Despite the protests of Franco-Manitobans that the Manitoba Act had been violated, Manitoba remained monolingual in practice until the early 1980s, when legal challenges created a crisis that threatened to invalidate almost all laws passed in Manitoba since 1890, on the grounds that these statutes were not published in French as required by the Manitoba Act. The provincial government under Howard Pawley tried and failed to address the crisis, with the opposition refusing to attend legislative sessions. In 1985 the Supreme Court ruled that the Manitoba Act had been violated and that all provincial legislation must be published in both French and English, restoring the legal equality of the languages that had existed when the province was created. While this restoration of legal equality faced overwhelming public opposition at the time, polls taken in 2003 showed a majority of Manitobans supported provincial bilingualism.