As I said in the other thread, I suspected that the comment you had made was about Bill 96. TBH, this bill goes a lot further than I had thought after briefly reading about it, but as the article says, it remains to be seen how many of its provisions are going to be enforced. The idea that the Language Police will, Gestapo-like, raid businesses and arbitrarily seize computers and cellphones and the like sounds a bit far-fetched. OTOH, the Language Police have surprised many before with their unthinking zealous extremism.
No question that this is an absolutely terrible piece of legislation, a new low in Quebec’s ever-increasing language extremism. It’s the broadest application yet of the ill-advised “notwithstanding” clause to bypass the Constitution, a clause that exists only because Quebec alone demanded it.
Beginning in the 1970s, Quebec has had several periods of major business exodus prompted by its franco-cultural extremism, and I predict this will precipitate another one. At one time Montreal was a more populous and more prosperous city than Toronto. That status has now been reversed, and the decline of Quebec continues to accelerate as it moves ever closer to being a third-world shit-hole. I imagine that the worse things get, the more the extremist francophones will hate the rest of Canada and the USA, and blame “les maudit anglais” for all their troubles.
As a Canadian, this greatly saddens me. But on the bright side, from a purely selfish point of view, the good news is that much of the exodus of wealth, talent, and jobs will gravitate to Ontario. Despite all the linguistic nazification, Quebec (mainly Montreal) still has significant businesses in the areas of aviation, pharmaceuticals, and digital technology. And when Quebec finally does turn into a fascist third-world shit-hole, they are welcome to separate, so that the federal government can stop throwing money at them in the form of equalization transfer payments and the rest of us can prosper as a unified nation.
If it’s any indication, Quebec documents like birth certificates and driver’s licenses have been issued in French only for years now. This has real practical implications. The US government, for instance, will not accept documents written in French for official purposes without a court-approved official translation, which isn’t cheap. Last I saw, Quebec claimed that documents like birth certificates are available in English by special request, but there was no way that anybody could find to make that request.