The Supreme Court crafted an artful, admirable and unanimous compromise yesterday on English-language schooling for immigrant children. Like all such minority-schools cases, it hearkens back to the original compromises on which Canada was founded. To listen to the attacks on the decision, from sovereigntists and, worse, from Quebec's Liberal government, one might conclude that Canada itself is an impossible notion.
The court did nothing radical. It created no broad new rights for immigrants to choose the language of instruction for their children. It accepted Quebec's right to protect the French language by requiring most children, immigrant and otherwise, to be schooled in French. "This is the expression of a valid political choice," said Mr. Justice Louis LeBel. "Resolving this problem is a serious and legitimate objective."
The court also accepted that Quebec has a right to stop immigrant parents from trying to skirt the law by sending their children for a few months or a year to private, unsubsidized English-speaking schools, and then use that as a springboard to argue that the majority of their children's education had been in English. (Quebec law provides that children whose parents have studied in English in Canada, or who have studied themselves, for the most part, in English, may go to school in English.) "The legislature's intention ... would be compromised if these 'springboard' schools could be used to make obtaining access to minority language schools almost automatic," Judge LeBel wrote.
But the court, good Canadian institution that it is, dislikes absolutist policies. And Quebec's policy is absolutist. When immigrants turned to the so-called bridging schools, Quebec passed another law that all education in those schools would be ignored, for the purposes of deciding what a particular child's language of school instruction should be. That went too far. There are constitutional guarantees of minority-language schooling in Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Imagine a child enrolled in an English-language private school that is unsubsidized until the secondary level; suddenly the child is no longer eligible to learn in English. Instead, the Supreme Court ordered the province to assess each child's education in its entirety (including whether the child has any learning disabilities), rather than pretend that part of it had not happened.
This compromise alters no basic principles. To object is to disdain the compromise that is Canada - which is understandable from separatists, but not from the government of Quebec.