Thank you, that’s interesting. I would agree that if the legal consensus is that officially granting constitutional status to some French version of the Constitution Act (whichever it is, and especially one that causes controversy, which seems to be the case for all of them) would require unanimous assent of all provinces, then it is unlikely to happen. Especially since, as you point out, this assent would not be forthcoming on Quebec’s part without other constitutional changes such as recognition of Quebec’s traditional constitutional demands. (Former Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard apparently wanted to have the National Assembly adopt the Constitution, but it’s not something that would have been politically feasible even with a majority government.)
Note that some more recent amendments to the 1867 Act were enacted bilingually, so although the Act is primarily English only, the French versions of some sections have equal status with the English version. See as, 92A and 93A, for example.
As well, both language versions of the Canada Act 1982 and the Constitution Act, 1982 (which includes the Charter) were enacted bilingually and have equal status.
Aren’t you sad that you don’t get to have these types of discussions about your bland Anglo-only Constitution?
Hardly. We have enough to quarrel about without further complicating things with a whole 'nother language!
If you ever looked at the capitalization of the US Constitution? Crazy stuff, and often silently corrected.
That was the 18th century stylistic convention: Nouns in formal Documents were capitalised, but not other Types of Words.
The Constitution Act, 1867 was capitalised in the same way. I think nouns are still capitalised in German.
I have long suspected the old-fashioned aggressive capitalization comes from German.
If you think two languages is bad, try a constitution in eleven languages!
(In reality it doesn’t cause confusion, because while all eleven versions are technically official, by the Constitution’s own terms the English version prevails in case of inconsistency.)
That is a lot!
We have a mixed situation: where enacted only in English, the English is the only official version, but for those parts enacted in both English and French, both versions are equally authoritative.
German still does this (capitalising nouns, I mean). And not just in formal documents, but everywhere. It’s the only language I know of that does this (among the languages written with case-sensitive alphabets), not even very close relatives such as Luxembourgish do the same. So the US Constitution feels somewhat eerily familiar to a German reader.
In German, all the Nouns begin with a capital letter. Now that is a good idea; and a good idea, in this language, is necessarily conspicuous from its lonesomeness. I consider this capitalizing of nouns a good idea, because by reason of it you are almost always able to tell a noun the minute you see it. You fall into error occasionally, because you mistake the name of a person for the name of a thing, and waste a good deal of time trying to dig a meaning out of it. German names almost always do mean something, and this helps to deceive the student.
(Mark Twain)
European Union law is even more complicated here. The EU has twenty-four official languages, legal acts are published in all of them, and they are all legally equally authoritative. According to case law, in case of discrepancies you need to do a comparative reading of all language versions to find out what the intended meaning would most likely be. Which is of course something that nobody has a clue as to how, exactly, one would do that.
Judges here will do their best to interpret the English and French versions as having a common meaning, but if there is a clear difference between them, then the rule of « common ground » usually applies: the common content of the two versions is the preferred interpretation, and if one version has a broader scope than the other, the broader part is ignored.