Forty years after the imposition of a constitutional reform that curtailed the powers of the Assembly and refused any formal recognition of the Quebec nation, the federal government, responding to a desire for atavistic domination in English Canada, is determined to restrict more before the political freedom of the Quebec people.
On Wednesday, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, David Lametti, revealed that the Trudeau government is seeking to put an end to the possibility for the Quebec government to use in a preventive manner the notwithstanding clause contained in the Canadian Charter of Rights. and freedoms contained in the 1982 constitutional amendment. He intends to ask the Supreme Court to invalidate its own case law established in 1988 by the Ford decision. Nothing less.
Unexpectedly but deliberately, at an incongruous press conference on the sidewalk of a street in Verdun, David Lametti put the cart before the horse by affirming that the Trudeau government would present arguments before the Supreme Court for it invalidates the Quebec State Secularism Act.
From a strictly legal point of view, for a Minister of Justice to announce that his government will intervene in the Supreme Court even before learning of the decision of the Court of Appeal on the subject and without knowing whether the highest court will subsequently accept hearing the case is unusual to say the least. The Quebec Court of Appeal has not yet ruled on the decision of Superior Court Judge Marc-André Blanchard, who last year invalidated part of Bill 21 applicable to English school boards. We don’t even know the hearing date of the case. In the meantime, the Court of Appeal has maintained the whole of the law in force while the court decides on the merits.
David Lametti also gave his opinion on Law 96, which had just been adopted. He took on board some of the fears that agitate Quebec Anglophones about health services in English, which the law does not affect. He was concerned about the impacts of the law on newcomers and aboriginal people. “I am no less Quebecois because I oppose Bill 96,” said this former McGill University law professor. The issue of access to justice in English is of concern to him, but these aspects of the law are not protected by the notwithstanding provision to which the CAQ government has resorted and may therefore be reviewed by the courts.
By revealing his game so early, David Lametti, on behalf of the Trudeau government, is only reacting to the discontent, even the anger, that the two bills have aroused among English speakers in Quebec, but also elsewhere in English Canada. It is a political gesture.
These days in Toronto, we like to see in François Legault a crypto-separatist who is trying to achieve independence through the back door. In a vitriolic editorial, the Globe and Mail did not hesitate, as the detractors of Bill 96 do, to distort its scope, advancing in the most serious way that the Quebec government will carry out abusive searches, violate the right to privacy and trample on professional secrecy . From the height of this moral superiority in which the English-Canadian intelligentsia coats its contempt, it is implied that Quebec is not a State of law. The CAQ government is accused of “quietly redefining the constitutional order”, when it is only exercising its prerogatives. Coming from the English-Canadian majority, whose prime ministers treacherously agreed to modify the Constitution without the agreement of the national minority, this accusation only betrays an old oppressive background. Quebec would only have the right to exist under trusteeship.
Last Friday, during an interpellation at the National Assembly, the Minister responsible for Canadian Relations, Sonia LeBel, who, while claiming to be part of the autonomist nationalism advocated by the CAQ, is one of the most sincere federalists in the cabinet, affirmed that the derogation provision contained in the Charter, what it refers to as the “parliamentary sovereignty clause”, allows Quebec to protect its model of society. “Quebec is free to adopt a model for organizing relations between religions and the State,” she argued, a model worthy of an advanced and democratic society.
By calling into question the recourse to the notwithstanding clause, however tried and tested, with what seems to us to be new and imaginative quibbles, it is this freedom that the Trudeau government seeks to infringe, supported by an armada of distinguished Canadian jurists who brainstorm.