Quebec seeks to appeal court ruling on French-only election mailouts

The court won’t rule on the request until election day.

The Quebec government is seeking leave to appeal a ruling that suspended part of the province’s French-language charter to allow Élections Québec to send out bilingual reminder cards to voters.

The provincial government filed the application Wednesday, arguing Quebec Superior Court Judge Sylvain Lussier erred in his decision by “applying the criteria of a serious issue to be tried and the balance of convenience by creating a linguistic right not provided for in the (Canadian) Constitution.”

Geoffrey Chambers, the plaintiff in the lawsuit against the province and the election agency, said he was “very disappointed and discouraged” by the government’s efforts to appeal.

Electors, he said, have “the right to have election information in English or French.”

“But it’s so clearly offside what they’re trying to do here that I think we have to continue to push back,” he said in an interview Thursday evening.

The latest development comes one week after Lussier ordered the independent election agency to prepare reminder cards in both French and English to send to voters ahead of the provincial election on Oct. 5.

Élections Québec wasn’t ordered to send bilingual versions of the registration notice and voter’s guide that had already gone out, with Lussier citing “the evidence on record convinces the court that this would be an unrealistic and extremely costly undertaking.”

On Sept. 1, Élections Québec announced it wouldn’t mail out English-language versions of the provincial election guide, the notice of voter registration and the reminder card. The French-only mailers include QR code and contact information to access English versions.

The unilingual mailouts were a result of language reforms under the law known as Bill 96 by the Coalition Avenir Québec government. Élections Québec said it voiced concerns about the measure, but its requests for an exemption were denied.

Coalition Avenir Québec Leader and incumbent premier Christine Fréchette has stood by the French-only mailers, despite concerns from anglophone advocacy groups. Earlier this month, she said the ballot will be available in both languages, though Élections Québec said there isn’t much to translate.

The measure prompted a lawsuit by Chambers, which led to Lussier ruling on part of the legal challenge and partially granting the demand for a provisional interlocutory injunction.

On Sept. 21, the court stayed the application of the Charter of the French Language until election day on Oct. 5 and ordered Élections Québec to finish preparing the bilingual reminder cards and to mail them.

Élections Québec spokesperson Julie St-Arnaud-Drolet said the agency would not comment on the government’s efforts to appeal the decision “as it involves a political issue and our mandate to organize elections requires us to remain neutral and impartial.”

“Our public statement on Sept. 1 was intended to inform anglophone voters how to access information in English, not to spark a debate on the new provisions of the Charter of the French Language,” she said in email Thursday to The Gazette.

On Friday, a spokeperson for Quebec’s Justice Ministry said “out of respect for the judicial process, we will not comment.”

The Quebec Court of Appeal is expected to hear the government’s request on the same day as the provincial election on Oct. 5, according to Chambers’s legal team.

Asked how far he would be willing to take his legal challenge, Chambers said: “This is, I mean, obviously all that process is very time consuming and requires a lot of energy to be devoted to it and it’s expensive, but we will absolutely take this to the end.”

“This is very important,” he said.