N.S. court rules in favour of creating francophone riding of Chéticamp in Cape Breton

HALIFAX — A Nova Scotia Supreme Court ruling issued this week could lead to residents of Chéticamp, N.S., casting their votes in a smaller riding with a higher percentage of francophone constituents in the next provincial election.

Justice Pierre Muise ruled Tuesday that the failure of an electoral boundaries commission to grant the northwestern Cape Breton community special status as an Acadian riding in 2019 was an unjustified breach of Section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“Chéticamp and its surrounding communities present an extraordinary case, a linguistic, cultural, historical and geographical community of interest needing more effective representation, at a crucial time,” the judge wrote.

Muise has given the provincial electoral boundaries commission 20 months to draw up a new riding.

The legislature currently has 55 seats, including three Acadian ridings — Argyle, Clare and Richmond — and one African Nova Scotian riding — Preston — which the commission recommended be given “protected” status in the 2019 report. However, Chéticamp didn’t make the list, with a slim majority on the commission suggesting its population was too small to warrant its own electoral district.

Nova Scotia created protected ridings in the 1990s to ensure effective representation of Acadian and African Nova Scotian voters and to protect them from electoral redistribution.

The Fédération acadienne de la Nouvelle-Écosse launched a court challenge in 2021 after it objected to Chéticamp being left out in 2019.

Muise said the commission failed to meet tests set out in a 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision that said factors like community history and minority representation may be considered in setting electoral boundaries, even if they deviated from the “one person-one vote” principle

“The commission’s decision to refuse to recommend an exceptional electoral district for Chéticamp was based on a speculative risk of unduly diluting the urban vote,” he wrote.

Muise wrote that Chéticamp, a francophone community currently included in the sprawling riding of Inverness, “had been denied effective representation for about a century.”

In his analysis, he noted four of the nine members of the original commission had dissented against refusing Chéticamp the special status of a protected riding, and the majority hadn’t given extensive reasoning to support their position.

Muise noted the dissenters in 2019 had argued Chéticamp had elected only two Acadians in Inverness since Confederation, that constituents hadn’t been able to speak to their representative in French, and that Inverness was an unwieldy constituency that stretched more than 200 kilometres in length.

He also cited a long history of struggle to maintain the French language in the area. Acadians throughout Atlantic Canada were deported between 1755 and 1763 and after their return were forced to live in communities far from the major centres. Chéticamp boundaries were disrupted in the last century, when Parks Canada expropriated land to include in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

The judge noted that since the 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision, Nova Scotia had been “a model” for how boundary commissions could consider linguistic and racial minorities in creating ridings.

In his reasoning, Muise also said that the commission’s proposed boundaries for the Chéticamp riding were more limited than the boundaries proposed by the Acadian federation in 2019.

The judge wrote that the precise figures for the number of voters in the federation’s proposed riding weren’t provided to the court. However, he said if the existing district were split “roughly in two,” Chéticamp’s francophone voting population would have been comparable to those in the protected riding of Richmond — in the southeastern area of Cape Breton.

The fédération said in a news release Thursday that it welcomed the court’s decision. “The community of Chéticamp, like all other communities in Nova Scotia, deserves fair and equitable representation,” said Denise Comeau-Desautels, the fédération’s president.

The advocacy group said it hopes the boundaries commission “will quickly proceed with the revision of the electoral boundaries in accordance with the wishes of the court.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 15, 2024.

Michael Tutton, The Canadian Press