Since the 1960s, many Canadian policy makers have seen the Official Bilingualism policy as a strategy to maintain Canadian unity. However, the success of this strategy depends a great deal on the way linguistic rights are interpreted by the courts. In interpreting language rights in four important sub-fields related to provincial jurisdiction, the Supreme Court has established two inconsistent and contradictory interpretive approaches. An analysis of provincial court language rights jurisprudence since the 'Beaulac' precedent of 1999 reveals that these courts have responded to the Supreme Court's inconsistent case law with jurisprudence that is generally more restrictive than liberal. This has resulted in the narrowing of some language rights and possibly the undermining of the official bilingualism scheme to some extent. This illustrates that the courts (even those of the provinces) have a great deal of power in the development of public policy and that lower courts do not always faithfully follow the precedents of superior courts.