Judge Marc St-Pierre

By Joel Goldenberg
The Suburban

Quebec Superior Court Judge Marc St-Pierre ruled last week that the federal government does not have to be a respondent in the Task Force on Linguistic Policy’s case against Quebec’s language law Bill 96.

The court ruling noted that it “cannot or should not force” the federal government to be a part of the case against the language law, and that the Task Force and the other complainants in the case are able to make their case on their own against Bill 96 and Quebec’s Attorney-General.

Task Force President Andrew Caddell told The Suburban that it is “disappointing the judge sided with the federal Attorney-General.

‘We now have a new Attorney-General in Gary Anandasangaree, but I am skeptical as to whether he will be knowledgeable enough to respond to any of the details of cases like ours. We believe the Trudeau PMO just wants this to go away, as they did with so many things concerning the Anglophone community in Quebec.”

Caddell added that last week’s decision “does not mean we cannot proceed with our case — just that we will be fighting the AG of Quebec.

“We have 30 days to appeal the decision to the Quebec Court of Appeal. I have asked the Board of the Task Force to decide. Our next meeting will be in a week or so, and we will let our members know once the Board has made its decision.”

As reported by The Suburban, the Task Force said last September that it included the federal government as a respondent for “refusing to defend the Constitution of Canada… against the unilateral declaration of Quebec as an exclusive French-speaking nation in the Constitution. It is also due to the incorporation of the Charter of the French Language, as amended by Bill 96, in Bill C-13, the new federal Official Languages Act.”

Michael Bergman, lawyer for the Task Force, told a town hall recently that a victory would have set an important precedent.

“It will be the first case of its kind on the notion that Canada must defend the integrity of the supreme law, the Canadian constitution,” Bergman told the virtual meeting, which was attended by nearly 100 people. “If Canada won’t defend it — that every province can start making unilateral amendments — the Canadian constitution will no longer be a unifying document. It will be like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don’t quite fit together, it will break into different pieces with different rules.”

The plaintiffs in the ongoing case against Bill 96 include Caddell, “general plaintiffs acting as public interest litigants, as a constitutional question; a teacher concerned about his status due to education provisions in Bill 96, a businessperson whose commercial affairs are affected by Bill 96, a permanent resident with an autoimmune disease who cannot receive communications in English and a mother whose autistic child has not been able to receive proper specialized care because his first language is English.” n