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| - Canada's top court ruled Friday that British Columbia violated francophones' rights by underfunding French-language schooling, marking a win for parents fighting their children's assimilation into anglocentric culture. In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court said the province contravened a section of the Charter of Rights guaranteeing education in one of Canada's two official languages. "The mission of a government is to manage a limited budget in order to address needs that are, for their part, unlimited," wrote Chief Justice Richard Wagner. But, he added, budgetary concerns cannot be used to justify trampling minority language rights. "Treating this role as such an objective would lead society down a slippery slope and would risk watering down the scope of the Charter." The decision is the culmination of a decade-long fight led by British Columbia's sole French-language school board and a parent group for better education services for a growing local French-speaking student population. They lamented that too many students had to spend long stretches -- up to two hours -- on buses to schools that are often little more than a few portable classrooms stuck together, with no gym. A freeze on school bus transportation funding, they said, further aggravated the problem. For many families, this meant choosing "not to send their children to francophone schools," Suzana Straus, president of the Federation of Francophone Parents of British Columbia, told public broadcaster CBC. "They (would) choose to go to the local school, and that means assimilation. And that saddens me tremendously," she said. Outside of Quebec, francophones are a minority. Approximately 64,000 of British Columbia's five million people speak French as their primary language, up 21 percent since 2006, according to the federal languages commissioner. About 6,200 students are enrolled in 44 French-language schools across the province, while British Columbia's entire primary and secondary student population stands at nearly 576,000. In court documents, the British Columbia government argued that the disparity was justifiable because the cost of providing equal services to a small minority was too high. At his morning briefing, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the decision a win for minority language communities across the country who have long argued that they are being short-changed on education funding. "We now hope that the provincial governments will step up further in areas that are their exclusive jurisdictions, like education," Trudeau said. "As a federal government, we will always stand ready to support and help minority-language communities across this country," he said. amc/ft
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