Appeal court upholds rulings under Bill 101 that French language still needs protection

Attempt to overturn charter provisions scuttled for firms cited for violations

A three-year-old court challenge to the signage provisions of Quebec’s French language charter has received another setback, with the province’s Court of Appeal siding with two lower court judgments that the French language in Quebec continues to require protection.

In a unanimous decision filed Nov. 7, the three judges of the appeal court upheld the findings of a Quebec Court judge in 2014 — which was upheld by a Superior Court justice in 2016 — that scuttled an attempt by several local businesses cited for violations to Bill 101 to overturn provisions of the language charter.

In the 2014 trial, lawyer Brent Tyler attempted to prove that French is no longer vulnerable in Quebec and thus the limits the French-language charter places on freedom of expression cannot be justified. The court heard from expert witnesses and the Quebec government, both of whom gave diametrically opposed assessments of the state of the French language in the province.

In the end, Quebec Court judge Salvatore Mascia ruled that while French language use had increased over the past quarter-century, it was because of Bill 101, and the charter should not be made “a victim of its own success.”

“In the present matter, the petitioners-defendants have not shown that the situation of the French language has changed significantly since the decisions of the Supreme Court in Ford and Devine,” Mascia wrote, referring to a pair of Supreme Court judgments in 1988 that struck down the provisions of Bill 101 that called for commercial signs to be in French only. But while the Supreme Court rejected the total ban on all languages other than French, it said it was justifiable to require that French be markedly predominant because Quebec’s majority language was vulnerable.

In 1993, Premier Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government passed Bill 86, which allowed English and other languages on public signs as long as French was markedly predominant (at least twice as big).