page_title: Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
section_title: Application
hierarchical_section_title: Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms / Application
caption_attribution_description: Ecole de L'Anse-au-Sable: French-language K12 school located in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
context_page_description: Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the section of the Constitution of Canada that guarantees minority language educational rights to French-speaking communities outside Quebec, and, to a lesser extent, English-speaking minorities in Quebec. The section may be particularly notable, in that some scholars believe that section 23 "was the only part of the Charter with which Pierre Trudeau was truly concerned." Trudeau was the prime minister who fought for the inclusion of the Charter of Rights in the Constitution of Canada in 1982.
  Section 23, or section 23 as a whole, are also known as the "Canada clause."
context_section_description: Section 23 is a positive right. It has been found that section 23 thus guards against linguistic minorities being assimilated if their educational rights are denied for a long period of time, and this has led to section 24 of the Charter, which provides remedies for rights infringements, to be applied flexibly and creatively.  For example, in Doucet-Boudreau v. Nova Scotia (Minister of Education) (2003), it was found that the government could be forced to report to a judge as construction on schools progressed, in order to ensure the schools were built within a sufficient amount of time.
  While much of section 23 can apply to Quebec, section 59 of the Constitution Act, 1982 states that section 23(1)(a) is of no force or effect there. This was a conciliatory gesture made by the authors of the Charter which failed to obtain Quebec's agreement to the constitutional changes in 1982. This provision will not be valid in Quebec until the provincial government chooses to ratify it.
caption: L'Anse-au-sable, a French language school in Kelowna, British Columbia.  Its school board Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique helps ensure those with section 23 rights receive minority language education.[6]
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