OQLF gets $5 million for inspectors
New resources include 50 employees, focus on helping small firms comply
Quebec's language watchdog is getting its biggest budgetary boost — $5 million — in more than 25 years.
Simon Jolin-barrette, the minister responsible for the French language, announced in Montreal on Monday the Office québécois de la langue française will go on a hiring spree in the coming months.
New resources will be dedicated to enforcing the Charter of the French Language, particularly within businesses.
“We have to be clear: French is the common language here in Quebec, and we need to give the OQLF the resources to enforce the French language,” Jolin-barrette said at a news conference held at Édifice Hocquart on Viger Ave., now part of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.
The money, earmarked in last March's budget, will pay for 50 additional employees, most of whom will work in the Montreal area.
Among them, a 20-member team will be dedicated to working with small businesses with up to 50 employees to “help them” conform to the language charter, Jolin-barrette said.
Currently, smaller businesses are exempt from some parts of Bill 101, but Jolin-barrette said many don't comply with even the minimal requirements.
He said 70 per cent of complaints made to the OQLF target smaller businesses, and it is up to the government to ensure Quebecers retain the right to work in French and that business signage conforms to the law.
The money will also pay for enforcement personnel, with 11 new employees dedicated to the inspection of signs in the province.
As well, the OQLF will open new offices for the first time since the 1990s: in Drummondville, Laval and Longueuil.
“People have the right to work in French and customers have the right to be served in French, and in the last few decades, particularly in Montreal, there is some difficulty about that,” he said.
He said the additional resources are needed because while the number of businesses covered by the French language charter have doubled in the last two decades, the OQLF'S budget has stagnated over that time.
Jolin-barrette said although the government is giving additional resources to enforce the charter, this should not be seen as an attack on the province's historic English-speaking minority.
“We can respect the institutions of Quebec's English community while reinforcing French,” Jolin-barrette said. “I think we can do both, and that is important to me.”
Jolin-barrette added the province doesn't want to punish businesses, many of which are struggling to stay afloat amid the pandemic. That's why he said the focus is on giving them tools and advice on how to comply rather than issuing fines and taking recalcitrant companies to court.
However, one CEO of an online web store with its head office in Mirabel is challenging Jolin-barrette's assertion that OQLF officials are shying away from litigating.
Mario Tremblay, the CEO of Robotshop.com, said he recently received a threatening lawyers' letter on behalf of OQLF inspectors complaining that many of the site's products, which are sold around the world, are not translated into French.
“We're in the midst of an economic crisis, and I'm in survival mode, and I was sent a lawyers' letters giving me two months to comply,” Tremblay told the Montreal Gazette by phone on Monday.
Tremblay explained to inspectors that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of products that he would have to translate in order to comply with the law as they interpreted it, and said it would be impossible to do.
He sent a five-page letter detailing the difficulties he would have complying with the law and why he feels his company should be exempt from Article 51 of the language law, which governs such products. He added that 95 per cent of his products are sold outside the province, and French-language versions of those products are not currently available. However, the letter he received in return from the OQLF ignored all of his arguments.
“I understand the need and value of the law, and I have no problem with making sure that my employees are able to work in French; the company complies with all of those provisions of the law,” said Tremblay, whose mother tongue is French. “But if I can't sell products that have English-only descriptions, my customers will just go find the same products on another website that's not based in Quebec, like Amazon. It makes no sense to penalize Quebec-based businesses like this.”
Tremblay said since he can't comply with the demand of the language watchdog, he's currently considering options such as closing the site to Quebec-based customers or moving his company's head office to Ontario.