Sorry isn’t good enough after English speech, group tells mayor

Mayor Valérie Plante apologized again Wednesday morning for giving a speech almost entirely in English. On Tuesday, while making an announcement on artificial intelligence to a business audience, she got momentarily carried away and spoke off the cuff in English instead of reading her speech, which was in French, Plante said at a meeting of the city’s executive committee. “I want to emphasize that French is my mother tongue, it is the language of my heart and it gives me great pride to uphold that language in North America’s largest French-speaking metropolis,” she said. “I am a transparent person and it is important to recognize that it was a mistake,” Plante added. The mayor noted that she gives “about a dozen speeches per week that are all in French, always, always, always, and in which there can be segments in English when the context requires it, for example, when I’m speaking to English-language media,” Plante said. The English-only speech caused a storm of controversy on the TVA network and the Journal de Montréal as well as on social media. Plante apologized on Twitter after the speech announcing that three British companies in the field of artificial intelligence are opening branches in Montreal. “Mea culpa. I improvised this morning while speaking to a group of foreign investors. My speech should have mainly been in French,” she tweeted. “I’m proud of being the mayor of the francophone metropolis of North America and I remain engaged in promoting our common and official language on all forums,” she said in a second tweet. The Mouvement Québec français said in a statement Wednesday morning that the apology was not sufficient. It demanded that the mayor respect “the spirit and the letter of Bill 101 in activities and communications by the mayor,” that she create a position within the executive committee to oversee the application of the French language charter and that the mayor reaffirm Montreal’s status as a French city.