Michel Bastarache

Michel Bastarache

Introduction to Michel Bastarache

Michel Bastarache, born in 1947, Canadian jurist and puisne (associate) justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1997- ). He was born in Québec City. He received his bachelor's degree in 1967 from the University of Moncton in New Brunswick and law degrees from the University of Montréal in 1970, the University of Nice in France in 1972, and the University of Ottawa in 1978. Between 1978 and 1987 he taught and served as a dean at the law schools of the University of Moncton and the University of Ottawa. He also served briefly as director general of the Official Languages Department of the Secretary of State for Canada. He edited Les droits linguistiques au Canada (1986; Language Rights in Canada, 1987) and cowrote Précis du droit des biens réels (1993; Handbook of Real Estate Law). He was appointed to the Court of Appeal of New Brunswick in 1995, and in 1997 Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appointed him to the Supreme Court.

Bastarache's first significant decisions on the Court reflected his background in language rights. In R. v. Beaulac (1999) a bilingual defendant had been convicted in Vancouver, British Columbia, in a trial conducted in English. The defendant, however, considered his primary language to be French. Bastarache found that the right of a defendant to a trial conducted in his own language was not satisfied in this case, and he sent the matter back to be retried in French. His decision, cowritten with Justice John Major, in Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island (2000) clarified section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The section calls for publicly funded instruction in a minority language when a significant number of students in an area speak that language. The decision ordered the provincial government to provide a “locally accessible” school for French-speaking students, rather than bus them to a more distant location. Bastarache will reach the Court's mandatory retirement age of 75 in June 2022.” (1)

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Information about Michel Bastarache in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia

Guide to Michel Bastarache

Law is our Passion

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This entry was last updated: August 24, 2014