The system is probably old and written for ISO-8859-1 or similar. French diacritics are supported and... that's it. B.C. system has to be upgraded to Unicode.

The system is probably old and written for ISO-8859-1 or similar. French diacritics are supported and... that's it. B.C. system has to be upgraded to Unicode. While the web world might've finally gotten everything to be Unicode with utf-8 encoding being predominant, these government systems have not. Improving them requires lots of tax dollars, which aren't spent on cost centers like computer systems unless they're forced to. And yes, getting all the systems that are potentially nationwide would require years to fix it all. Every single place where these names are stored or transmitted would need to be upgraded to support Unicode. But let's make things worse. If they file a document in court, do the court systems handle unicode encodings? Do the fonts?