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Jamie Sarkonak: Unilingual Canadians are inferior in the Supreme Court's eyes

Chief Justice Richard Wagner gives himself the power of a king

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Canada used to be a bilingual country, in that our institutions could accommodate speakers of either official language. That age came to a resounding close on Friday, when a majority of the Supreme Court banned the appointment of unilingual speakers to a bilingual government office.

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The case before the court had been brought by an Acadian activist group that challenged the appointment of a non-French-speaker, Brenda Murphy, to the position of lieutenant governor of New Brunswick. Six of the Supreme Court’s nine judges agreed with the Acadians, concluding that the lieutenant governor must speak both English and French. Appointing an anglophone, they said, constituted a violation of the Charter, in particular the equality rights of francophones.

Jamie Sarkonak: Unilingual Canadians are inferior in the Supreme Court's eyes Back to video

“Where an institution is unipersonal, where some of the institution’s constitutive functions cannot be delegated and where it publicly expresses itself through the person embodying it, equality of status cannot be achieved in the institution unless that person is able to understand and speak each of the two official languages,” wrote Chief Justice........

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