Section 93 has to be considered by any commission or any group considering language and education as the criterion for allocation of students.
The second issue the hon. member raised has implications essentially for other provinces. He raised the issue of what I referred to as new plural trends in education. Every province obviously is different from the other. This is one of the nice things about Canada today. I would think that there are more indications outside Quebec and outside Ontario of experimentation with religion and education and religious based schools. The thing that is becoming interesting is the suggestion that it should be accompanied by at least partial funding from state, from public authority.
My point was simply that there is nothing in the constitution that prevents that. We do not have the absolute separation of church and state that they have in the United States which positively prevents that.
I taught constitutional law in the United States and it was a constitutional absolute, the absolute separation. It even chased out of the American school system voluntary religious classes given on the school premises outside school times. There was a series of decisions in the fifties, sixties and seventies.
This is perhaps a correct judgment by the United States supreme court of the American ethos but it is not necessarily applicable in Canada.
One issue at the core of the third question of the hon. member was the issue of the courts and the constitution. I would be the last to say I am always happy with the development of the jurisprudence of courts.
When the charter of rights was adopted I suggested to the then prime minister that a logical concomitant of the change to a charter based system of constitutional jurisprudence was reform of the supreme court. I and some others recommended unsuccessfully the establishment of a special constitutional court with the European system of election of judges for a term of years. The European courts have a strong cross-section of political and general philosophical opinion on the courts.
I do not think it is a necessary consequence of the role of the courts today, even under the system that now exists, that they apply American jurisprudence. Mechanically applied, I think those would be wrong decisions.