Final Report of the French Constitutional Drafting Committee responsible for providing the Minister of Justice of Canada with a draft official French version of certain constitution enactments

Notice to the reader: This document represents the recommendation of the Committee constituted under s. 55 of the Constitution Act, 1982 and has never been superseded by any other report under that section.

Section 55 of the Constitution Act, 1982 provides that "a French version of the portions of the Constitution of Canada referred to in the schedule [to that Act] shall be prepared by the Minister of Justice of Canada as expeditiously as possible". The French Constitutional Drafting Committee was set up in 1984 with a mandate to assist the Minister in that task.

The Committee has endeavoured to ensure the greatest possible consistency in the documents without changing the substance of the laws contained in them. Each word or expression had to be considered not only in its immediate context but also with respect to constitutional law in its entirety. These considerations prompted the Committee to make certain modifications to its interim report*, which it had drafted before its review of the enactments was complete.

In the Committee's opinion, the French version of the Constitution of Canada should, to the greatest possible extent, reflect Canadian constitutional law at all stages of its development, from Confederation to the present.

With this principle in mind, the Committee concluded that a restrictive interpretation of section 55 of the Constitution Act, 1982 would be inappropriate, and it decided to draft a French version of all of the documents, both British and Canadian, contained in the schedule to the Act, whether or not they are still in force.

Thus Part I of this report contains a draft official French version of all thirty documents set out in the schedule to the Constitution Act, 1982, in accordance with the order used in that schedule.

During its preparation of the French version of the documents set out in the schedule to the Constitution Act, 1982, the Committee discovered that many of the documents contained in that schedule contain passages that are linked, to varying degrees, with other documents not specifically mentioned in that schedule. The Committee felt that, were it to exclude these other documents from its review, the French version of Canada's constitutional law, both past and present, would remain less complete than the English version, and there would be inconsistencies between the draft official French versions of the documents that it had prepared and the French versions of these other documents, which were, for the most part, literal translations of the English.

Part III of the report, therefore, outlines minor changes that should be brought to the Constitution Act, 1982 and to subsequent constitutional enactments.