L’Observatoire international des droits linguistiques

In this case, the Federal Court was asked to rule, on a preliminary basis, on whether members of Parliament and their staff constitute “federal institutions” within the meaning of the Official Languages Act and are therefore subject to the language obligations set out in Part IV, among other provisions. The dispute arose from a complaint about a member of Parliament's unilingual response to a citizen who had communicated with her in both official languages.
The Court, hearing a motion to dismiss, refused to strike the application. It concluded that the issue raised serious questions of legislative and constitutional interpretation, particularly with regard to the scope of section 90 of the OLA relating to parliamentary privileges and its interaction with the rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the absence of direct case law on the linguistic status of communications between members of Parliament and their constituents, the Court found that the appeal was not doomed to failure and deserved to be examined on its merits.
This decision therefore leaves open a fundamental question for Canadian language law: the extent of the linguistic obligations of parliamentarians in the exercise of their duties to the public.