In 1982, a group of French-speaking parents urged the Edmonton Public and Catholic school boards to establish a French-language elementary school in their city. They felt that immersion schools did not meet their children’s needs. The school boards rejected their request. Undeterred by this rejection, a year later these parents set up a private school called École Georges et Julia Bugnet, along with an association of the same name. Lacking funds, however, the school soon closed, prompting members of the association, including Jean-Claude Mahé, Angéline Martel, and Paul Dubé, to take legal action to establish French-language schools administered by francophones. The organization asked the courts to rule on the scope of section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It obtained financial support from the Court Challenges Program, created in 1978 by the federal government to promote access to the courts for cases involving fundamental rights.  

This court case divided the Franco-Albertan community. Some French-speaking parents preferred their children to attend immersion schools to ensure they learned both official languages. The Association canadienne-française de l’Alberta (ACFA), on the other hand, wanted to negotiate with the Progressive Conservative government of Peter Lougheed since going to court was a lengthy and costly process. Faced with the Alberta government’s categorical refusal to take action to advance the educational rights of francophones, the ACFA finally supported the Association Georges et Julia Bugnet.

The association won its battle on March 15, 1990. With the ruling on the Mahé v. Alberta case ([1990] 1 SCR 342), the Supreme Court of Canada recognized that francophones living in a minority situation – like anglophones in Quebec – had the right to manage their own schools. The judges affirmed that Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms recognizes that “citizens of Canada who have received their primary school instruction in Canada in English or French and reside in a province where the language in which they received that instruction is the language of the English or French linguistic minority population of the province, have the right to have their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in that language in that province.” This ruling represented a major legal and political gain for French-language minority communities in relation to education.