Quebec group condemns Supreme Court ruling on historic rulings

MONTREAL. A Quebec civil liberties group says it intends to pursue a lawsuit after the Supreme Court of Canada responded to its request for a translation by simply removing thousands of monolingual English-language decisions from its website last week.

Droits collectifs Québec said the court’s decision to set aside the decisions did not address the issues it raised. “Our intention is to continue with the review, which we believe is still relevant at this point, despite this somewhat desperate gesture by the Supreme Court,” Etienne-Alexis Boucher, the group’s chief executive, said in an interview .

The organization went to the Federal Court, alleging that the Registrar of the High Court – the administrative arm of the court – was not complying with the Official Languages ​​Act. He demanded a public apology, a court ruling, an official English-only translation of the rulings for three years, and $1 million in damages to be shared with groups working to preserve the French language.

More than 6,000 decisions handed down before 1970, when decisions began to be systematically translated under the Official Languages ​​Act, were posted on the Supreme Court’s website in English only.

On Friday, the registrar announced it was removing all decisions handed down before 1970 from the Supreme Court’s website, directing people to other online databases if they wanted to consult them. In June, the head of the court, Richard Wagner, said that decisions made before 1970 are primarily of historical interest and the cost of their translation would be prohibitively high.

The registrar said on Friday that although the court rulings had been lifted, it would begin translating the “most historically or jurisprudentially important” rulings up to 1970.

The Federal Court’s statement refers to decisions made between 1877 and September 1969, when the Official Languages ​​Act went into effect, requiring federal agencies to publish content in English and French. This comes after the court failed to respond to a ruling by the commissioner for official languages, Raymond Theberg, who said that decisions published on the court’s website should be available in both official languages.

Teberge agreed that the law was not retroactive, but he said it was an offense under the law to publish previous rulings without a translation, and he gave the high court 18 months to rectify the situation.

Teberge said in a statement Tuesday that he was aware of the Supreme Court’s “new approach to publishing decisions on their website” and said his office would continue to monitor developments on the matter.

Francois Larocque, a University of Ottawa professor who researches language rights, said that under the 2023 Official Languages ​​Act reforms, the commissioner has the power to offer a compliance agreement if institutions do not follow his recommendations.

He said the removal of monolingual solutions reflects short-term compliance.

“The spirit of the recommendation was a bit different … it was about making all the court’s jurisprudence available to both legal audiences in Canada: French and English legal audiences,” Larocque said.

“By removing all solutions, they essentially level out, right? Instead of making all judgments available in both languages, you’re just going to remove the offending ones and nobody will get them on the Supreme Court website.”

Larocque said access to translated versions is important because some cases are still regularly cited as case law.

He said he “strongly” disagreed with the chief justice’s characterization that the decisions were of historical interest only. “These decisions, despite the fact that they are not necessarily quoted every day, are still important. They are the law of the land until they are expressly overruled by the next decision,” Larocque said.

The decisions are also a pedagogical tool for law teachers, so it is important to have them in French.

“I think that’s the right way to look at all these decisions as part of the fabric of our legal system,” Larocque said. “Everything the Supreme Court has ever done, I think is important.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on November 12, 2024.

— With the files of Pierre Saint Arnaud in Montreal.

Siddhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press