Section 16.1 of The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - Influence Outside New Brunswick

Influence Outside New Brunswick

In 2000, an Ontario court ruled that the province was legally obligated to keep from closing the Montfort Hospital as part of its program of merging many of the hospitals in the Ottawa region. The basis for the decision was the court's conclusion that this was a logical application of an unwritten constitutional principle of minority rights, which had been found by the Supreme Court in the 1998 Reference re Secession of Quebec. Since the Montfort Hospital was the only hospital in the region operating primarily in French, it amounted to a protected parallel service-provider, much as New Brunswick's French-language and English-language school systems are parallel service providers, and therefore as an essential component of the collective rights of Ottawa's Franco-Ontarian population. The government of Ontario criticized the decision as judicial activism, and charged that "The divisional court decision has effectively rewritten the constitution to make 16.1 applicable to Ontario despite the express intention that it apply to New Brunswick alone."