Bill 101 Has Failed

Even the Angry French Guy has to concede defeat: the unilingual Anglos are back in business in Quebec, especially in Montreal. Enjoy the bitterness of the post:

English is Back in the Québec Workplace

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“I just love Montreal”, I overheard a lady tell her friend in Avenue Video in Montréal. “I’d live here if I spoke French.”

“I don’t speak French”, scoffed a passerby. “Don’t worry about that.”

English is getting stronger in Montreal. I’m not the one saying it. The Montreal Gazette is saying it. There’s just no way around the numbers. Québec’s English-speaking population rose by 5.5% between 2001 and 2006 according to StatsCan.

How did this happen?

“The easy answer to the question of why young anglos aren’t leaving Quebec like they did a generation ago”, writes David Johnston, “is that they speak better French, and aren’t being chased away by political uncertainty.”

You will all remember that the “political uncertainty” started in the 1950’s and 1960’s when francophones started asking why they were paid less than any other nationality in Québec, why no francophones held any management position in Canada’s banking and finance industry and why they were forbidden to use their language to speak to each on the shop floor.

English-Canada’s business elite responded by moving the country’s entire financial sector and 800 000 jobs from Montreal to Ontario where discrimination against French-speakers was allowed.

But a more important reason, according to the Montreal edition of the Winnipeg Free Press, is that it’s getting easier and easier for English-speakers to live and work in Montreal because there has been a “cultural shift” that has made English “acceptable” in the workplace.

“By the 1990s”, continues our man, “speaking English had become more acceptable in Quebec as firms came to see the need to improve the capacity of their workforces to operate in English. This created new opportunities for anglophones.”

As if English had ever disappeared from the Québec workplace! As if the French-speaking majority of Québec that had been forced to work in English for 250 years suddenly found itself unable to communicate with the outside world in the international language of business after bill 101 gave them the right to work in French!

The failure of Bill 101

When I was a truck driver satellites communications between French-speaking drivers and French-speaking dispatchers had to be in English so the English-speaking security team in Toronto could understand what was going on.

In 2005 the Metro chain of grocery stores bought A&P Canada and Christian Haub, the CEO and chairman of the board of A&P got a seat on the Québec company’s board. Thirteen Francophones and one Anglo. Guess what language the board meeting are in now?

Yep. Even when the French businessmen win, they lose.

That’s the way the modern workplace functions. It is entirely structured around the needs of the less qualified people. French-speakers in Québec, and all non-English speaking people around the world, are required to acquire additional language skills so that unilingual Anglos won’t have to.

Québec briefly tried to change that with the Charter of the French language, but the truth is that the rules that were supposed to protect the right of Québec workers to work in their language are broken. They don’t work anymore.

They were designed for businesses that could be contained in a building, to make sure that the 15th floor would communicate in French with the 6th and 2nd floor, all the way down to the shop floor.

But businesses don’t work like that anymore. Management is in Toronto, accounting’s in Alberta and IT is in Bangalore. Toronto’s and New York’s business culture is once again being imposed on the workers of Québec, and the entire world, actually.

Québec’s workforce has always been the most multilingual in Canada, and probably one of the most linguistically versatile in the World. Québec’s business culture did not change, it’s the world’s business structure that changed.

And once again, after only a brief interruption, unilingual Anglos can come back to work in Montreal.

And just in time, as the stellar generation of brilliant financial minds that left Montreal a generation ago have now managed to completely scrap Ontario’s economy and is now ready to come back home.

Hat tip: Edward J. Cunningham

French PM Francois Fillon Speaks English to Investors

http://www.e-nough.hmdnsgroup.com/archives/001607.html

PARIS July 6, 2007 (Forbes/AP) - Mesdames, Messieurs, France is now open for business. ... In their efforts to draw a thick line between Sarkozy and his predecessor, French officials are even delivering their message in the language fellow conservative Jacques Chirac fought so hard against: English.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon told the World Investment Conference in La Baule, western France, last week:

We too often gave you the image of a country with escalating social contributions, an increasingly complex legal system, and discouraging red tape.
Addressing his audience in the language of his British wife [Penelope, who is Welsh], he said:

That is all over! We are going to make France a country where it's easy to do business, where you can concentrate on running your company without hassle or pressure other than those of the market.

Mais oui! French business does too speak English

SYDNEY, March 23, 2006 (AFP) - France may be committed to protecting its culture from English and American intrusions but a senior trade official Thursday conceded the Gallic tongue had been overtaken in global business.
"Of course English is the international business language," the head of France's international investment body, Clara Gaymard, told reporters in Sydney.
Gaymard, who is seeking to attract greater foreign investment from China, India, Australia and ASEAN nations, said that investors coming to France did not need to learn another language to do business.
Many French companies such as car manufacturer Renault and gas company Total already held their board meetings in English, she said.
"It's a new reality; we have to make it known," she said.