June 12, 2020
Huge Victory for Minority School Boards in Supreme Court B.C. School Board Case
In a landmark decision today, the Supreme Court of Canada has given a generous and broad interpretation of Section 23 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees minority language educational rights to French-speaking communities outside Quebec and to the English-speaking minority within Quebec.
In the decision Chief Justice Richard Wagner states that “the purpose of s. 23 is not only to ensure the sustainability of the country’s linguistic communities, which is a concern focused on the future, but also to make it possible for those communities to develop in their own language and culture, a concern focused on the present.”