[1] First introduced by Camille Laurin, the Minister of Cultural Development under the first Parti Québécois government of Premier René Lévesque, it was passed by the National Assembly and received royal assent on August 26, 1977.
Prior to 1974, Quebec had no official language[2] and was subject only to the requirements on the use of English and French contained in article 133 of the British North America Act, 1867.
Section 133 of the Constitution Act, 1867, still in effect, nonetheless requires that bills be printed, published, passed and assented to in French and English in the Parliament of Canada and the Legislature of Quebec.
Parties may request the translation in French or English of the judgments by the courts or decisions rendered by any "body discharging quasi-judicial functions".
The government departments and agencies are designated by their French name alone, and all administrative documents are drafted and published in that official language.
The burden of the proof is on the employer, who must satiety each the following criteria in order to meet the requirement of having taken all reasonable means to avoid requiring knowledge or a specific level of knowledge of a language other than the official language: Product labels, their instructions, manuals, warranty certificates as well as restaurant menus and wine lists must be in French.
[30] Bill 178 was passed in direct response to the legal case of Ford v. Quebec (Attorney General) and invoked the notwithstanding clause to shield the articles on business signage from judicial review.
In response, the Quebec Liberals introduced Bill 86 which made the Charter compliant with the Canadian court rulings without the need for the override provisions.
On August 26, 2020, Quebec's Minister of Justice and French Language, Simon Jolin-Barrette, announced plans for 2021 that would strengthen the Charter.
[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][excessive citations] Bill 96 invoked the notwithstanding clause, allowing the law to temporarily override sections 2 and 7–15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
[34] The leader of the Parti Québécois, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, said he supported aspects of the bill, but felt it did not go far enough, saying, "Unfortunately, the CAQ gave us the absolute minimum."
A few days later PQ announced their plan if elected, which would include [41][42] According to a poll by Léger published on May 22, among Francophones the approval rate for the various proposals was fluctuating between 72% and 95%.
[48] The Charter was criticised by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who called Bourassa's Bill 22 as a "slap in the face", in his memoirs,[which?]
The most notable case was Ontario, where Premier Bill Davis did not grant full official status to the French language, despite the fact that the infrastructure was already in place.
[52] The language barrier has also been regarded as a "soft cap" for population growth; for instance from 2013 to 2014 while Montreal gained around 43,000 immigrants from other parts of the world it lost 10,000 residents to other provinces.
On the other hand, Toronto's advantage had been growing since the 1930s and had become apparent in the 1950s, and is also related to the greater importance of the United States, rather than Britain, in Canada's economy.
Levying fines of up to CA$7,000 per offence, Charter enforcers were widely labelled in the English media as the "language police" or "tongue troopers".
While the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) provides several warnings[citation needed] before resorting to legal sanctions, allegations that it has abused its powers has led to charges of racism and harassment.
[58] Dunn's also fought a ruling to change the name of "Smoked Meat" to "Boeuf Mariné" in order to conform to Quebec Language Law.
Marie was a series of symbolic but divisive resolutions by some municipalities outside Quebec declaring their towns unilingually English in protest of what they saw as an infringement on the rights embodied in the charter.
Aside from the civil rights infringement, the Charter has faced legal challenges because the restricted education opportunities have hindered not only unilingual but bilingual anglophones' employment.
On November 14, 1988, the political and human rights watchdog organization Freedom House published "The Doctrine of 'Preponderance of Blood' in South Africa, the Soviet Union and Quebec"[66] in its journal Exchange.
Introduced by Zbigniew Brzezinski (an anglophone who had once lived in Montreal) former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's National Security adviser, the essay compared the language of instruction provisions of the charter with South African apartheid statutes and jurisprudence.
The criteria used by Quebec to determine if parents are entitled to have their children instructed in English are the same as those found under section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
It requested and published the opinions of various experts from Spain, Israel, the United States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Wales, Australia and Flanders in a special issue of the OQLF's Revue d'aménagement linguistique celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Charter in 2002.
[70] Mart Rannut, vice-dean of research at the Department of Philology of the University of Tallinn, in Estonia, recalled the influence of Quebec's expertise in the field of linguistic human rights and language planning which helped countries that have gained independence from the Soviet Union and concluded that "Bill 101 indirectly touched one-sixth of the planet".
[71] Ina Druviete, at the time dean of the department of sociolinguistics at the Linguistic Institute of Latvia, noted the similarities between the language policies in all three Baltic states (which have large, if often officially unrecognized, Russophone minorities) and that of Quebec.
The principal sectors of intervention were the language used in the government agencies and the administration, in meetings and office spaces in particular, in corporate names, information and education.
According to Colin H. Williams, professor and researcher at the Welsh Department of Cardiff University particular lessons followed in Wales which stem from the experience of Quebec are: In Israel, while the "penetration of English in the sociolinguistic organization of the country" is perceived, according to Bernard Spolsky, professor emeritus of English at the Bar-Ilan University, as a threat to Hebrew, the language policy has thus far only influenced linguists and some politicians.
Presently, Hebrew shares this title with Arabic only, because a measure was taken soon after the foundation of the State, in 1948, to modify the British policy, which imposed three languages, and gave up English.