asked for funding to cover social workers, interpreters, assessment personnel, and other support staff. This kind of request was strongly reflected in a 1989 report by the Canadian School Trustee’s Association (see also Flaherty and Woods 1992), which maintained that the federal government should bear at least some of the financial responsibility for dealing with the issues of integrating immigrant children in Canada’s public school systems. No funds have since been forthcoming for this purpose.

We have also noted the distinction created for school boards between credit and non-credit courses and their staffing. While this change resulted in lower pay and loss of job security for the non-credit teaching personnel, the boards continued to expand and increase the courses they offered. In some way, being separated from the Education Act, the continuing education programs were freed to align with the initiatives of other ministries, the federal government, and the private sector, so that school boards were closely involved with NLOC ESL classes in settlement agencies and workplace language teaching under various programs. In addition, bilingual English classes for adults were held, in which a bilingual teacher could ease students' transition into the English environment, and ESL literacy classes were set up for those adult students not literate in their first language (see Spencer 1991).

As noted above, as early as 1983 Employment and Immigration Canada was pointing out the special role that NGOs played in attracting and providing services for immigrants. Thus, they were targeted, along with educational institutions, as potential delivery agencies for the Settlement Language Training Program. Also, as adult literacy became a prominent issue at both the federal and provincial levels, the central role of NGOs in reaching out and delivering adult literacy services was acknowledged. Thus, toward the end of the 1980s, it was common for programs of many sorts to be delivered through consortia including (1) government money, (2) public schools (boards) or colleges, and (3) community agencies. An example of this perspective was expressed in Hynes’ (1987) report for George Brown College on needs assessments and Toronto’s diverse racial and cultural communities. (See also Spencer 1991.) The risk here was that governments were becoming less generous about providing core funding for NGOs, even those that were created to meet governments’ needs for suitable service delivery in immigrant settlement and language training. NGOs had less stability than most public educational institutions to exist in a climate of annual competitions for service delivery contracts.

NGOs also were vocal in lobbying for issues of interest to them. They had been effective in getting the Equality Now! study and the SLTP implemented early in the decade, and they continued to lobby. For example, OCASI continued to represent immigrant settlement agencies, and some of these agencies hosted a colloquium on immigrant and visible minority women, pressing for more, better, and increased accessibility to language and literacy training (Mouammar 1987). As noted above, various NGOs were instrumental in getting the Ministry of Education moving on scrutiny of textbooks and supporting Black Studies programs in the schools.

In the 1980s, public awareness of immigration and concern about changes in the economy forced governments to openly recognize communications issues for marginalized groups, such as non-English-speaking immigrants and people with low levels of literacy. However, particularly at the federal level, ESL support was kept strictly apart from adult literacy so that ESL learners would not (be seen to) be filling up adult literacy programs, as they easily could, and indeed did in many cases. Apparently, government still felt that it would be more popular to support a domestically created "problem" (literacy) than one related to "imported problems" through immigration. Concerns about the economy were also appearing in calls for deficit reduction through less government spending on social programs. Adult ESL at the federal level, then, became mainly a labour development program since the federal government canceled the CILT language and settlement funding because it had no control over it and received no credit from the voters. The next target was to eliminate the expensive labourmarket program delivered through the provinces. Employment and Immigration had been expanding its use of NGOs for ISAP service delivery because they were useful in reaching certain populations. It experimented with a program that would deliver ESL by letting annual contracts on a competitive basis go to NGOs and educational institutions. Such a program would be cheaper than the labourmarket one because it would not provide training stipends to the learners nor involve a unionized teaching force. However, the NGOs stood to be weakened in a competitive market with no core funding and potentially high demands for accountability.

Both the federal and provincial governments responded to lobbying from NGOs and others by establishing various commissions of inquiry about access of various groups, including immigrants, to the labourforce. Also, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) required that attention be paid to matters of equity, and provided recourse through the courts. On the federal side, the most visible result seemed to be the Multiculturalism Act, which concentrated on general equity matters, while the province pursued specific barriers for immigrants to access to the trades and professions. As for other training for adult immigrants, with four ministries ostensibly involved in adult training, all of them focusing largely on the workplace, the web of funding, programs, and players was virtually incomprehensible.

The local school boards finally settled their dispute with the Ministry of Education over heritage language teaching, but the ministry managed this without making changes to the Education Act and without letting heritage languages become a significant part of any school’s curriculum. Lobbying by local school boards and national organizations to get federal funding for ESL for elementary and secondary immigrant children went unheeded. In adult education, school boards as well as NGOs were being drawn into partnerships with educational and other agencies to provide services to immigrants.

This final section of the report will be less detailed than the others since we do not have the capacity to bring each strand from this report right up to the moment. Also, detailed information on current issues should be more readily available to readers than was the historic data discussed below. We will describe some of the most salient developments, but also concentrate on several major surveys that have been conducted on the largest programs. For the first time, in the 1990s, these broadly based assessments have been made to see what actually happens in these educational undertakings.

As for ongoing demographics, by 1991, the census indicated that 25.1 percent of children in Toronto between the ages of 5 and 15 and 38.1 percent of adults between 16 and 65 had a mother tongue other than English. Among children, 18.1 percent spoke a language other than English at home, and 10.9 percent (.8 percent in 1971) were reported to speak neither English nor French. Of the adults, 23.8 percent spoke a language other than English at home, and 11.9 percent (4.2 percent in 1971) were reported to speak neither English nor French. The 1997 Every Secondary Student Survey in the schools of the former Toronto Board of Education (secondary school students only) indicated that 8 percent of secondary students spoke both English (or French) and another language as a mother tongue, and 45 percent spoke only another language as a mother tongue. In terms of racial groups in the secondary schools, among Canadian-born in 1997, 3 percent reported Aboriginal, 70 percent White, 6 percent Black, 16 percent Asian, and 5 percent other; among foreign-born students, 1 percent reported Aboriginal, 19 percent White, 13 percent Black, 56 percent Asian, and 12 percent other (Cheng and Yau 1998, 4).

With respect to adult programs, this report has noted complaints, at intervals, about significant problems caused by the lack of coherence and coordination of language and settlement services for immigrants. At the beginning of the decade, an extensive report prepared for George Brown College, Adult ESL in the City of Toronto: An Issue Paper (Spencer 1991) surveyed a broad range of programs and provided a detailed overview of the remarkable variety of programs at colleges, school boards, universities, and NGOs, although it was not in a position to undertake numerical studies comparing need with provisions. It distilled twelve common themes from the data and expressed them in terms of immigrants’ needs. These encompassed all the previous litanies of concerns about lack of coordination, lack of specialization of programs (particularly in the mother tongue) for various groups, need for better information brokerage, and better information about students and graduates. The writers of this report chose the following quote to summarize the findings.

...a major injection of leadership, funding, and administrative attention from the highest levels of government is required to put some kind of coherence into the language training system for adult immigrants. The current system is chaotic and wasteful of human and monetary resources: those of governments, the deliverers, and the learners. First of all, immigrant students cannot find out what learning opportunities are available, and those that are available are not c