Francophone students in British Columbia have to spend long stretches on buses to arrive at schools that often don’t have gyms or are located in buildings that are ill-suited for education, say the proponents of a lawsuit that aims to force the province to provide the same kinds of services to French students as they do for their English counterparts.
The Supreme Court of Canada will decide Friday whether it agrees that British Columbia has violated the linguistic minority rights of French-speaking students or whether, as the government argues, the disparity is justifiable because the cost of providing equal services to a tiny minority would simply be too high.
“The whole point of minority rights that are constitutionalized is to provide some certainty. It’s to provide some peace, so to speak, so that the minority knows that come what may, the majority will have to do certain things, or won’t be able to do certain things,” said Mark Power, the lawyer representing B.C.'s francophone school board and a parents group.
The Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique and the Fédération des parents francophones de Colombie-Britannique have spent a decade in litigation with the province, alleging it has underfunded its French-language education system.
The CSF and FPFCB argue the board is entitled to larger amounts of facilities funding for its schools, which would ensure the quality of its services is “substantively equivalent” to English schools.
They point to Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees the minority language educational rights of linguistic minorities across the country.
But the B.C. government says it should be allowed to scale that funding, since the proportion of CSF students is small, and the cost of these measures would be too high. The francophone board has about 6,200 students enrolled in 44 schools across the province, while British Columbia’s entire K-12 student population stands at nearly 576,000.
B.C. is leaning on Section 1 of the Charter to defend its funding decisions. The section guarantees Canadians their rights and freedoms “only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
Mr. Power argues that by invoking Section 1, the province is endangering minority rights.
B.C.'s Ministry of Education said Thursday in an e-mail that it “will wait until tomorrow’s Supreme Court decision before commenting” on the case. But it said it provided $42.64-million in capital funding to the CSF over the past three years. It also approved funding for the construction of a new francophone school that opened in 2018, and bought property that included a French school in 2020.
FPFCB president Suzana Straus, a Richmond parent whose two children have attended CSF schools over the years, can see an English school from her backyard, but chose to send her children to French schools “one- or two-hour bus rides away” because the family “decided that their francophone heritage is important.”
However, she said francophone schools across the province often have poor facilities.
“There are francophone schools that don’t have gyms, there are francophone schools in our province that are essentially three portables that are stuck together,” she said.
She said Friday’s ruling will determine whether future generations need to keep making tough decisions on schooling and can avoid linguistic assimilation.
“We are Canadian, we are francophone and anglophone, we have both languages. It’s a benefit. If our culture can thrive then it’ll only be positive for Canada,” she said.
The CSF and FPFCB filed an initial lawsuit against B.C. in 2010. The Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that the province owed $6-million to the board for “chronically underfunded” student transportation in 2016.
But both plaintiffs saw the scope of this ruling as too narrow, and thought the province failed to recognize larger issues regarding funding and linguistic assimilation. In 2018, the plaintiffs lost an appeal in the British Columbia’s Court of Appeal. They then took their case to the country’s highest court.
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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misspelled Mark Power's name.