Supreme Court will hear case about closed Acadian Peninsula courthouses

Caraquet Mayor Bernard Thériault says he feels vindicated after hearing Canada’s Supreme Court will hear the case he and a group of Acadian Peninsula mayors have put forward regarding the closure of the Caraquet and Tracadie courthouses in 2022.

The Forum des maires de la Péninsule acadienne Inc. argues the closures violated language rights.

While Thériault says residents can receive service in French at the nearest courthouse an hour away in Bathurst, N.B., the mayors say the courthouses are institutions that should be protected by official language laws.

“Because a courthouse is more than a place where you do trials. A courthouse is one of those institutions that are required for a healthy community to thrive and to move forward in terms of progress and we have been denied that,” said Thériault.

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In 2024, New Brunswick’s Court of King’s Bench ruled that the closures were made without considering the linguistic rights of the area’s francophone community, but that was overturned the following year in the Court of Appeal.

Now, the Supreme Court of Canada will decide if the closures from four years ago are valid.

Section 16.1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to distinct educational and cultural institutions that are necessary for the preservation of linguistic communities in New Brunswick.

That’s why the province has separate school and health-care systems.

Stéphanie Chouinard, who serves on Canada’s official language rights expert panel, says she can see why this is relevant for Canada’s Supreme Court.

“I think at the crux of this issue here will be a determination as to whether courthouses can be seen as institutions that have either or and any educational or cultural bearing on an Acadian community or on the Anglo-New Brunswicker community,” said Chouinard, who is a political science professor at the Royal Military College.

“So this is an unsolved question and one that the nine Supreme Court justices seem interested in solving.”

Theriault says he’s open to solving things out of court but is very clear on what that would entail.

“We want our court system back. And the court system we had in those days had a judge, had 18 jobs,” he said.