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The Minister must proportionately balance section 23 Charter values when exercising discretion over minority-language school admissions.
Five non-rights holder parents applied to the Minister to exercise discretion to admit their children to a French first language education program in the Northwest Territories, with the support of the francophone school board.
The Minister denied each application, finding the parents did not meet the categories established in the ministerial directive.
The SCC held that the Minister was required not only to consider s. 23 of the Charter but to conduct a proportionate balancing of the values underlying that provision — including preservation and development of the minority language community — against the government's interests.
Applying the Doré framework, the Court found the decisions unreasonable because the Minister gave disproportionate weight to consistency and cost, and insufficient weight to pedagogical requirements and the remedial purpose of s. 23.
The appeal was allowed and the Court of Appeal orders set aside.
Summary conviction appeal allowed; trial judge erred in finding language rights violations and arbitrary detention.
The Crown appealed a trial judge's decision to stay proceedings on charges of impaired driving and driving over the legal limit.
The trial judge had found that the accused's language rights under sections 7, 10(a), and 10(b) of the Charter were infringed because the police did not communicate with him in French, and that he was arbitrarily detained under section 9.
The Superior Court of Justice allowed the appeal, finding that the trial judge erred by raising the language rights issue on his own during closing arguments, taking improper judicial notice of facts, and misapplying the law on language rights.
The court also found no arbitrary detention and set aside the stay of proceedings, remitting the matter back to the trial court to hear a pending section 11(b) application.
