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Solicitor for the respondents: The Attorney General of British Columbia, Victoria. Solicitor for the intervener the Attorney General of Canada: The Attorney General of Canada, Ottawa. Solicitor for the intervener the Attorney General for Ontario: The Attorney General for Ontario, Toronto. Solicitor for the intervener the Attorney General of Manitoba: The Attorney General of Manitoba, Winnipeg. Solicitor for the intervener the Attorney General of Newfoundland: The Attorney General of Newfoundland, St. John's. Solicitor for the interveners the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund and the Disabled Women's Network Canada: Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, Toronto. Solicitor for the intervener the Charter Committee on Poverty Issues: Public Interest Law Centre, Winnipeg. Solicitor for the interveners the Canadian Association of the Deaf, the Canadian Hearing Society and the Council of Canadians with Disabilities: Advocacy Resource Centre for the Handicapped, Toronto. The official versions of decisions and reasons for decision by the Supreme Court of Canada are published in the Supreme Court Reports (S.C.R.). This site is prepared and published by LexUM in partnership with Supreme Court of Canada.

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Eldridge v. British Columbia (Attorney General)

Judgments

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Country

Canada

Rights Involved

Right to health

Issue

Non-discrimination
Resource allocation

National Court

Supreme Court of Canada

Date: Oct 9, 1997

Summary: In 1990, the non-profit agency that had provided sign language interpreter services in British Columbia began experiencing serious financial difficulties and sought funding through officials at the Ministry of Health, but was turned down. The Supreme Court found the failure to provide such services to be a violation of the Charter, and stated that the right to equality places obligations on governmental actors to allocate resources to ensure that disadvantaged groups have full advantage of public benefits. In this case, the government had failed to demonstrate that it had a reasonable basis for denying medical interpretation services in light of costs; the government failed to meet the minimum impairment requirement necessary to justify such discriminatory treatment resulting from the failure to provide services, as the estimated cost of providing sign language interpretation for the whole of British Columbia constituted just 0.0025% of the provincial health care budget at the time.

Primary Documents

EldridgeDecision.pdf
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Resourcing Rights

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Eldridge v. British Columbia (Attorney General)

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