Lawyer Francois Cote, right, speaks as Daniel Turp, centre, and Etienne-Alexis Boucher of Droits collectifs Quebec look on during a media availability at Federal Court in Montreal, Nov. 1. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sidhartha Banerjee
MONTREAL – A Quebec civil liberties group says it intends to push forward with legal action after the Supreme Court of Canada responded to its translation demand by simply removing thousands of unilingual judgments from its website.
Droits collectifs Québec had gone to Federal Court this month alleging the high court’s registrar – the court’s administrative body – was not respecting the Official Languages Act.
That was because more than 6,000 rulings that predate the 1970 language legislation were posted on the Supreme Court’s website in English only.
On Friday, the registrar announced it was removing all pre-1970 judgments from the Supreme Court website, directing people to other online databases if they wished to consult them.
The registrar also said it would begin translating the “most historically or jurisprudentially significant” decisions from before 1970.
Droits collectifs Québec says the registrar’s decision to remove the rulings doesn’t resolve the issues it raised, so it will continue to seek a Federal Court ruling.
In September, official languages commissioner Raymond Théberge ruled that any decisions published on the court’s website must be available in both official languages.
He said the failure to translate the judgments amounted to an offence under the act, and he gave the high court 18 months to correct the situation.
The Quebec group’s legal action involves decisions that were rendered between 1877 and the entry into force of the Official Languages Act, which obliges federal institutions to publish content in English and in French.
The Supreme Court has been translating all decisions issued since 1970, but it has said the earlier rulings were primarily of historical interest and the cost of translating them would be prohibitive.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
