Montreal still reeling from Pastagate
Tourism down as city battles image problem
Remember “Pastagate”? Maybe potential tourists to Montreal do, too; the story of Quebec’s French-language protection agency ordering a restaurant to add French translations to the Italian names of dishes on its menu in February made it around the world.
So maybe Pastagate has something to do with what so far has been a disappointing summer tourist season in Montreal.
The Hotel Association of Greater Montreal reported last week that in May and June, the total occupancy rate in its 77 member hotels was lower than last year.
The difference was small — 2.6 per cent in June and almost zero in May.
But summer 2012 was also a bad tourist season for Montreal, partly because the “Maple Spring” of nightly, sometimes violent protests in the city.
Several theories have been proposed to explain this year’s poor early season, especially bad weather. In all the stories on the topic that I’ve seen, however, nobody in the tourist industry has mentioned language friction in general and Pastagate in particular. Yet Pastagate was one of the biggest stories out of Quebec in the early part of the year, when tourists would have been planning their summer vacations.
A Montreal-based media monitoring service, Influence Communication, reported less than a week after the story broke that Pastagate had been the subject of 350 articles in 14 foreign countries as far away as Australia, and more articles than that within Canada.
Unless somebody does a survey asking potential tourists from outside Quebec why they didn’t come here this summer, we’re left to speculate about the reasons. True, Pastagate is far from the only story that gave Montreal negative publicity in the past year.
But corruption doesn’t scare off tourists. Some countries that are popular tourist destinations rank pretty low on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. What concerns tourists more is how they might be affected by local conditions in the places they choose to visit. So it seems plausible that some tourists might not have wanted to come here because of a perception that Montreal has become inhospitable for languages other than French.
Not many tourists want to go where they might not feel welcome and where they might have unpleasant experiences because they don’t speak the local language.
And while Pastagate was the biggest story feeding such a perception, it was far from the only one in the past year.
Since last summer, there have been reports of confrontations in Montreal between individuals, occasionally physical, over language.
Some of these incidents occurred in the métro, between English-speaking subway users and French-speaking ticket takers.
Others involved anglophones overheard speaking English among themselves.
In last September’s election, the Parti Québécois, running on an anti-minority platform, received more French-speaking votes than any other party.
Subsequently, the PQ minority government proposed the anti-English Bill 14.
These stories were reported outside Quebec, especially in English Canada.
Similar stories have continued to come out of this province this summer — about a complaint to the languagelaw enforcement agency about an English slogan on a plastic spoon, and about supermarket employees forbidden from speaking English among themselves.
And even Le Journal de Montréal thought the province’s registrar of companies went too far when it rejected a proposed business name — Wellarc — because, although it isn’t actually an English word, it “sounds” English. Overzealousness in the defence of French may be starting to damage Montreal’s economy as well as its social fabric. But the zealots either don’t realize it, or don’t care.