Celebrating and supporting our francophone farming heritage

By Paul Maurice, Director, Ontario Federation of Agriculture

September 25 is Franco-Ontarian Day in our province. It’s a celebration of the cultural, historical, social, economic and political contributions of francophones in Ontario.

At the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), nearly 600 of our members report French as their primary language and of our 15 regions across Ontario, nine are home to at least five or more French-speaking members.

I am proud to count myself among this group – born and raised French in the bilingual community of Lafontaine, just west of Penetanguishene, where our son Alex grows crops and produces chicken as the fifth generation of our family on our farm. Since 2021, I’ve also served on the provincial board of the OFA as the director representing farmers in Peel, Simcoe and York.

I’m also proud of the work that OFA does to provide communications to francophone members in their native language and to work together wherever possible with our French-speaking colleagues at the Union des cultivateurs franco-ontariens (UCFO).

In 2021, with the support of funding from the provincial government, we collaborated on a project with UCFO to translate many of our fact sheets, policy documents, and other important resources into French and make them available on the OFA website.

Since then, we’ve carried forward a commitment to ensuring key news releases, opinion columns like this Viewpoint and other communications on key and province-wide topics are translated and made available in French.

We also make sure all of our OFA election information is provided in both official languages so that the democratic process of our organization is transparent and accessible to our members.

And for the past year, OFA has been working closely with our counterparts at UCFO to promote a program they’re leading in Ontario called AgriMentor that provides one-on-one mentorship coaching nationwide in French or English for women working in agriculture.