Language Rights 1999 - 2000
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Foreword
This report reviews a wide range of language rights issues that have been subject to litigation over the past two years. It deals with both constitutionally entrenched language rights and those that have been established by way of federal and provincial legislation. Guarantees set out in the Constitution, whether they date from the original terms of Confederation in 1867 or the more recent provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter), constitute the bedrock upon which Canadian bilingualism rests. In effect, constitutionally entrenched language rights provide a context and a set of principles that permeate the various legislative initiatives undertaken over the years to promote our two official languages.
Perhaps no constitutional principle is more important than that set out in subsection 16(1) of the Charter, which declares that “English and French are the official languages of Canada and have equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in all institutions of the Parliament and government of Canada.” The principle of equality not only has immediate substantive impact on the operation of federal institutions but also constitutes a goal toward which legislation and government programs should tend. Indeed, the Charter itself at subsection 16(3) explicitly recognizes the role of both Parliament and provincial legislatures in the advancement of status or use of English and French in Canadian society. At the federal level, the Official Languages Act (the OLA) represents a key statutory initiative designed to implement this underlying principle of language equality.
The recent history of language rights bears eloquent testimony to the active role that the courts intend to play in their implementation, especially as regards section 23 of the Charter, which pertains to minority language education. After addressing the important unwritten principle of minority protection in the referral on the secession of Quebec in 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered landmark decisions, in May 1999 in the Beaulac case and in January 2000 in the Arsenault-Cameron case, which shed light on the principle and on jurisprudence as a whole.
While we wish to applaud the progress made in jurisprudence thus far, it is also our duty to recall the long journey that lies ahead. The courts have played a fundamental role in the implementation of linguistic duality, but those court proceedings were very time consuming and expensive and often demanded an exhausting degree of solidarity from the official language communities involved. We accordingly hope that these recent decisions will give governments the necessary incentive to more fully respect the language rights of anglophone and francophone minority communities and to more actively foster their growth and development.
Language rights are at the heart of our collective will to live in a free and democratic society. We must therefore tirelessly defend these principles and above all see to their full implementation. We must move from the theoretical equality of our two official languages to real and redistributive equality.
Dyane Adam
Commissioner of Official Languages
