Mark Clifford Power

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.

The appellant mother was awarded primary residence of the children at trial and permitted to relocate approximately ten hours from the respondent father's residence.

The father successfully appealed to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, which admitted post-trial financial evidence under a test distinct from Palmer and used it to overturn the relocation order.

The Supreme Court of Canada allowed the appeal, holding that the Palmer test governs all additional evidence tendered on appeal for the purpose of reviewing the decision below, whether the evidence relates to events before or after trial.

The new evidence failed the Palmer due diligence criterion because it could have been available at trial with reasonable diligence, and its admission was not in the interests of justice given the availability of legislative variation procedures.

The trial judge's relocation analysis under Gordon v. Goertz was free from reviewable error, and the Court of Appeal wrongly intervened in the absence of a palpable and overriding error.

The appellants, the sole French-language school board in British Columbia and associated parents' federation and individual rights holders, brought a constitutional challenge alleging systemic underfunding of minority language education and inadequate facilities in numerous communities, contrary to s. 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The majority clarified the sliding-scale framework for situating the number of minority language students so as to determine the level of educational services warranted, introducing a province-wide comparative presumption of pedagogical and cost appropriateness when majority language schools of comparable size exist elsewhere in the province.

The majority further held that substantive equivalence — not proportionality — is the applicable standard for assessing the quality of the educational experience throughout the sliding scale, and that infringements of s. 23 are subject to a particularly stringent justification standard under s. 1, such that the fair and rational allocation of public funds does not constitute a pressing and substantial objective.

The Court held that Mackin immunity from Charter damages does not extend to government policies infringing s. 23, and restored the trial judge's award of $6 million for the transportation funding freeze and ordered $1.1 million in additional damages for the Annual Facilities Grant Rural Factor breach.

Brown and Rowe JJ. dissented in part, rejecting the province-wide presumption as inconsistent with settled jurisprudence and as compressing the middle of the sliding scale, though agreeing on substantive equivalence, the invalidity of a purely financial s. 1 objective, and the appropriateness of Charter damages in the s. 23 context.

Two traffic-offence appellants argued Alberta had a constitutional obligation to enact, print, and publish legislation in both French and English based on the 1867 Address and 1870 constitutional instruments.

A majority held no entrenched constitutional guarantee of legislative bilingualism applied to Alberta through those texts, rejected related fiduciary-duty arguments, and dismissed both appeals.

The Court answered the constitutional questions in Alberta's favour while awarding the appellants party-and-party costs in this Court and below.

The appeal addressed the test for substantive equivalence under s. 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in minority language education.

The court held equivalence must be assessed holistically from the perspective of rights holders, including facilities, programming, and travel burdens, rather than formal cost parity.

The court restored a declaration that the minority-language educational experience was not equivalent to nearby majority-language alternatives, while leaving responsibility and remedy issues to later phases.

The court also upheld phased proceedings and restored special costs for the successful public interest litigants.

The appellants sought to file French-language exhibits attached to affidavits in constitutional litigation concerning minority-language education rights.

The majority held that British Columbia law required civil court proceedings, including exhibits relied on for their content, to be in English unless impracticable, and that this framework displaced residual inherent jurisdiction to admit untranslated French documents.

The Court further held that the 1731 English statute was received into provincial law and had not been displaced for this issue.

The dissent would have recognized continued inherent jurisdiction absent clear legislative ouster and remitted the matter for discretionary determination.

The appeal was dismissed, with costs awarded to the appellants.

In an administrative law appeal, the appellant municipality challenged a referral decision by a provincial human rights commission to appoint a board of inquiry regarding alleged discriminatory school-funding arrangements affecting a minority-language school community.

The Court held that referral decisions at this preliminary screening stage are reviewable on reasonableness, with strong judicial restraint against premature intervention in ongoing administrative processes.

The Court clarified that older jurisdictional framing tied to preliminary questions should no longer govern this context.

Applying the proper standard, the commission had a reasonable basis in law and on the evidence to refer the novel and complex complaints for inquiry.