We Will Remember Them:
War Memorials in New Brunswick
Language
The colour grading on the map to the left represents the French/English divide in the province. New Brunswick is offically-- and in some places, practically-- a biligual province, which means that both English and French are meant to have the same level of equality and exposure in public life.
It is well-established that French Canadians-- particularly Québécois-- had a far different experience of war than English Canadians did. For example, in the Great War, the country was divided on the issue of conscription in 1917. The Conscription Crisis affected the politics of the era and continues to form part of the Canadian political framework. The Crisis did not repeat itself in the Second World War, if for no other reason than that the Second World War was an ideologically "simple" war. This is explored further on the page about the Acadian Peninsula.
The map above makes it very obvious that the province is, despite its biligual status, very anglophone. What is interesting, however, is the distribution of the memorials in the province does not seem to be affected by linguistic lines. Memorials are still concentrated in cities and along the borders of the province. There are large portions of the province that have no memorials at all, particularly in the northern part of the province. This could be explained in several ways: first, there is a large amount of Crown Land in the northern part of the province, and so the population is not as concentrated; second, is that I have used data from the Directorate of History and Heritage, and it is entirely possible that they did not collect data from those areas of the province, for whatever reason.
The points in the shown map are by genre, this is to illustrate that there is very little difference in genre of memorial depending on whether or not it is in a francophone or an anglophone part of the province.
It is important to note that this linguistic data is taken from the 2011 census data. It is difficult when dealing with a large time period-- as this project does-- to come up with definitive data. This is therefore, meant as a guideline for linguistics in the province and should not be regarded as hard and fast divisions. Also, it is worth noting that some municipalities have languages other than French and English that are prominent, which are not represented here. There are seven divisions on the map for which there is no data because Statistics Canada has suppressed the information for any number of reasons.
In terms of identifying each municipality as English, French or bilingual, I have used a percentage threshold of 70 percent. For example, if 70 percent (or more) of single respondents in a municipality indentify English as their primary language, I have called that area English. In addition, if the percentage is lower than 70 percent, but the gap in between is bigger than 15 percent, I labelled that area as English.