Quebecers are turning to the courts to invalidate the appointment of Mary Simon to the post of Governor General, because she does not speak French fluently.
The group, led by history professor Frédéric Bastien, filed a motion in the Superior Court of Quebec on Wednesday for a judgment to declare “null, invalid and inapplicable” the appointment of Ms. Simon.
According to the group, this appointment violates the provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which provides that “French and English are the official languages of Canada”. The class of plaintiffs includes the Association for the Defense of Individual and Collective Rights of Quebec and the organization Justice pour le Quebec.
Mr. Bastien, who was a candidate for the leadership of the Parti Québécois in 2020, says that choosing a governor general who does not speak one of the country’s two official languages is an insult to French speakers and a signal that bilingualism has no not important in Canada.
The Governor General of Canada, Mary Simon, speaks English and Inuktitut, and she has promised to learn French. But Mr. Bastien says the government should have chosen one of the many qualified Indigenous candidates who speak both official languages.
Like in New Brunswick
In its application to the Superior Court, his group relies on a legal precedent in New Brunswick, where Acadians recently challenged, on similar grounds, the appointment of a unilingual Anglophone lieutenant-governor.
The Chief Justice of the Court of Queen’s Bench in New Brunswick ruled last April that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau violated the language protections guaranteed by the Canadian Constitution when he appointed Brenda Murphy.
Justice Tracey K. DeWare felt that the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick “must be bilingual and able to perform all the duties required of his role in English and French.” She added, however, that overturning the appointment would lead to a constitutional crisis.
Ottawa announced in May that it is appealing the decision, arguing that the power to appoint the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick contains “no bilingualism requirement” and that neither the Constitution nor the Charter can to such a requirement.
“The appointment of Ms. Simon is unconstitutional, because it violates the provisions on bilingualism,” explained in an interview Thursday Mr. Bastien, who is currently a history professor at Dawson College, an English-speaking CEGEP in Montreal.
“This appointment is an insult to Francophones everywhere in the country, and obviously first and foremost to the Quebec national minority,” argued the author in 2013 of the essay “The Battle of London — Below, Secrets and Behind the Scenes of constitutional repatriation”.
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