Academic

Ed Morgan - "In Yellowknife, language rights go back on the menu"

First published in the Globe and Mail, April 21, 2009.

In taking on the chef who runs the famed Wildcat Cafe, Yellowknife's city council appears to have concocted a recipe for bringing Quebec-style language politics to the Northwest Territories. In the process, it has given us the basis for a constitutional crise du jour.

The iconic eatery in Yellowknife's Old Town sports a log cabin veneer, rough wooden benches and floors, and a pedigree that harks back to the 1930s prospectors who founded it and the miners and bush pilots who made it a frontier landmark. The building was designated a heritage site in the early 1990s and it has been leased out by a municipal committee to licensed operators since reopening as a popular tourist destination in the late 1970s.

Le Wildcat Cafe, as it's now known, is currently run by a Quebec-born restaurateur. It serves up a northern repertoire of muskox sirloin, caribou burgers and, from personal experience, the best arctic char this side of anywhere. But the great northern food and ambience have been eclipsed by a language feud that brings the Constitution into play. It all turns on the French article "Le," which has been added to the historic name. The Yellowknife council wants it banished.

The chef's argument, as quoted in the news media, is that the council's demand amounts to discrimination. The council contends that it is merely out to do its duty in protecting the heritage of the site and of the region. 

If the entire controversy seems to make a mountain out of the smallest mole hill, no one should underestimate the heights of constitutional theory that a certain other jurisdiction's linguistic battles have made us scale. Montrealers, or at least those over 30, will still recall the vanishing possessive on Eaton's stores in the 1980s, mandated by the ruthless Office québécois de la langue française as part of its rooting out of all things English on commercial signs under the infamous Bill 101.

When Quebec's sign law finally made it to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988, the court had the opportunity to weigh two arguments - one by the challengers, disgruntled shopkeepers who felt unfairly targeted by this early Parti Québécois legislation, and another by the provincial government, which felt the need to preserve what it called the visage linguistique of the province.

Although Quebec's language police and Yellowknife's city council may have seemed a tad overzealous in taking on punctuation marks and definite articles, the underlying question would pose a challenge to any constitutional court. Canada is both a liberal society, sharing universal values and rights, and a distinctive society, with its own heritage and traditions. As the Supreme Court put it, language "is a means by which a people may express its cultural identity. It is also the means by which one expresses one's personal identity and sense of individuality."

The right to use one's chosen language and the authority to preserve the cultural patrimony stack up against each other in a way that makes the contest a tough call. The Supreme Court eventually told the government of Quebec that it could preserve the province's visual francophone heritage by requiring French signage to predominate in any given shop, but that it could not ban other languages altogether. The result is La Maison Egg Roll and other deliciously Canadian names.

Governments at all levels, from municipal to provincial to federal, can and should do their best to preserve the cultural inheritance of Canadians, and they may do so in a way that is appropriate to their particular locale or jurisdiction. But they cannot enforce these policies at the expense of individual freedoms, such as the right to express oneself in the language of one's choice. Some things simply lie too close to the bone of individual liberty to be carved away on the ornamental platter of heritage.

Those Yellowknifers who worry about their territory's history of English-speaking prospectors may have to take a cue from the Supreme Court's 20-year-old ruling on Bill 101. "Le" might not be able to dominate the Wildcat on the café's famous wooden sign, but it cannot be banished altogether from the brochures and menus.

After all, what's sauce for Quebec's goose is sauce for the rest of our gander.

Full post as published by University of Toronto Law School Faculty Blog on April 21, 2009 (boomark / email).