Merchants reject CAQ’s plan to ban ‘Bonjour-Hi’
The only language that matters in a shop is the one that’s good for business.
That was the reaction of several downtown Montreal merchants to remarks by a member of Premier François Legault’s cabinet on Friday suggesting the government is looking to ban the bilingual greeting “Bonjour-Hi” in businesses.
Merchants visited on Saturday called the idea of such a ban everything from “silly” to impractical and said politicians are fixated on a problem that the merchants don’t agree exists.
“As someone who operates a business and who has obligations to employees, suppliers and even the government itself, I have to keep my business going,” Roger Costa, the general manager of restaurant Wienstein & Gavino’s on Crescent St., said. “And the instinct is to accommodate the guest.”
Costa said he’s fluent in four languages, and would use any one of them to satisfy his customers.
Visitors are aware they’re in a francophone environment, even if an English word is added to a greeting, he added.
“My opinion is that if it’s that important to those people who sit in the assembly in Quebec City, then so be it,” Costa said. “I think in practical terms it is silly and also counterintuitive. I think even some of those ministers up in Quebec City have travelled themselves and will have noticed that in many a country across Europe and other places you can be served in English and French.”
For his part, Costa said he needs to focus on keeping his business, which provides about 100 jobs, viable.
He’s also generating tax revenue for the government, he said, “which, incidentally, feeds all those people in Quebec City.”
Simon Jolin-Barrette, the minister designated by Legault to be in charge of protecting the French language, told reporters at the National Assembly on Friday he will soon propose measures to enforce the unilingual greeting “Bonjour” in businesses as he prepares an action plan to protect the French language.
The remarks came after his Coalition Avenir Québec government was asked by the Parti Québécois what it intends to do to strengthen the French language.
The National Assembly is keen on French-only business greetings, Jolin-Barrette said on Friday, “and I think I will have to translate it into measures in the coming months with the reform that I will propose.”
The Legault government took some ribbing on social media.
“My new Quebec show writes itself!” Quebec comedian Sugar Sammy wrote on Twitter on Saturday. His tweet linked to a newspaper article on Jolin-Barrette’s remarks.
Meanwhile, downtown shopkeepers say “Bonjour-Hi” is just a way of engaging with a customer if it isn’t immediately clear what language they speak.
“We always say Bonjour-Hi,” said Joseph Maskour, who works in his father’s shop, Souvenirs Sarah, on Ste-Catherine St. W.
“That’s the easiest way. Sometimes you can tell. And if you can see that they’re Americans, I’m not even going to say Bonjour. Or people from France, I’ll go straight to Bonjour. But if you’re not sure, you say Bonjour-Hi. It’s safe. Why do people want to ban it? That’s beyond me. Why wouldn’t we reach out to more people?”
Maskour said he understands the government’s desire to protect the French language, but a ban on “Bonjour-Hi” seems excessive.
“I can understand where it’s coming from because it’s from a reasonable place,” he said, referring to the protection of the French language. “But at the same time, this definitely hurts us because we’re a tourist shop.”
It doesn’t make sense to ban “Bonjour-Hi,” said Steve Medalsy, who manages the sunglass store Key West on Ste-Catherine next to Crescent St.
“Already, the retail business is tough. Look at the closed stores. Just the opposite, we should be using more languages to bring people in.”
Medalsy said he tries to take cues from the customers walking into the shop before deciding what language to use. He greeted a reporter with “Salut.”
“Salut. Hi. Bonjour,” Medalsy said. “I say whatever. A lot of them are tourists. You can tell sometimes because for example a couple will be speaking English between them when they come in.”
Cédrick Parent, manager of outdoor clothing boutique Fjällräven on Ste-Catherine, said he used to work on the South Shore, where bilingualism is less important than in Montreal. So language is about the best way of serving your customers, he said.
“It falls into the same category as ‘Salut’, ‘Allo’,” Cédrick Parent said of ‘Bonjour-Hi.’
“They’re just different ways to say the same thing.”