We will defer to the learned wisdom of Justice Pierre J. Dalphond of the Quebec Court of Appeal: The government does indeed have the right to force a certain 10 private-school students into French school. But the case's rigorous legal framework serves only to demonstrate the rigid irrationality behind Quebec's coercive school-language laws.
Parents of the 10 students in question have chosen to fight for the opportunity to move from fully-private grade schools to government-subsidized secondary levels in the same schools. This progression would violate Bill 104 of 2002, passed by a Parti Quebecois government to close a so-called loophole in the Charter of the French Language, Bill 101 of 1977, which closed off English schools to most Quebec students.
Last fall the Supreme Court of Canada invalidated Bill 104 as unconstitutionally strict. But the high court suspended its ruling for a year, to give Quebec time to draft and pass an acceptable substitute. So 104 stays in effect until October.
In the case that had the Appeals Court working Saturday, the parents had argued that with Bill 104 scuttled, and the replacement Bill 103 not yet enacted, their children should be allowed into English high school this fall.
Quebec Superior Court bought that argument, and ruled in the parents' favour last week, but on Saturday Justice Dalphond didn't: Since the Supreme Court suspended its judgment, Bill 104 remains in effect until October. Legally, the argument seems clear.
But the absurdity of the premise underlying Bill 104 (and the mean-spirited Bill 103 with which today's Liberal government expects to replace Bill 104) shines through Saturday's ruling: If these kids got into an English-language school, many other parents would want the same thing, the ruling noted, and giving the public what it wants would be ... contrary to the public interest. Further, permitting such requests would add complications for educational administration and also for the National Assembly's debate on Bill 103.
After decades of social engineering over language, here's what we have come to: Everybody, except many parents, defines "the public interest" as removing almost all choice in language of education. The only remaining freedom of choice is for those eligible for English school, and for those wealthy few who can pay many years of very high tuition fees.
It gets worse. As the distinguished and dedicated Montreal lawyer Michael Bergman argued on our opinion page in July, Bill 103 is in some ways even tougher than Bill 104 was. Bill 103, Bergman noted, "distorts and circumscribes" rules the Supreme Court put in place -the Solski criteria -for deciding each access case on its own merits. This raises the interesting possibility that Bill 103, too, could be thrown out by the highest court in the land.
Quebec governments keep on trying to patch and preserve the dam they have built to prevent parents from exercising language choice in education. How long can they ignore the evidence that parents, including many francophone ones, want more choice, not less?