COURT RULING ON SIGNS A MISSED OPPORTUNITY
In this series of columns, onetime Alliance Quebec president and media personality Royal Orr reflects on his relationship with his second language.
For a lifelong Quebecer now in my 60s, wars have come and gone, men have walked on the moon, the Berlin Wall fell and Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash, but always, alongside these headlines on the front pages of Montreal newspapers, there was the latest episode in the psycho-drama of language in Quebec.
The young leaders who emerged out of the Duplessis era had a firm, double intention for our province — to build a more democratic society where the use of French would be enhanced. Successive Quebec governments of all parties engaged with “projet de société” and made news about it endlessly.
There’s a long list of commissions, policy papers and legislative efforts that addressed this dual agenda, resulting in two laws important enough to be called “Charters” — the Charte québecoise des droits et libertés de la personne and the Charte de la langue française. I had a frontrow seat when these foundational laws of Quebec squared off in the infamous commercial signs case in the 1980s.
The French-only commercial signs provisions of Bill 101 were deeply resented by anglophones from the moment they were unveiled. The issue of individual freedom of expression was at play, of course, but the deeper offence was that other languages were banished from the “face” of Quebec. In time, several young lawyers co-ordinated by Alliance Quebec started building a case to contest these restrictions.
The result was an unbroken series of victories for the anglo merchants challenging Bill 101, right up to the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1988.
The Charter of the French Language, Bill 101, had been built atop earlier language legislation — the Union Nationale’s Bill 63 and Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa’s own Bill 22. A similar process was happening in parallel, focusing on the democratic development of Quebec. The result was the 1975 Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, updated by the Parti Québecois in 1983 and mailed by a proud René Lévesque to every household.
Inevitably, questions arose over which charter would take precedence. Lévesque and the PQ’s Camille Laurin clashed on this point. Laurin demanded that his Charter of the French Language be equal to the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. Lévesque famously and forcefully said: “Non.”
So it wasn’t surprising that when the commercial signs case first went to court, the lawyers based their arguments largely on the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. And the first judgment in 1984 said that though French could be required, forbidding other languages contravened freedom of expression as protected by the Quebec Charter.
With that judgment, a great opportunity to elevate the protection of human rights as our society’s key to reconciling social and cultural conflict was missed. The signs issue was a serious injustice felt by Quebec citizens, argued by Quebec lawyers on the basis of Quebec law, and resolved by a Quebec court. Regrettably, it was appealed by the PQ government and then again by Liberals after a Court of Appeal victory, and the moment was lost to settle the issue and thereby enhance support for rights-based democracy.
Later at the Supreme Court, the Canadian charter moved into the front rank of arguments and the signs case victory has been framed ever since as federal pow- er throttling Quebec aspirations. The political damage caused by Bourassa’s failure to respect that decision, instead applying the “notwithstanding ” clause, was long-lasting.
When Quebec’s desire to enhance human rights and to protect the French language came into high-profile conflict on the question of commercial signs, Quebec’s political and media elite repeatedly refused to stand up for democracy.
We did, of course, get through it all and we will look at how we established linguistic peace.
But the first signs judgment was a missed opportunity to show how our two foundational Quebec laws were adequate to reconciling individual rights, including freedom of expression, with the need to promote French.