For the law is wholly consistent with the Charter.

Section 23 of the Charter guarantees to parents whose first language, English or French, is in the minority in the province where they live, or who were educated in that tongue, the right to have their children schooled in the same language at public expense. It grants no such right to parents from the majority language group. And of course, the whole thing applies only with respect to the two official languages: nothing in the Charter obliges the government to teach your kids in Swahili.

It should, in short, scarcely be called a "right" at all. It is more in the nature of a promise, a carefully hedged assurance of what the state will do for a select group of people, rather than a right as the word is properly understood: as a limit upon the state, a protection from arbitrary intrusions on personal liberty that applies equally to all. Indeed, the "right" to minority language education does not apply evenly across the country. In every other province it covers all citizens, whether they were raised in Canada or elsewhere; Quebec alone was specifically entitled by the Charter to exclude immigrants from its protection.

(This is the Charter, remember, that was "imposed" on Quebec.)

So Simon's parents are instead seeking the protection of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. As wonderfully distinct as that document may be, I doubt it will be of any more use to them. Much as the province's English-rights activists would like to turn this into another sign-law controversy, the two are not comparable. Nothing in Bill 101, we should note, precludes Simon, or any other child, from being educated in English: the question is only whether he is to be educated in English at public expense.

The couple's lawyer, Brent Tyler, says the case "puts into perspective the whole civil rights battle in Quebec." But no perspective of civil rights entitles you to help yourself to gobs of public funds.

Discrimination! cry the advocates of freedom of choice. A child "should not be discriminated against on the basis of who his parents are," argues Mr. Tyler. "We're saying francophone citizens cannot have more, or less, access to public services than others." Now, Mr. Tyler would not insist, I think, that all public services should be equally available in every language. He means that access to public services, whether they are provided in French or English, should be equally available to all. But it is no less discriminatory, surely, to offer services only in those two languages. French- or English- speaking parents, in such a regime, get to have their child educated in their own tongue.

Swahili-speakers do not.

There's no getting around this. The minute you enter the public sphere, the question of what is to be the public language, or languages, is engaged. That necessarily means choosing which languages, among the many that may be spoken in society, will be recognized as "official," and which will not. The choice will be governed by law, by history, by practical politics. The one thing it cannot involve is rights. If it did, then every language would have to be official.

For the efficient management of public funds, as much as for the promotion of a sense of community, the government of Quebec must be entitled to prefer one language to another in the provision of public services. What it may not do, if rights are rights are rights, is to extend this preference into the private realm: as in the prohibition on English signs.

The same analysis applies at the national level. Official bilingualism, in this light, is not some dreamy, romantic ideal. It is a ruthlessly pragmatic policy, in the calculation that that is the minimum number of languages we can afford. That is why the (Canadian) Charter obliges Quebec to provide English-language schools to its English-speaking citizens: the ones educated in Canada, at any rate. And that is why it goes no further.

Decency would suggest that Quebec should extend that privilege to English-speaking immigrants, in order to minimize the disruption to their lives. But it is neither unlawful, nor unfair, to deny the same to others.