The announcement comes one week after a Quebec civil rights group sued the SCC
A week after a Quebec civil rights group filed a lawsuit to compel the Supreme Court of Canada’s registrar to provide both English and French translations of every court decision on its website, the high court announced it would no longer provide online access to untranslated decisions.
Since 2019, the registrar's office has made every decision in the court’s history – which spans judgments rendered between 1877 and the present – available on the SCC’s website.
The court has published decisions in English and French since the Official Languages Act went into effect in 1970. However, the SCC did not always provide two versions of the approximately 6,000 decisions it published between 1877 and 1970, sometimes producing judgments in only English or French.
In an announcement Friday, the SCC said individuals looking to access all the court’s decisions, including those not translated into both official languages, can search open online databases. The court also said that next year it plans to start translating historically and jurisprudentially significant decisions published before 1970 and offer both French and English versions of the decisions on its website.
Droits collectifs Québec took legal action against the SCC’s registrar on Nov. 1, alleging the court refused to comply with the Official Languages Act.
The group initially filed its complaint with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. In September, Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada Raymond Théberge affirmed the SCC’s argument that the Official Languages Act does not apply retroactively but recommended that the SCC provide both English and French translations of the decisions on its website within 18 months.
Since the publication of Théberge’s report, the SCC has not made any moves to comply with his recommendation, the Quebec group alleged. The group also cited Supreme Court Chief Justice Richard Wagner's comments in June about the court's lack of human and financial resources to translate decisions with minimal legal value.
The group argued that the SCC’s failure to provide French translations for its historical decisions violated the rights of Francophones in Canada.
Eugene Meehan of Supreme Advocacy LLP told Canadian Lawyer on Monday that DCQ’s legal actions have put the SCC in a tough position. “On the one hand, translating 6,843 judgments, which may be of limited use given their age, is an enormous undertaking of potentially questionable value,” Meehan said, noting that the chief justice estimated in June that the translation costs could cost up to $20 million.
“But on the other hand, is bilingualism important – not just constitutionally, but pragmatically? Are Supreme Court judgments – all of them – part of our juridical foundation? Would you build a house with bricks missing from the foundation because you think some bricks are needed less than others?” Meehan said.
The court’s decision to translate only significant pre-1970 decisions “may be a reasonable compromise,” he added. “Our courts continually write judgments about the importance of proportionality, and the Court’s response to this issue may very well be itself proportionate.”
