THE SUPREME court of Canada has struck down legislation in the French-speaking province of Quebec that restricts the rights of children to attend the province’s (minority) English-medium schools. On 22 October the court found unanimously that a law preventing some children who attend English private schools in Quebec from transferring to English public schools was ‘excessive’ and violates Canada’s constitution. The provincial government of Quebec now has one year to replace the law with ‘an appropriate compromise.’

The case centres on Bill 104, adopted by Quebec’s ruling Parti Québécois provincial government in 2002. Bill 104 ended the right to a place in an English-medium school for children who had previously spent at least a year in such a school – including a fee-paying one. The 2002 Bill further restricted the rights of Quebec’s anglophones – or francophones who just wanted an education in a more international language.

The court’s decision was based on the sections of Canada’s national Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantee minority-language educational rights, and which overrule the provincial legislation of Quebec. The supreme court’s decision follows a recent Quebec court of appeal’s decision which struck down Bill 104 for the same reasons, after parents of Québécois children who couldn’t get places in English medium schools lost their cases in the lower courts and appealled.  

The Quebec Association of Independent Schools and the Quebec English School Boards Association joined lawyers and the parents to get the Quebec appeals court’s decision confirmed in the nation’s supreme court in the capital, Ottawa. A lawyer representing the parents who had brought the case told Canadian broadcaster CBC that the ruling was a partial victory, with the anglophone children left in ‘limbo’ for the one-year grace period granted to Quebec. The Quebec government had argued the parents were using private schools to circumvent a law necessary to protect the French language and shouldn’t be able to buy their way into state-funded  English-medium schools. Now Quebec has no choice but to comply with the supreme court. The resurfacing of Quebec’s long-running language conflict presents political problems for Parti Québécois (PQ) leader Pauline Marois as well as Quebec’s premier Jean Charest. At a forthcoming PQ congress in November, factions in the party threaten to vote for further restricting access to English-medium education. 

PQ is now expected to work with opposition parties to reach a compromise that stays within Canada’s constitution but safeguards the ‘primacy of the French language’. The province’s culture minister Christine St-Pierre was reported by CBC as being  ‘disappointed and angered’ by the ruling.