Érik Labelle Eastaugh
Panel: Linguistic equality and justice in the face federal diversity: A Canadian perspective
Chair: Karine McLaren
Since 1969, Canada has adopted an array of legal measures aiming to address various inequalities between Anglophones and Francophones. These measures have been adopted by a range of actors in a variety of different contexts, giving rise to apparent inconsistencies or conflicts between them. The most widely remarked-upon of these apparent conflicts have been those between Quebec’s Charter of the French Language (Bill 101), a law whose purpose is to protect the right to use French in a variety of public and private settings, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a constitutional bill of rights which contains standard civil and political rights as well as several sui generis language rights based on a principle of equality between English and French. These two instruments are often described as being ‘fundamentally’ incompatible, on the grounds that they instantiate radically different principles of language policy and linguistic justice. This supposed incompatibility is usually framed in binary terms, with proponents claiming that Bill 101 protects ‘collective’ rights, while the Charter protects only ‘individual’ rights, that Bill 101 adopts a ‘territorial’ approach, while the Charter rests on a ‘personal’ one, and/or that Bill 101 represents an exercise in self-determination by the Québécois, while the Charter is a centralizing force that deprives them of their autonomy. However, this paper will argue that the degree of conflict between the two measures is in fact substantially overstated as it rests on a series of false dichotomies, and that both the Charter and Bill 101 can be seen as pursuing a common goal of ‘advance[ing] the equality of status or use of English and French’ as set out in s. 16(3) of the Charter. In doing so, the paper will offer a critical examination of the use (and misuse) of certain key concepts in the debates over linguistic justice, such as collective rights and territoriality.