The Manitoba Schools Question (French: La question des écoles du Manitoba) was a political crisis in the Canadian province of Manitoba that occurred late in the 19th century, attacking publicly-funded separate schools for Roman Catholics and Protestants. The crisis was precipitated by a series of provincial laws passed between 1890 and 1896, and another passed in 1916.[1]
The crisis eventually spread to the national level, becoming one of the key issues in the federal election of 1896 and resulted in the defeat of the Conservative government, which had been in power for most of the previous thirty years.
Because of the close linkage at that time between religion and language, the Schools Question raised the deeper question whether French would survive as a language or a culture in Western Canada. The result of the crisis was that, by 1916, English was left as the only official language in use in the province until 1985. As French was no longer an official language, its use declined greatly. Moreover, the Schools Question, along with the execution of Louis Riel in 1885, was one of the incidents that led to strengthening of French Canadian nationalism in Quebec.[2]