MONTREAL – Francois Choquette (above), the former NDP MP who sued Canadian Heritage and the Official Languages commissioner over the Liberal government’s 2017 $500 million Netflix deal, said he has been pursuing his legal action as a private citizen.
“I’m taking this case as a private citizen since the beginning,” the former Official Languages critic for the party told Cartt.ca on Tuesday. “Nobody has funded me, I’m doing it on my own and I’m representing myself.”
That appears to run counter to a press release on the NDP website from April — when the legal challenge was filed and when Choquette was still an MP — which states that the “NDP asks Court to force Canadian Heritage to comply with the Official Languages Act.”
The comments came after an inquiry from this publication as to the status of Choquette’s involvement in the ongoing case after he lost his bid for reelection in the October federal contest. A request for comment to party leader Jagmeet Singh and party president Mathieu Vick weren’t returned. The office of current NDP Official Languages critic Alexandre Boulerice supplied Cartt.ca with the contact information of Choquette.
The former Parliamentarian said he filed his official arguments in court earlier this month, which was the deadline set by the court. This is despite the court docket not reflecting an update since a December order that set deadlines for submission. When asked, Choquette did not provide Cartt.ca with what he filed with the court.
Canadian Heritage has until February 17 to respond to the charges. New Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault now inherits the file from the previous minister at the time, Pablo Rodriguez.
Choquette said he will present a case that paints the $500 million, five-year deal that Netflix pledged with Heritage — then under Melanie Joly — to invest in Canada in 2017 as one that short-changed French Canada — by not making clear an appropriate balance of funds for the language of 10 million Canadians. He said the deal’s details, which include an additional $25 million for “market development activities” in Quebec, don’t represent an equal treatment with English development funds. This is despite Netflix later clarifying that the $500 million will go to both English and French markets — and the $25 million is an additional funding measure for the minority market.
The allegation, he argues, violates the advancement of English and French provision of the Official Languages Act, which states that the government should seek to enhance the “vitality of the English and French linguistic minority communities in Canada and supporting and assisting their development.” For Canadian Heritage, the mandate is to take measures that would “advance the equality of status and use of English and French in Canadian society.”
Choquette filed the initial complaint with the interim Official Languages commissioner Ghislaine Saikaley about a month after the Netflix deal was announced. Saikaley was then replaced by Raymond Théberge, who found in a preliminary report about a year after the complaint that the allegations against Heritage were unfounded.
The former MP has two outstanding cases in federal court related to the issue to correspond to the parties he claims are at fault: Heritage for engineering the deal and the Official Languages commissioner, who found in his final report that the department did not violate the law when it agreed to it. The case against the commissioner — which is that he did not use his full powers of inquiry in the investigation — is currently suspended until the case against Heritage is resolved.
Part of the issue with the Netflix deal is that it has been shrouded in secrecy since its inception.
The deal initially irked critics, including those within the NDP, who said further regulating the streaming service would’ve been a much more effective return for allowing it to operate in the country. Earlier last year, Netflix established a production hub in Toronto, further entrenching the company in the country.
Netflix said in the fall it has already met its commitment with the federal government within two years.
