LaFontaine - A French Speaking LittleTown in English Ontario

Downtown Elmvale, Ontario

Canada has around thirty three million people.
A third of the population of Canada call Ontario home.

While Toronto has around 2.7 million residents, the rest of Ontarians scatter through many different smaller cities and towns.

It is a pleasure to explore these little towns.
A few weekends ago, after having lunch with our friends in Elmvale, we drove around in this part of southern Ontario rural  area.

We came upon LaFontaine, a small town located in the Municipality of Tiny, a French speaking town right smack in the middle of English speaking Ontario less than two hours away from Toronto!

Eglise Saint Patrice, LaFontaine, Ontario

We walked around and saw a few of the houses and buildings in the town.


This small town has some beautiful churches with bilingual sings. These churches reminded us of the church buildings we saw in Quebec.

Eglise Sainte -Croix, LaFontaine, Ontario

Though it is a small town with a few thousand people, we were surprised to see two beautiful big churches dominating the town's landscape.

Canada is a bilingual country
with English and French as the two official languages.

However, Francophone congregate and live in Quebec, one of the largest provinces, while English speaking Canadians live in the rest of Canada.

Big houses have replaced many of the modest cottages along the waterfront

LaFontaine is a small town famous for its clear water beach. During the summer the cottagers and tourists can swell and easily double the town's population.

In fact, many of the small modest cottages have been bought. torn town and replaced with fancy big houses such as these ones.

The Supermarket in the town provides many services such as fax a community bulletin board where residents can post and advertise their information.

 It was a cold and heavily snow covered town on the day we visited LaFontaine. We look forward to visiting the town again in the summer when it is nice and warm so that we can stroll around and enjoy the beach as well!


R.T.
LaFontaine, Ontario