By Joel Goldenberg
The Suburban
Lawyers representing 23 municipalities were in Quebec Superior Court Monday and Tuesday, presenting a motion for a stay of various aspects of Quebec’s language law Bill 96 until the challenge can be heard on the merits.
The case, first announced at a press conference in Côte St. Luc in June 2023, is being brought by municipalities that are officially bilingual because they have more than 50 percent mother tongue anglophone populations, and those which have opted in, declaring to the government they want to remain officially bilingual as they are below the 50 percent mother tongue threshold but were officially bilingual according to previous rules.
The municipalities challenging the law, represented by the Grey Casgrain law firm, are Baie d’Urfé, Beaconfield, Blanc-Sablon, Bonne-Ésperance, Chichester, Côte St. Luc, Dollard des Ormeaux, Dorval, Havelock, Hope Town, Kazabazua, Kirkland, L’Isle Aux Allumettes, Montreal West, Mulgrave and Derry, New Carlisle, Pointe Claire, Senneville, Sheenboro, Shigawake, Stanbridge East, Wentworth and Westmount.
A statement from Côte St. Luc and the other municipalities points out that the legal action “covers five areas, including contracts and communications, the obligation to adopt resolution to maintain bilingual status, illegal searches and seizures, government grants, and the obligation to discipline employees.”
More specifically, the provisions the cities want declared invalid and inoperative are the prohibition for contracts to be written in a language other than French, “even if both parties agree,”; allowing OQLF inspectors to inspect and seize, at any time without notice, any documents, equipment and computers from any municipal body; that cities have to declare in resolutions that they want to maintain their bilingual status if the English mother tongue population is below 50 percent; that the language minister or another designated minister can withhold provincial government grants to a city if they don’t comply with any provision of the law; and that a city has to punish any employee who does not comply with Bill 96.”
The municipalities say that Bill 96 “compromises the concerned municipalities’ bilingual status, which is intrinsically part of their cultural identity, but the proposed provisions also extend far beyond language rights and undermine constitutionally protected and inalienable rights that belong to all Quebec citizens.”
CSL Mayor Mitchell Brownstein said late last week that “municipalities with bilingual status have been waiting for this hearing to ask the Superior Court to suspend the articles of the law that cause harm to our municipalities and that will impose a change that we are confident will eventually be overturned when the case is heard on its merits later on.
“For instance, our future capital projects are at risk because of the power given to the Minister of the French Language to withhold funding to municipalities granted by other ministries of the government. Municipalities need to be able to plan for the future without the threat of withheld funding.”
Dale Roberts-Keats, Mayor of Bonne-Espérance which has a population of 695, says Bill 96 “has created much confusion with regards to the obligation to use French for all contracts. It’s absurd that for our municipality where 99 percent of the population has English as their preferred language, we can’t produce contracts with suppliers in our community in English.” n