Adrien Habermacher

Professor of Law

Panel: Linguistic equality and justice in the face federal diversity: A Canadian perspective

Chair: Karine McLaren

The Canadian constitutional framework entrenches the right of official language minorities to receive school instruction in their own language. This specific right often lays at the core of language minorities’ legal battles against governments, for instance in relation to the level of funding provided by government for such services, the quality of the programs and the facilities, as well as the extent to which the official language community is able to manage and control such services. Moreover, it has long been recognized that a mere translation of the curriculum offered in another language in the majority’s education system may not be adequate as the instruction provided must reflect the values and culture of the language community in question.
Against this backdrop, we have recently witnessed the generalization of distance learning at all education level during the COVID-19 pandemic. While recourse to such methods was temporary, it inevitably leads to questions regarding the possibility that government may try to fulfil their legal requirements to provide educational services to official language minorities by way of distance education programs. This may come across as a tempting alternative to allocating significant financial resources to operating dedicated facilities, especially for governments less favorable to language minorities and in regions where the numbers of right-holders are low.
This paper explores the pitfalls and benefits of this option from the point of view of language (in)justice beyond the specifically Canadian legal framework. It questions the importance of environments, physical or virtual, in the implementation of language rights to education. Building on insights from the fields of socio-linguistic, education, and law, it also considers the intersection of socio-economic and language minority status.