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Tyler looks to UN

Alliance Quebec president Brent Tyler said yesterday the Canadian government is dishonest in the handling of its international human-rights treaty obligations.

Tyler said the Canadian government countenances discrimination against English-speaking Quebecers under the province's French language charter, commonly known as Bill 101, in violation of United Nations treaties it has signed and fails to acknowledge it does so.

"Canada is lying to the UN about our record of compliance with human-rights treaty obligations," said Tyler in a special lecture at the McGill University law faculty.

Tyler said he has lost rulings in several cases involving Quebec's sign law and school-access restrictions because judges held that the treaty obligations are moot because they have not been legislated into Canadian law.

"If they're right, Canada's treaty obligations aren't worth the paper they're written on," he said. "We should be very embarrassed."

He cited Quebec's law that limits access to public schools on the basis of where a child's parents were educated as an example of a statute that violates a UN treaty to which Canada is a party.

"The Quebec language charter is discriminatory on the basis of family relationship," he said.

"What we're telling children in Quebec is that you've got the wrong parents."

Tyler said Canada also invokes the argument that its treaty observance is complicated by the fact that there are provincial and federal laws for different areas of jurisdiction.

He rejected the argument, saying that when a country signs a treaty, it applies to all areas of a federal state.