‘Bonjour-hi’ flap feels like, uh, deja vu
The proverbial unilingual fat English saleslady at Eaton’s may be as long gone as Eaton’s and its apostrophe, but she has been reincarnated, it seems, as a francophone man in the trimmer form of Parti Quebecois Leader Jean-François Lisée.
How else to explain Lisée’s petty crusade against the “Bonjour-Hi” greeting commonly used in Montreal stores with a significant English-speaking clientele?
This kind of attitude is what one has come to expect from Lisée. Harder to swallow is the unanimous passage by the National Assembly Thursday of a PQ-originated motion calling for the greeting’s replacement with a simple “Bonjour.” Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante’s apparent support for the motion, in rather opaque comments Friday, is also disappointing.
The fact that the amended version was an improvement on the original, which had labelled the greeting as an “irritant,” is cold comfort. It still amounts to discouraging merchants from offering to serve customers in the language of their choice.
In raising the matter in the National Assembly Wednesday, Lisée framed the issue as one of the language of the workplace. What he seems to be forgetting is that these workplaces are where customer service is delivered, and the bilingual greeting signals that the clerk is prepared to speak English. If use of French in the workplace saw a small relative decline in recent statistics, this has less to do with store clerks than with the development of the tech sector and a more outward looking economy. But store clerks are an easier target.
Given that Montreal anglophones today are more sensitive about language (and more bilingual) than were members of the apocryphal saleslady’s generation, many if not most are likely to respond in French when spoken to in French. They might assume a clerk offering a unilingual French greeting cannot speak
English or prefers not to.
Why put on the onus on the customer to guess a clerk’s abilities or preferences? Why put the onus on the clerk to figure out whether the client would prefer to be served in English? A bilingual greeting just says, you’re the customer, you pick the language.
All of this could be dismissed as silliness, were it not for the messages it sends as we approach an election year. The government’s support for the motion undercuts its recent overtures to the English-speaking community.
What to make of the minister responsible for relations with English-speaking Quebecers, Kathleen Weil, voting in favour, along with other English-speaking MNAs? Wedge politics, indeed. Lisée must be chuckling at his cleverness.