Opposition to the Legault government’s draconian language laws has taken a comical turn in Montreal in the past few weeks. Like the hugely successful strategy of American Democratic duo Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who are using humour to mock Donald Trump and his sidekick J.D. Vance as “just really weird”, an anonymous linguistic rebel in Montreal is driving the language police crazy with his humorous escapades.
Each morning in the city’s predominantly anglophone neighbourhood of Notre Dame de Grace (NDG) residents awaken to find the iconic bilingual phrase “Bonjour-Hi” tastefully stencilled on crosswalks, walls and the sides of retail establishments. And each morning scores of city workers stream out to locate and erase the offensive artwork which they are terming “vandalism” and “graffiti”. Rumour has it there have even been overnight stakeouts to try and catch the Banksy-style artist, but to no avail.
Clearly this farcical response has demonstrated an interesting set of priorities. As one critic of the language police (otherwise known as the Office quebecois de la langue francaise, or OQLF) noted, they are devoting enormous amounts of time and money to this search at the same time that truly offensive graffiti has covered many of the city’s buildings, walls and sidewalks for years without being removed.[i]
This is hardly the first, or the most serious, intervention by the OQLF, but it is surely the most hilarious. Previous incidents that have drawn international scorn include the American CBS “60 Minutes” episode in 1998, when host Morley Safer accompanied a language inspector on his rounds and then told the show’s millions of viewers “the Marx Brothers would have been at home here.”[ii] The issue returned to the international spotlight in 2020 when NBC’s Saturday Night Live did a sketch about the situation, shortly after the 2019 declaration by Quebec Minister for Language Simon Jolin-Barrette that he was planning to ban the bilingual greeting. Only months later he was forced to retreat after the massive and universally negative reaction, declaring instead that retailers and everyone else would be “encouraged” to greet people with the French term only.
Then in 2022 the Legault government, not content with the original 1977 legislation (Charter of the French Language), of the separatist government led by Rene Levesque, introduced Bill 96, a sweeping piece of legislation which drastically tightened the regulations on the use of French in virtually all sectors of public life. Critics immediately termed the bill unconstitutional, and in particular an affront to minority rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Legault responded by pre-emptively invoking the notwithstanding clause, (s.33), a widely perceived abuse of power that upped the ante on criticism in Quebec among its English language minority, and across Canada. Prominent human rights lawyer Julius Grey termed the government’s behaviour “one of the most gratuitous uses of power I’ve ever seen” and pledged to challenge the legislation at the United Nations. [iii] His views were echoed by Marlene Jennings, a former Liberal MP and head of the Quebec Community Groups Network, who declared “this legislation is the most significant derogation of human rights in the history of Quebec…It revokes the right to access services in English for some 300,000 to 500,000 Quebecers.”[iv]
Faced with such devastating restrictions on access to health care, education and the judiciary, and prevented from further legal action against Bill 96 by the pre-emptive use of section 33, English-speaking Quebecers are leaving the province in record numbers not seen since the election of the Levesque separatist government more than fifty years ago. Meanwhile the Legault government has also managed to scare away thousands of prospective English-speaking students from other provinces in Canada through his sudden and drastic increase in tuition fees, thereby causing serious economic problems for McGill and Concordia Universities, who are both suing the premier for this decision. Quebec is technically in a recession. Foreign investment is down, not surprisingly, despite Legault’s efforts to convince multinationals that Bill 96 would not affect them nearly as badly as they feared. (Who on earth would have believed him?)
Given all of these dire and far more pressing realities, what better time to return to the charge on Bonjour-Hi? But that is exactly what several of Legault’s MNA’s, and now Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante, have done. Given of all of this unconscionable behaviour on the part of his government, surely Legault should be more than happy to see that those anglophones who have not yet abandoned Quebec are content to use humour, like the Democrat’s Harris-Walz team, to make their point.
[i] A. Caddell. OpEd. Hill Times. Aug.7, 2024.
[ii] As cited in National Post. “Au revoir to Bonjour-Hi?” April 25, 2024.
[iii] L. Cecco. “Quebec Moves to Protect French Language and Restrict Use of English” The Guardian. May 25, 2022.
[iv] Cecco. Op. cit.
