Standing Committee on Official Languages

Comité permanent des langues officielles

For immediate release

Ottawa, May 09, 2017 -

The Hon. Denis Paradis, Chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages, today tabled a report in the House of Commons entitled The Enumeration of Rights Holders under Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Toward a Census that Supports the Charter.

The Committee expressed concerns about the fact that the census provides an incomplete picture of rights-holders under section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Committee learned that the census identifies only some rights-holders (Canadian parents who have the constitutional right to enrol their children in minority francophone schools). In addition, the census does not collect any data to identify how many children are eligible to enrol in minority anglophone schools in Quebec.

The Committee believes that this is a breach of the provisions of Part VII of the Official Languages Act, which requires the Government of Canada to take positive measures to advance the official languages and support the development of official language minority communities. The Committee also noted that this breach could be interpreted as a violation or a denial of constitutional guarantees.

“The Committee is of the opinion that the Government of Canada must address this breach before the 2021 Census,” said the Hon. Denis Paradis. “This has been an ongoing problem for far too long. It puts official language minority communities at a distinct disadvantage because it affects schools, which are at the very core of community vitality.”

In the Committee’s opinion, the Government of Canada must help rights-holders exercise their constitutional right to send their children to minority schools. It must also provide minority school boards with the data they need to fully exercise their right to school governance and to engage in meaningful dialogue with the provinces and territories, which require reliable data from a reliable source to make informed decisions.

Therefore, the Committee recommends that the Government of Canada require Statistics Canada to include questions in the 2021 Census that would allow for the enumeration of all rights-holders under the broadest interpretation of paragraphs 23(1)(a) and (b) and subsection 23(2) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In the report’s appendix, the Committee included all of section 8 of the brief submitted by Rodrigue Landry, Mark Power, Marc-André Roy and Jean Pierre Hachey, in which they analyze the changes required to specific census questions and suggest new questions to capture all rights-holders in the 2021 Census.

The Committee concluded its report by urging the Government of Canada to act quickly and make this a priority issue.

The report is available from the Committee’s web page on the Parliament of Canada website at http://www.parl.gc.ca/LANG-e. Anyone unable to access an electronic copy of the report can obtain a paper copy by contacting the Committee clerk.

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages is composed of 10 members. The Chair is the Hon. Denis Paradis (Brome–Missisquoi) and the Vice chairs are John Nater (Perth–Wellington) and François Choquette (Drummond). The other members are René Arseneault (Madawaska–Restigouche), Sylvie Boucher (Beauport–Côte de Beaupré–Île d’Orléans–Charlevoix), Bernard Généreux (Montmagny–L’Islet–Kamouraska–Rivière du Loup), Linda Lapointe (Rivière des Mille Îles), Paul Lefebvre (Sudbury), Darrell Samson (Sackville–Preston–Chezzetcook) and Dan Vandal (Saint Boniface–Saint Vital).