National Post (National Edition)
Quebec hopes to bid adieu to ‘Bonjour-Hi’
MONTREAL • The shopping experience presents no shortage of potential irritants, from annoying music to overzealous salespeople and non-existent parking.
To that list, Quebec politicians have added another: the friendly greeting.
For two straight days in Quebec’s National Assembly, Parti Québécois leader Jean-François Lisée has zeroed in on the common Montreal shopkeeper’s greeting, “Bonjour-Hi,” framing it as a threat to the French language.
And on Thursday, Lisée succeeded in getting the legislature to unanimously adopt a motion inviting Quebec merchants to stop saying “Hi.”
The word “bonjour,” the resolution declared, “expresses magnificently Quebec conviviality” and is almost universally understood. “As a result, (the National Assembly) invites all merchants and employees who are in contact with local and international customers to warmly welcome them with the word ‘bonjour.’ ”
The final version of the resolution dropped the word “irritant” initially proposed by Lisée to describe “Bonjour-Hi,” the only concession required to win the support of Premier Philippe Couillard and his Liberal government.
But it was the ability of “Bonjour-Hi” to get under the skin of language hardliners that fuelled the debate.
Sociologist and Journal de Montréal columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté tweeted Thursday that “Bonjour-Hi” was just one step down the slippery slope to an all-English greeting. “From one stage to the next, French fades away. And with that, the Quebec people fades away,” he wrote.
Couillard’s own culture minister, Marie Montpetit, called the bilingual greeting an “irritant” in a television interview last weekend.
Lisée once presented himself as a friend of Quebec anglophones. An aide to then premier Lucien Bouchard after the last referendum, he wrote Bouchard’s 1996 speech reaching out to the anglophone community. In 2013, as a minister in the PQ government of Pauline Marois, he said Quebec had evolved to a point where English-speakers should not be seen as a threat to the French language.
“The way we see the next phase of the linguistic debate in Quebec is not winners and losers. We can all be winners,” he said. “It is no longer the case that English has too much space in Quebec.”
But with polls showing his party in danger of falling to third place in next year’s election, Lisée has seized on the language question; maybe English does have too much space after all.
Last week, Lisée blamed Couillard after the manager of an Adidas shop in downtown Montreal spoke almost entirely in English at the store opening. The manager’s actions amounted to a display of contempt “toward all the francophones of Quebec,” Lisée said.
Couillard is left walking a fine line, not wanting to look too soft in his defence of French but not wanting to alienate anglophone supporters. So while he declined to call “Bonjour-Hi” an irritant, he agreed that it would be better if the expression were not used.
The National Assembly frequently passes unanimous motions demanding action or taking offence — this is at least the 16th this year, according to a list maintained by the province.
They have no legal force, and they rarely produce results. The reality is that it makes business sense for merchants, especially in Montreal where there are many tourists, to signal to customers that they can be served in English.
“Merchants are trying to serve their customers the best way they can. That’s normal,” said Martine Hébert, senior vice-president for Quebec of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
She said small businesses are happy it was just a voluntary motion that passed, not an additional regulation that would have invited even more oversight by the province’s language police.
“It is already mandatory for employers to offer a workplace that is in French and to offer service in French to their customers,” she said. “There is no need to panic. There is no need to adopt more legislation.”