They hate tourists. And making money.
My favourite are the warning and safety signs that have the English three times smaller. Nice.
[Hijack] I was at the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and English signs/explanations there were so badly written I read the French ones instead. The English seemed to have been bablefished rather than actually translated. My German isn’t good enough that I could just read the Deutsch.[/hijack]
About road signs: I know one thing that absolutely baffled some of my friends when I lived in Ontario was that when driving in Québec, they could never tell where the highway exits would be, especially in Montréal, where they are as likely as not to be on the left as the right.
I was quite confused about this complaint, until I remembered to pay attention to the road signs one day while driving through the city on my way home at Christmas or Thanksgiving or whenever it was. Then I clued in.
In Québec, the location of the highway exit is indicated by the yellow box that contains the exit number. The arrow pointing left or right only shows up when the exit lane begins to form, so if you haven’t gotten into the right lane, you might be in trouble and have to take the next exit and double-back or simply cut across traffic lanes. For example, you might have a sign indicating:
Granby
[68/
Which means to get ready, the exit is on your right. At the exit lane you’ll see:
Granby
[68/ ->
If, however, you saw
Granby
\68]
You’d have to prepare yourself for an exit on the left. When you got there, you’d have:
Granby
<- \68]
My Ontarian friends still thought it was a crazy system, but one did tell me later on that on his next trip through Québec, he remembered what I said and found it less frustrating.
Here’s a picture of what I mean:
This is what I expected, given the concentration of French speakers in Northern Ontario. Actually, to see nice pictures of Ontario roads, we can check this site. As mentioned by Athena, Highway 17 has plenty of bilingual signs, at least from Sault Ste. Marie eastwards (check this one). On the other hand, if you were to drive on Highway 401 in the Greater Toronto Region, you wouldn’t find many bilingual signs.
Do you have any evidence for your outrageous claims, or you’re just repeating stuff other people with an axe to grind told you?
Here is another picture of the things you can see on Montreal highways. The signs on this picture mean: autoroute 520 (Côte-de-Liesse) to route 117 (boulevard Marcel-Laurin), and to PET airport, exit 65, now to your right. Autoroute 15 southbound to autoroute 10, as well as to downtown and Champlain bridge and to a tourist information office, exit 66-S, 1.5 km ahead, to your left, and the left lane will be a compulsory exit. Oh, yeah, and if you take exit 65 now, the speed limit will get down to 50 km/h some distance ahead.
Does direct observation at construction sites and on the metro count? (My French-Canadian friends joke that Anglo lives count less)
While most hazard/danger signs are usually symbols to try and make them understandable to the most people, the “English writing three times smaller” is likely thanks to Bill 101, which requires signs to have the French be predominant, if there is another language there as well.
It’s a controversial law, but many people seem to think it had a good effect on the province. I don’t really have an opinion on it, seeing as how I’m too young to know what it was like before that law came into effect, and I just haven’t researched it all that much.
The biggest limitations are those pertaining to schooling, and since I was allowed to be educated in English (and I was), my kids will have that opportunity too. We will be teaching both languages to our children, though.
I remember a CEGEP (college) teacher once said about Bill 101:
<< I might not be allowed to write “Banana, 1$” on a sign in my store, but I can still stand up and say "FUCK YOU BOUCHARD!* " So I’m not complaining >>
*Lucien Bouchard was the premier (separatist) at the time.
…
Actually, the outrageous claims were that we hate tourists and making money. I’m willing to believe that there might be warning signs somewhere, in both French and English, but with the English three times smaller, but as mnemosyne says, warning signs are mostly pictographic anyway. And as the laws regarding predominance of French in signs apply only to commercial signs, at least to my knowledge, I’m not even sure what you’re describing is mandated by any law.
Wouldn’t hate seeing a picture, actually.
I definitely know that the emergency instructions posted in the Metro cars are as described: French and English, with the English much smaller than the French. And they’re one of the very few places you can see English at all on a public (governmental) sign.
Ed
That’s generally true in eastern Ontario and parts of Northern Ontario, but as you get away from the areas with Francophones in them, it’s not.
Ontario, having no rules about what language signs need to be posted in, will post them in whatever languages seem to make sense.
Consider your information passed onto another Ontarian who when driving in Quebec (admittedly not that often) will now no longer have to act quite as crazy. Of course this will just make me stand out in Montreal 
They’ve already faced this. Several Native American (Native Canadian?) groups have tried to insist on having the same legal rights for their language as French enjoys. And I remember reading about Chinese business owners in Montreal’s Chinatown district complaining about not being allowed to post signs with Chinese as the main language.
One battle Quebec lost was trying to force airlines to use French when flying into Quebecois airports. English is the international language of aviation. Pilots speak English when flying into Paris. When Quebec tried to change this, there was a general boycott of the province’s airports by commerical pilots and Quebec had to back down.
I’ve always said every country has to have some issue that they’re particularly crazy about - other countries look at them and shake their heads and wonder why they get so worked up over something so trivial. In the United States, it’s race. In Canada, it’s language.
For what it’s worth, signage in reservations I’ve visited in Quebec was bilingual. Here’s a French/Inuktitut stop sign. About natives (called First Nations in Canada) the Charter of the French language has this to say:
There are also a number of provision specific to particular groups such as Crees and Naskapis.
In Chinatown, businesses are allowed to feature Chinese more prominently than French. I know that in 1998, there was an attempt to seek exemption from the language charter. The major issue isn’t signage (probably all but 5 people are okay with the big Chinese characters) but that in several businesses it is impossible to get service in French. The reason, which everyone on the French side of the debate aknowledges, is simply that many immigrants do not master French well enough to comply. As a result, there was a joint effort by the Chinese business association and the Quebec government to help Chinatown buisiness better comply, in other words better serve their customers in French. At the time, the gevernment also asked for legal counsel to clarify the rights of Chinese business owners with regards to the existing laws.
Here is a pdf document (in French) that outlines the legal rights of Chinese business owners. It was the Human Rights Commission’s opinion that simply providing a French translation along with Chinese characters in a business sign was enough to make it comply.
This was in 1975 – before the introduction of the French Language Charter. It was the air traffic controlers, not the provincial government, that fought for the right to use French in control towers. Note that it is only recently that Paris airports started to operate in English only.
Tangent - In the Northwest Territories, government signs are in all official languages of the NWT. There are eleven (cite). Luckily, the English is the most prominent.
Except we don’t have laws restricting what people of a given race can do.
Or both. remember the ado over declaring English the official language of the US (amid immigration debates)? And French government workers may not only have their language in mind when fining kosher delis in Hassidic neighborhoods and Chinatown merchants who don’t comply with 101.
As for my ‘hating tourists and making money’ comment, I was being semi-facetious. There are some great merchants and Montreal is full of wonderful people, French and English. They just don’t take too kindly to anyone who didn’t take a language class at the border, even if they’re planning to move in and start up a profitable company (and invariably don’t for myriad reasons, taxes and mobsters being two). And why shouldn’t restaurant and store owners be rude and bitter? The city is screwing over their own businesses plenty. When they’re not ripping up the street outside their store for the fifth time in two years, they’re monitoring their advertising with an iron fist (e.g. Quebec wants even web-based businesses to hire translators or risk a hefty fine). Preserving culture is one thing, but Quebecers often don’t seem to notice how warped some of their laws are – the ones they’re paying taxes to support – unless they get an outsider’s point of view.
I’m not sure I follow. Are you the outsider whose point of view is meant to fight our ignorance and finally get us to see the warpage in our laws? I’m not sure that’s what you’re saying, but if you are, let me say a heartfelt thanks on behalf of all Quebeckers. Really, we had no idea…
I was under the impression some Quebecois weren’t too fond of the laws, either. And yeah, sometimes it takes a few years away from your home or a few travelled tourists to point out when certain laws cross from cultural preservation to pedantic insanity. Tourists and investors don’t need a potemkin village, but seeing ‘101’ scrawled over any shop saying SALE is sort of off-putting (yeah, I know, that is the work of a lone graffiti artists and not the government, and I’m straying into IMHO territory). It just sometimes seems like the government is completely ignorant of the fact that they could be spending less money on ‘Visit Quebec…’ ads in trade mags and more on translating some museum guides.
Sorry, I’m lost again. I don’t remember the last time I saw 101 scrawled on anything. Which decade are we talking about? I haven’t lived in Canada or Montreal all my life, but from what I’ve seen, anglos have it swell here. Listening to them whine nauseates me.
At the place where I work, we currently have about a hundred long-term consultants from all over Canada and the US. None of them can speak a word of French. You should see all the francophones in our office bending over backwards to speak English to them. You should hear the consultants on the phone to their landords, setting up their various long-term rentals in English. You should hear them on the phone talking to various government departments about taxes, getting their family members visas, etc., etc., etc., all in English. For a place that supposedly has draconian language laws, Montreal is very anglo-friendly. The instances of pedantic insanity are few and far between.
As I wrote in my first post in this thread, English used to rule Quebec, and now, to a certain extent, the pendulum has swung. It’s never going to be perfect, and if some museum guides don’t get translated, well, my god, the horror!
I’m a pretty harsh critic of Canada and Quebec, but you have to pick your spots.
You know what, Cat Fight? I actually agree with you, though maybe not in the way you’d like. Appearances are all that matter. Maybe in almost all of Canada, francophones have to fight long and hard to keep what services they are getting in their language, while anglophones in Quebec have a very good education system up to university level, and good government services in their language, at least in most cases, and almost everyone thinks it’s a good thing. Maybe anglophones in the other provinces question themselves just as much as francophone Quebecers over immigration and how it will affect them. But that doesn’t matter. What matters aren’t the facts, it is the image that it sent outside, and I must say that the least important applications of our language laws (changing “street” to “rue” on West Montreal road signs, is there really a necessity for that?) are the first thing outside people use as an example of how francophone Quebecers are somehow dumber, more racist and vaguely less democratic than English Canadians. Witness Derleth’s post, which comes pretty close to likening me to a Klansman.
You know, as ridiculous as it sounds, I feel that we might gain a lot of goodwill just by starting to write only “STOP” on our stop signs. It would shut the mouths of all the idiots who like to point out that even France writes “STOP” on its stop signs, so it must mean that we’re even more anti-English than the frogs! Of course, they don’t mention that many other countries, starting with Mexico and Puerto Rico, use a word in their official language on their stop signs, and that everyone knows what a red octogon means, whatever you find on it, but as I said, don’t confuse me with the facts. Appearances are what matters.
To me, the important purpose of our language laws are to ensure that French be the main language of business in Quebec, and that immigrants learn it and use it. That’s it. Nothing else really matters. Of course, Canadian nationalists will still object to the element of coercion in promoting French while Canada is a bilingual country and therefore we should let people choose between French and English. Sure, that’s a choice that you’d never see in any other province, and neither should you, and sure, it’s a mystery why Canada still appears to be a bilingual country to outsiders and even to many Canadians, but as I said, appearances are everything. When you have to fight a well-oiled propaganda machine, you’d better use all the good PR you can find.
Now, I guess we’re sailing out of GQ with the last few posts, if we were even there in the first place, but there are misconceptions that I must correct. Thanks to jovan too for clearing other misconceptions about things I weren’t aware of; it’s really nice that you’ve resubscribed and I always look forward to your posts.