Unconstitutional to appoint monolingual Canadian official

OTTAWA, Ontario — The Canadian Supreme Court found that a lower court should not have declared the appointment of a monolingual, anglophone Lieutenant Governor in New Brunswick constitutional. “The appointment of a unilingual English-speaking person has the effect of relegating the official language in which that person is not proficient to a secondary status and of undermining, through the symbolic effect of the appointment itself, the rights of the province’s Francophones.” However, the adequate remedy is not to quash the appointment but to issue a declaratory judgment that the appointment was unconstitutional.