Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee.
I understand I'm under a very tight leash in terms of time, so I'm going to speak quickly and breathe little.
I'd like to address three aspects of the question that's before you. One is the importance of court cases to our community in the past. The second is what I anticipate may be coming down the pipe in terms of a need for this. Third is some of the elements of what I think should be part of a renewed or reinstated program.
Very quickly—and I'll be happy to discuss it more in questions—there are a number of cases that have really made a difference for our community.
There was the Blaikie case and the Manitoba Reference case in 1979 and 1984 in which the Supreme Court upheld the bilingual courts and legislatures provision of our constitutions and struck down unilingual courts and legislation provisions in Manitoba and Quebec. This was vital to us, because courts and legislatures is a fundamental core to the whole practice of our democratic system.
In 1984 the PSBGM case, which was decided by the Supreme Court, broadened access to English schools from Bill 101, which stipulated that only children of English people educated in English in Quebec could go to English school. It was broadened to children of Canadians educated in English in Canada who could go to English school.
The community cannot survive if it cannot revitalize itself and if it cannot be a welcoming community. We're far from being in an ideal situation right now, but that case moved a long way in helping to stabilize the decline, rather than have us in free fall.
In 1984 and 1990 there were the Ontario Education Reference and the Mahé case. I think the Mahé case is compulsory reading for this committee. It's brilliant. It held that section 23, minority language education rights, include control and management for the linguistic minority. That, by the way, cleared the way for a constitutional amendment in 1997, which allowed us in Quebec to move from a confessional school system to a linguistic school system because of the constitutional guarantee that we received for the linguistic system replacing the confessional guarantee. That was important to allow us to have critical mass and to start focusing on a modern reality.
With the Ford case in 1988, the Supreme Court struck down the unilingual French signs law in Quebec and in that made a wonderful statement that: “Language is not merely a means or medium of expression; it colours the content and meaning of expression.” That was the beginning of the court really starting to elaborate its thinking on these things. The sign issue was important, because there was an attempt to deny our legitimacy, our visibility, and our presence in the province. We are not visitors, we are not interlopers, and we are not the extension of somebody else. We are a community that has been in this province for several hundred years. We have built the province, we are part of the province, and we are not going to be treated as some sort of passing, transient people who drifted in from British Columbia.
Then there was the Montfort Hospital case, which was very important. The Ontario Court of Appeal found an unwritten constitutional principle of a minority as having a right to some measure of control in their health services and health institutions. That case became very important to us in the restructuring of the health system—which just took place in Quebec and which was dramatic—where our own institutions that we controlled and managed were being wiped out. The threat of using Montfort to stop that at least got us to the table and enabled us to get some strengthening of the minority language guarantees within the system, although the control and management is still unresolved.
For the future, in the Mahé case the court said, speaking through Chief Justice Dickson: “minority language groups cannot always rely upon the majority to take account of all of their linguistic and cultural concerns. Such neglect is not necessarily intentional”. I couldn't say it better myself. Frankly, it should be said and understood clearly.
It's an uphill battle, and often it is a battle. It is important to have the ability to turn to the courts and say, if you don't want to listen, then we have somewhere to go to talk this through. Otherwise rights become dead letters. We will continue to need the courts in the spirit of what the court, itself, recognized, that the community is under serious pressure.
I want to make a distinction. The English language is not threatened. It's a global language, it's the currency language of business. It is not a threatened language. The community is threatened as a community, as a vital entity that can replenish itself, that can play an active and full role. We're an aging population. Our young people have been leaving in droves. There are concerns about how we will tend to the aged as years go on. Our institutions, which we built, don't have the critical mass of community to continue to support that, not because the community doesn't believe in the institutions, they stopped believing in the place. That's an important issue. The community got tired and is getting tired, because every day it's another battle. Looking to the future, we're going to need this program. We're going to need it for education. The government wants to wipe out the constitutionally protected school boards that we have. That will not go down easy. The Supreme Court in Mahé was clear about the roles that schools play in terms of being a focal point of community life, community identity, that education is essential for language, culture, and identity. That case will go to court unless the government decides to find a way out.
The bilingual legislative process that the Supreme Court recognizes must take place is not being respected in Quebec. Frequently laws are being adopted only in French and English translation delivered after they are set. They are probably invalid. But on top of being invalid, they're being translated by people who are not experts in translation in English. The result is that we're getting versions of a law that are incomprehensible or inconsistent with the French version, with the result that after that people say, you can't bother with the English version, even though our law say both versions are of equal weight because the English version often makes no sense or is contradictory. This has been brought up. It's been discussed. It's been for years and years, and it's one for which maybe at the end you have to move the yardsticks with the court.
With regard to health and social services, the reform has put much more more control in the hands of the bureaucrats who are exceeding their jurisdiction in issuing directives controlling the administration of our institutions. I suspect that if this doesn't stop and if we can't find a way to stop it, it will end up in court.
With regard to education, there is a new curriculum that's been brought out by the Government of Quebec in history. They wrote a history that by all accounts is a torqued history that is not a fair presentation of Canadian history. Mahé has held that curriculum is one of the essential elements of control and management of education. I expect that, in due course, if the government is not willing to fix the curriculum that again will be challenged. Furthermore, we get a lot of our texts and stuff translated from French two years after the French schools have had them. That's just not fair and it's not proper and it's not giving us equal access to education.
Public service is a chasse gardée of a certain group of people. Thirty years ago, less than 1% of the public service were English-speaking Quebecers. Thirty years ago government started promising that they would change that. Thirty years later less than 1% of the public service of Quebec are English-speaking Quebecers. Why do we care? They shape policy. They shape thinking. They guide direction. They give rise to the legislation that gets adopted under section 133. Without the input of the community there's a complete lack of sensitivity and understanding and, as the court says, it's not necessarily bad faith but it's happening and it happens all the time.
In health we have the Montfort case. We access to services but now what's happened is that we are getting directed that we can't put up bilingual signs that direct people to the services. At some point we're going to have to get people to understand that health services include access to the information about the services and where they are. Again, you talk and you talk and they ignore and they ignore. Then you have to do something, through a new program or a reinstated program.
As the Supreme Court found in Mahé, language rights are a separate class of rights. They are distinct from equality and multiculturalism rights, which they see as legal rights. That distinction is important and therefore we need a different panel or program or aspect of the program that is budgeted for that.
It has to be autonomous. It has to be properly funded. It has to be sustainable. It has to expand into federal laws like the Official Languages Act and it must be dedicated to research and proceedings. ADR should not be a precondition to access. Thank you very much.