In June of 1912, the Ontario government, under the leadership of Premier James Pliny Whitney introduced Regulation XVII establishing new standards for the province's bilingual schools. Henceforth, the government would restrict the use of French as a language of instruction and communication to Form I, or today's version of grades 1 and 2. Provisions were made allowing for instruction of French as a subject of study, but only where parents specifically made such a request, and only for a maximum of one hour a day, and only in schools teaching French at the time of the Regulation's introduction. Franco-Ontarians, following the lead of the Association Canadienne-française d'éducation de l'Ontario (ACFEO) protested this intervention, and many communities province-wide urged teachers and schoolchildren to boycott any visit by the newly appointed English inspectors sent to enforce this edict. This work aims to determine why the Windsor Border Region was the only section of the province where resistance to Regulation XVII was a failure. One reason for the failure of the resistance movement to Regulation XVII was rooted in the divisions within the community. An examination of the 1901 and 1911 census statistics, coupled with regional literature on the francophones of the Windsor border region clearly indicates the existence of two major sub-cultural divisions. The first group, the Canayens, trace their roots to the old Fort Detroit community of the early 18th century trappers, traders, fishers and soldiers. This population settled on both sides of the Detroit river. A second group, the French Canadians, were migrants from Quebec who arrived primarily after 1850 to work as farm labourers and loggers and settled primarily on the coast of Lake St. Clair. These two sub-cultures had different histories, linguistic variations, family names and economic practices. As time would reveal, their response to the issue of Regulation XVII did not always converge. Aside from divisions within the francophone communities, the leadership of Bishop Michael Francis Fallon of London, Ontario was also a crucial factor in the failure of the resistance. Fallon, an advocate of the new school regulation, moved to muzzle the natural leaders of most French-speaking communities in the region: the priests. Coinciding with his advent as bishop in 1910. French instruction vanished from three of Windsor's four Catholic schools. When Regulation XVII was introduced two years later, French was forever banned from these schools. When a series of priests accused the Bishop of working to suppress French in the schools and churches, their grievances found their way to church officials in Rome. To secure a retraction for these damaging allegations regarding his character, Fallon summoned the priest-signers of the petition to appear before a diocesan court made up of 5 judges. When three of the priests who appeared before the court were subsequently punished with suspension or expulsion, tempers flared in the parish congregations of the Windsor border region against the bishop. Two other priests faced the threat of suspension only to be spared by Vatican intervention. The worst example of the anger towards the Bishop surfaced in Ford City on September 7, 1917, when a group of parishioners rioted to protest the forcible imposition of a new pastor deemed hostile to the French language and bilingual schools. The outraged congregation subsequently organized a boycott of the parish priest and appealed to Rome, over the head of their bishop, for the new pastor's removal and his replacement by a priest with pro-French sympathies. The year long standoff at Our Lady of the Lake Church was rooted in the whole Ontario Schools Question and Bishop Fallon's leading role in attacking the bilingual schools of the province. The conflict with the Bishop resembled similar language struggles in New England and elsewhere in Ontario involving francophone Catholics and efforts by church officials at integrating them into the larger English-speaking society. The resistance to Regulation XVII in the Windsor border region did not simply fail because of the leadership of Michael Francis Fallon. Divisions within the francophone leadership further weakened an already small and isolated resistance movement. Disputes over resistance strategy, personality conflicts, and open disagreement regarding the construction of an independent French school tore the region's lay leadership apart. The appearance of two competing independent French schools with limited funding failed to attract a vigourous student body capable of sustaining the schools financially. These promising experiments ended badly, in part because of the incessant fighting among rival bands of francophone militants in the Ligue des Patriotes and the Société Saint-Jean Baptiste. This thesis challenges historians to examine the complexities of other Franco-Ontarian communities, particularly for signs of division over issues of language, schools and resistance strategies. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)