Parents' group to take GNWT to Supreme Court of Canada
Group behind French school case confident they'll be heard
Evan Kiyoshi French
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, January 21, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
The 'big difference' between the territorial government's partially-successful appeal and the 2012 ruling ordering the territory to expand facilities for the Commission scolaire francophone is what makes Jacques Lamarche think the case has legs.
The president of l'Association des Parents et Endroits - an 80-member group comprised of parents of students at Ecole Allain St-Cyr who took the GNWT to court over space provided for the French board - said the group's lawyer is confident the case will be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada because the 2012 verdict was specific on the winnings of the French board, while the appeal is vague in its wording.
The original decision gave the group - which took the GNWT to court because the newly formed French board wasn't ready to do so - what they were looking for.
"The judge allowed us pretty much everything that we were asking for - a gym, and she specified the size of the gym, and the classrooms, (and) she specified the number of classrooms," he said. "And then when the government took us to appeal ... there's a big disparity of what they allowed us. No expansion of Ecole Boreale in Hay River. No rights to administer our students, and then for us here (in Yellowknife) we got a gym, but no size of gym specified. And we only got one special needs' classroom, and they said it doesn't have to be used just for that. It's quite a big difference from the first instance, and I think that's why our lawyer is confident."
Suzette Montreuil, president of the French board, said the parents took the GNWT to court, as French language rights holders, and started the process before the French board - which formed in 2000 - was ready to begin court proceedings.
"So when we got to 2010, before the big process, we took over paying the bills," she said. "From that point on everything was discussed, but we didn't (intervene) because that would have delayed the process another year."
Lamarche - who has a daughter in Grade 9 at Allain St-Cyr and a son who is in college - said the French board had begun negotiating with the GNWT for school expansions around the time the case began, but the parent group was finished with negotiation.
"We had been negotiating and negotiating and nothing was moving forward," he said. "So we decided to take the government into court."
He said the group has voted in favour of taking the matter to the next level.
"We have to make application to go to the Supreme Court and then the Supreme Court either accepts our case or not," he said. "I'm not 100 per cent sure, but our lawyer seems to think we have good chances of being heard."
He said a similar case is being heard in the Supreme Court of Canada on Jan. 21, based on the Yukon government reallocating funds away from French-language education.
Another related case was heard in Vancouver late last year, which could set precedent for the case his group is behind.
"We only have 60 days to make our application so we cannot wait for these verdicts," said Lamarche.
It won't mean the case will be dropped, he said.
Even if the Yukon verdict answers the questions about enrolment, the group still wants to answer questions around the enlargement of Ecole Allain St. Cyr and Ecole Boreale. Should the case not be heard by the court, he said, the group will back at the drawing board, negotiating with the GNWT to decide on the size of the gym to be built at Allain St. Cyr.
