Article,
La impugnación judicial de la pol\'ıtica lingü\'ıstica de Québec en materia de lengua de enseñanza
Court challenges to Quebec language policy regarding the language of instruction, (2005)
Abstract
In the two cases analyzed here, the Supreme Court of Canada had to rule on the constitutional validity of certain sections of Québec s Charter of the French Language (also known as Bill 101) governing admissibility to public education in the English language in Québec. These sections were attacked as incompatible with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms contained in the Constitution of Canada (the Canadian Charter), as well as with Québec s own Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms (the Québec Charter). Section 23 of the Canadian Charter confers the right to have their children educated in public schools where the language of instruction is the minority language (English in Québec and French elsewhere in Canada) upon parents who fit into one of two main categories: (a) parents who themselves have received their primary education in the minority language in Canada this first criterion is known as the «Canada clause»; (b) parents who have a child who received or is receiving primary or secondary school instruction in the minority language this second criterion is known as the «linguistic homogeneity of families» clause. In order to abide by the Canadian Constitution, section 73 of the Charter of the French Language has been amended so as to replicate the two admissibility criterions of section 23 of the Canadian Charter. However, an additional condition, not contained in the Canadian Charter, has been added in the Québec statute: the instruction received by the parents or by the children in the English language must be the «major part» of the entire education received. This condition has usually been applied in a strict quantitative way, the length of the education respectively received in French and English being mathematically compared and the instruction received in English having to be the most important part. It is this condition, inasmuch as it applies to the criterion of the instruction received by the children that was attacked as being an...
