The Supreme Court of Canada [official website] ruled [judgment] on Friday that the constitution does not require the Alberta legislature to enact laws in both French and English. French speakers, Gilles Caron and Pierre Boutet, challenged traffic tickets they were issued in 2003 because the laws and citations were only written in English, which violated their right to legislative bilingualism. The appellants argued that an assurance given from Canadian government in 1867 to respect “legal rights of any corporation, company, or individual,” entitled citizens to have their laws created and printed in more than one language. The court used legislative history to demonstrate that it was not the intent of drafters to require the law to be enacted and published in more than one language. The term “legal rights” was not equivalent “linguistic rights,” because the legislature knew how to expressly guarantee linguistic rights, and they had not done so in this act.

In 2010 the Canadian Bar Association passed a resolution opposing a federal bill [JURIST report] that would have required Supreme Court of Canada justices to speak both French and English. The resolution, introduced by lawyers from mostly English-speaking western Canada, stated that bilingualism is something to consider, but should not prevent an individual from being appointed to the bench. The bill had the most support in predominantly French-speaking Quebec. In 2009 The Supreme Court of Canada unanimously struck down a Quebec law restricting certain students’ access to English-language schools as unconstitutional. In 2005 the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously upheld [JURIST report] Bill 101, which requires French-speaking parents to send their children to francophone schools.