Language Law Jurisprudence at the Supreme Court of Canada Under Harper: How to Explain the Paradigm Shift?
This article tests the hypothesis that language law decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, which have been less generous to linguistic minorities since the early 2000s, are related to the coming to power of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which was generally more resistant to a liberal application of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Through an analysis of three variables, namely the Harper government’s support for official languages, the predictive power of the dominant political party on the ideology of judges in Canada, and the Harper government’s numerous setbacks at the Supreme Court in other Charter litigation, the paper will argue that one cannot infer such an influence of the Harper government on the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions in the area of language law.