Background
A number of Francophone families living in Summerside made a request to the French Language Board to build a French-language school in the community rather than bus the children to the closest French school 57 minutes away. The Board made a proposal to the Minister, which was rejected.
The family applied for a declaration against the province to build a school in Summerside. At trial, the declaration was granted, but was overturned on appeal.
In the decision of Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island, [1999] 3 S.C.R. 851, prior to the language rights hearing, the counsel for the government sought to have Bastarache recuse himself for reasonable apprehension of bias due to his history of championing the French language. In an application to Bastarache, he held that he was not biased to hear the case, and so did not recuse himself.
The Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, also known as the "Quebec Charter", is a statutory bill of rights and human rights code passed by the National Assembly of Quebec on June 27, 1975. It received Royal Assent from Lieutenant Governor Hugues Lapointe, coming into effect on June 28, 1976. Introduced by the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa, the Charter followed extensive preparatory work that began under the Union Nationale government of Daniel Johnson.
The legal dispute over Quebec's language policy began soon after the enactment of Bill 101, establishing the Charter of the French Language, by the Parliament of Quebec in 1977.
The official languages of Canada are English and French, which "have equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in all institutions of the Parliament and Government of Canada," according to Canada's constitution. "Official bilingualism" is the term used in Canada to collectively describe the policies, constitutional provisions, and laws that ensure legal equality of English and French in the Parliament and courts of Canada, protect the linguistic rights of English- and French-speaking minorities in different provinces, and ensure a level of government services in both languages across Canada.
Section 24 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides for remedies available to those whose Charter rights are shown to be violated. Some scholars have argued that it was actually section 24 that ensured that the Charter would not have the primary flaw of the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights. Canadian judges would be reassured that they could indeed strike down statutes on the basis that they contradicted a bill of rights.
Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms constitutionally guarantees Canadian citizens the right to vote for a federal and provincial representative and the right to be eligible for membership in the House of Commons or of a provincial legislature. The rights provided under section 3 of the Charter may be subject to reasonable limits under Section 1 of the Charter.
Gosselin v Quebec (AG) [2002] 4 SCR 429, 2002 SCC 84, is the first claim under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to a right to an adequate level of social assistance. The Supreme Court of Canada rejected the Charter challenge against a Quebec law excluding citizens under age 30 from receiving full social security benefits.
Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law v Canada (AG), [2004] 1 S.C.R. 76, 2004 SCC 4 – known also as the spanking case – is a leading Charter decision of the Supreme Court of Canada where the Court upheld section 43 of the Criminal Code that allowed for a defence of reasonable use of force by way of correction towards children as not in violation of section 7, section 12 or section 15(1) of the Charter.
Doucet-Boudreau v Nova Scotia [2003] 3 S.C.R. 3, 2003 SCC 62, was a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada which followed the Nova Scotia Supreme Court's finding that a delay in building French language schools in Nova Scotia violated the claimants' minority language educational rights under section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This finding led to an important debate regarding the scope of section 24(1) of the Charter, which provides for remedies for those whose rights are infringed, and the applicability of the common law doctrine of functus officio. While the Supreme Court of Canada split on what constitutes an appropriate usage of section 24(1), the majority favoured a section 24(1) with broad, flexible capabilities.
William Ian Corneil Binnie is a former puisne justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, serving from January 8, 1998 to October 27, 2011. Of the justices appointed to the Supreme Court in recent years, he is one of the few appointed directly from private practice. On his retirement from the Court, he was described by The Globe and Mail as "arguably the country's premier judge", by La Presse as "probably the most influential judge in Canada of the last decade" and by the Toronto Star as “one of the strongest hands on the court.”
Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the section of the Constitution of Canada that guarantees minority language educational rights to French-speaking communities outside Quebec, and, to a lesser extent, English-speaking minorities in Quebec. The section may be particularly notable, in that some scholars believe that section 23 "was the only part of the Charter with which Pierre Trudeau was truly concerned." Trudeau was the prime minister who fought for the inclusion of the Charter of Rights in the Constitution of Canada in 1982.
Mahé v Alberta, [1990] 1 S.C.R. 342, is a leading decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. The ruling is notable because the court established that section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms requires parents of the official-language minority in each province to have the right either to be represented on the school board or to have a school board of their own to provide adequate protection for the education rights of their children.
Blencoe v British Columbia (Human Rights Commission), [2000] 2 S.C.R. 307 is a leading Supreme Court of Canada decision on the scope of section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and on the administrative law principle of natural justice.
Gosselin v Quebec (AG), 2005 SCC 15, [2005] 1 SCR 238 is a leading case of the Supreme Court of Canada on the constitutional protection of minority language rights under section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Section 29 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms specifically addresses rights regarding denominational schools and separate schools. Section 29 is not the source of these rights but instead reaffirms the pre-existing special rights belonging to Roman Catholics and Protestants, despite freedom of religion and religious equality under sections 2 and 15 of the Charter. Such rights may include financial support from the provincial governments. In the case Mahe v. Alberta (1990), the Supreme Court of Canada also had to reconcile denominational school rights with minority language educational rights under section 23 of the Charter.
Section 18 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is one of the provisions of the Constitution that addresses rights relating to Canada's two official languages, English and French. Like section 133 of the Constitution Act, 1867, section 18 requires that all statutes and other records made by the Parliament of Canada must be available in both official languages. Section 133 places a similar obligation on the legislature of Quebec, and this is reaffirmed by section 21 of the Charter. Section 18 of the Charter places a similar obligation on the legislature of New Brunswick. New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province under section 16 of the Charter.
This is a list of all the opinions written by John C. Major during his tenure as puisne justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Lavoie v Canada, [2002] 1 SCR 769, 2002 SCC 23 is a leading decision of the Supreme Court of Canada on whether preference on basis of citizenship infringed equality guarantee under section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Court found that the federal Public Service Employment Act (PSEA), which gave preference to citizens when referring to departments, was discriminatory. The violation was saved under section 1 of the Charter as a reasonable limitation on equality rights.
Canadian administrative law is the body of law "that applies to all administrative decisions, whether issued by front-line officials, ministers, economic regulatory agencies, or administrative tribunals, with interpretations of law and exercises of discretion subject to the same. .. rules." Administrative law is concerned primarily with ensuring that administrative decision-makers remain within the boundaries of their authority and observe procedural fairness.
Because the country contains two major language groups and numerous other linguistic minorities, in Canada official languages policy has always been an important and high-profile area of public policy.
The language policies of Canada's province and territories vary between the provinces and territories of Canada. Although the federal government operates as an officially bilingual institution, providing services in English and French, several provincial governments have also instituted or legislated their own language policies.
