BC’s French School District Is Suing the Province. Again

More than four years after the Supreme Court of Canada declared that B.C. owes its francophone school district 19 additional, renovated or expanded school buildings, the Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique and the province are back in court.

B.C. is home to 60 different school districts. Fifty-nine of these districts are organized regionally. The CSF is the 60th. It’s responsible for administering French-language public education provincewide, in 47 schools.

The CSF is currently suing the province alongside four regional school districts for the remaining school sites the 2020 ruling determined they are owed under Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Section 23 of the Charter guarantees an English or French minority parent the right to have their children receive a kindergarten to Grade 12 education in the language they were instructed in if: the parent was educated in Canada; the parent’s first language is a minority language that they still speak; or one of their children already attends a minority-language school.

The 2020 case tackled two school infrastructure issues, says Rémi Léger, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University whose child attends a francophone school.

“A number of the schools were just inadequate — were not comparable or equivalent to the English-language schools in the region. And in other cases, there was just a lack of schools,” he said.

For example, École La Vallée in Pemberton is in deplorable physical condition, with students currently split among several school sites while they wait for a new building. The province announced $6.6 million for a new school earlier this year.

“The issue there is not necessarily that there’s no space, but that they’re using this space that is unsafe, that feels unwelcome, that feels non-equivalent to the school or the space that is offered to the English-speaking school,” said Léger.

Last year the Vancouver School Board closed Queen Elizabeth Annex, a kindergarten to Grade 3 school, and leased it to the CSF. This happened after the Education Ministry made it clear there would be no new funding for an Olympic Village school — a 2020 NDP campaign promise — unless the board sold or leased the annex to the CSF.

The VSB is currently leasing five school sites to the CSF, in addition to previously selling the francophone district two school sites.

But the francophone board maintains that the Vancouver, Abbotsford, Victoria and Sea to Sky school districts are standing in the way of the francophone district’s Charter right to school sites in their districts.

CSF is ‘owed schools’

“Generally the issue seems to be the VSB and other school boards are not really interested in selling their land to the CSF or leasing it on a long-term lease,” Léger said.

“So the CSF feels it’s stuck. They are owed schools... however, four years later, in a number of these communities and regions, they are searching, still trying to find a way to get a piece of land on which a school could be built.”

The Tyee reached out to the Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique for an interview, but the district declined to comment.

Instead, it pointed us to its latest press release, which calls out the Vancouver School Board in particular for not selling or leasing vacant school sites to the CSF.

The Sea to Sky school district said it was unable to comment at this time. Neither the Abbotsford nor the Greater Victoria school district responded by deadline.

The education minister declined to comment beyond affirming their commitment to upholding Section 23 rights for francophone students.

In October, the Vancouver Sun reported the CSF wanted not only Queen Elizabeth Annex and Laurier Annex in Vancouver but also Dr. A.R. Lord Elementary, which currently enrols students.

In an emailed statement to The Tyee, a spokesperson for the Vancouver School Board said they have offered to subdivide the Dr. A.R. Lord site and redevelop the land with two new schools, retaining Dr. A.R. Lord Elementary and offering the other school to the CSF on a long-term lease.

This offer isn’t a done deal, the district spokesperson noted, adding the district follows the leasing procedure under the School Act and its own policy.

“A formal and rigorous process would need to take place, which includes engaging directly with the school community before the Board makes a decision about the land,” the spokesperson said.

The history of the current court case dates back to 2010, when the CSF sued the province over a lack of adequate school spaces, control over enrolment and insufficient transportation funds.

The case, which ended in the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2020 ruling, is the fifth Section 23 case to make it to Canada’s highest court, further defining how a parent’s right to have their child educated in their minority language works in practice.

Minority-language education court precedents

The history of tussling over providing education in French or English, where one speaking population is considered a “minority” in their province, is as old as Canada itself, says Stéphanie Chouinard, an associate professor of political science at the Royal Military College and Queen's University.

But it wasn’t until Canada’s Constitution and its associated Charter of Rights and Freedoms came into effect in 1982 that the right to minority-language education was affirmed countrywide.

Section 23 applies only to French or English, however. Indigenous languages that European colonizers tried to eradicate, and other languages brought to Canada since colonization began, are not covered under this section.

The first case in 1984, Attorney General of Quebec v. Quebec Protestant School Boards, claimed English school registration restrictions in Quebec were stricter than Section 23 called for. The Supreme Court of Canada agreed, and Quebec was required to align its rules with the Charter.

The Supreme Court of Canada’s 1990 ruling on the Mahe v. Alberta case found minority-language communities had a right to manage and oversee their schools, including by creating a minority-language school board if the population is big enough.

“However, in this specific case in Edmonton, the Supreme Court said ‘We’re not quite there,’” Chouinard said, adding the courts called for francophone parents to have a certain number of Edmonton school board seats.

After francophone parents filed a human rights case with the United Nations, however, the government of Alberta created a francophone school board in 1993.

Today every province and territory has at least one minority-language school board, although it took further B.C. Supreme Court rulings for the CSF to be created and expanded provincewide in B.C.

In 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island, in which two parents and the Fédération des Parents de l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard Inc. took the provincial government to court over its plan to bus francophone students out of town instead of building a new school.

“The big principle that came out of the Arsenault-Cameron decision was that the parents who sit on the school board are spokespeople for the community,” Chouinard said, “and that the ministry of education has to pay heed to what they perceive as being in the best interests of the children in their communities.”

Finally, in 2003, the Supreme Court of Canada weighed in on Doucet-Boudreau v. Nova Scotia (Minister of Education), in which the province had agreed new francophone schools were needed. But they weren’t providing them.

Nova Scotia escalated the case to the Supreme Court of Canada after the initial trial judge ruled the province must not only provide the schools, but also report its progress to the court until all the schools were built. The Supreme Court of Canada sided with the trial judge.

“It’s now used all the time in immigration cases where files are not overseen in a timely manner,” Chouinard said. “It really created a strong precedent.”

In 2010, the CSF, the Fédération des parents francophones de Colombie-Britannique and three francophone parents filed suit against the B.C. Education Ministry for lack of school spaces, inadequacy of existing school spaces, control over admissions decisions and lack of transportation funding.

At 1,600 pages, the 2016 ruling was the longest decision in the history of the B.C. Supreme Court, said Léger. “In French it was called the ‘méga-cause’ just because it was mega: it concerned so many communities across the province.”

The courts largely sided with the francophone parents and school board.

However, the CSF was not granted all the school spaces it wanted. Nor did it get full control over student admissions. It was also dissatisfied with the $6 million in damages it was awarded for unfunded transportation costs.

In 2016 and 2017, the Vancouver School Board closed Sir Wilfrid Laurier Annex, Henderson Annex and Maquinna Annex and leased them to the CSF.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier Annex is now the kindergarten to Grade 3 École des Colibris, while Maquinna Annex has become École Norval-Morrisseau. Henderson Annex was used as temporary overflow space for the over-capacity École Rose-des-vents.

The CSF and parents appealed the 2016 ruling. Eventually the case came before the Supreme Court of Canada.

“It was a resounding victory for the CSF,” Léger said. “The chief justice who wrote the decision for the court almost took the province by the hand and walked the province through on why it needed to create schools, and also how it should do it.”

The court affirmed the right for minority-language parents to send their child to a school comparable to the majority-language schools in their region in terms of infrastructure, teacher pay, location, support for students with additional needs and extracurricular programming, Chouinard said.

The CSF took the province and the VSB back to court in 2022 to force the lease or sale of Queen Elizabeth Annex to the francophone school board. The VSB leased the school to the CSF in 2023.

The most recent case alleges that the province, alongside the Vancouver, Abbotsford, Victoria and Sea to Sky school districts, has failed to make school buildings or land available as previous court cases have established that it should.

While the case is between school boards and governments, the francophone community as a whole is affected by these continued court cases, Léger noted.

“There’s this idea there that francophones are entitled, and ‘Why is it that they have these schools?’” Léger said, noting B.C.’s francophone population is small.

Currently the CSF has 6,000 students enrolled, though both Léger and Chouinard note many minority-language parents send their kids to French immersion or English schools because they have no francophone option, or the francophone school in their area is in such poor condition.

The other question Léger said he hears is “‘Why are we prioritizing French-language schools where we should really be doing work for Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous language?’”

“There’s this pitting of minority against minority, as if we can only support one,” he said. “I just find that very unfortunate that that’s how our politics work.”