Business Forum | The silent exodus from headquarters

For more than 15 years, we have been processing the francization files of some forty companies whose business is all or almost all done outside Quebec, which requires them to operate most often in English. These companies feel targeted by the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) which seeks to francize them at all costs and neglected by law 96 which has forgotten them.^⁠1.

We are their agents with the OQLF: we manage their compliance file for them and with them. Our clients are American or European companies that come to settle in Quebec to take advantage of a qualified workforce. They are also Quebec companies whose markets have mainly developed abroad. We make sure that they respect the right of Quebeckers to communications in French even though they must continue, most of the time, to do business in English with the rest of the world.

Bill 96 imposed on all employers a formula for reducing the bilingual workforce, the arbitrary application of which by the Office is already leading to abuses of power that lead to layoffs and some cases of which will soon find themselves before the courts. Instead of mobilizing the lifeblood of our companies, Law 96 divides us through unnecessary coercion and administrative complications that will be extended in 2025 to companies with at least 25 employees:

• the deadlines for producing forms and reports have been halved, while the Office can stretch their processing over 24 months before issuing a certificate;
• the formula for reducing bilingualism is difficult to put in place without reviewing all job descriptions, all the tasks and qualifications of staff, the flow and importance of communications in English, as well as the reorganization of work, so that we are in general labor shortage;
• the OQLF can now impose on any company with less than 100 employees a two-headed francization committee, a notoriously ineffective mechanism in private sector companies where there are few unions^⁠2because its members are doubly busy doing the work for which they are hired and generally ignorant of the francization process;
• law 96 deprived companies of the possibility of being represented before the Office by qualified people, targeting in particular our company and the lawyers^⁠3. Would businesses be forced to pay their taxes by refusing them the right to be represented with Revenu Québec by accountants and tax specialists? This is what Law 96 did by intentionally specifying that the company’s representative to the Office must be a member of management.

Since 1^er June 2022, daily contact with a language other than French in the performance of tasks, frequent relations with foreign countries and the nature of the tasks, such as scientific research whose publications are mainly in English, for example, are not no longer sufficient reasons to require the use of a language other than French^⁠4. The vision of this publication is so restrictive that it cancels all the reasons for which, moreover, it is justified in the Charter to use a language other than French, according to the eligibility forms for a special agreement of the OQLF. What a contradiction between the OQLF and the Charter!

This is reflected in reality by new measures for the generalization of French imposed by the OQLF on head offices and research centers that cannot generalize the use of French and have signed specific agreements, agreements which give the right to these to use another operating language with foreign countries because their external relations are constant and complex. However, the OQLF people are in no way qualified to tell companies how they should organize themselves to work and have no legitimacy to indirectly oblige workers, despite the opinion of the courts, to work in French without taking of the context. We invite the Minister and the Prime Minister to reformulate the article which excludes agents like us and lawyers from the discussion with the OQLF and to review the way in which the OQLF applies the Charter to companies whose all or almost all of their business take place abroad. The economic health of Quebec depends on it.

* Other signatories: Simon Perreault, President, GoTo Technologies Canada Ltd., Bryan Mongeau, Chief Technology Officer, Broadsign Canada Company, Mario Tremblay, President and CEO, RobotShop Inc., Pierre Meunier, President, Rexfab Inc., Beatrice Niedermann, President, BND Conseil inc., François Godin, Associate Director in Chemistry, X-Chem inc./Intelisyn Pharma, Martin Villeneuve, President, Distech Controls inc., Robert Piccioni, President, Les Transports Fuel inc., Nadia Damiani, President, Camion Fuel inc., as well as 28 other companies who have informed us of their support and who cannot be identified for fear of reprisals or for legal reasons.

1. Bill 96 did not renew section 144 which allows specific agreements for seats and the OQLF applies section 46.1 to companies that have such agreements to cancel the effect of section 144.

2. In 2021, 23% of employees in private sector companies in Quebec were unionized, according to the Quebec Institute of Statistics.

3. Section 139.1, reinforced by section 213.1, eliminates the possibility that a lawyer can represent the company before the Office, according to the opinion of our lawyers, which also eliminates agents such as GP Conceptal .

4. Checklist for employers on the requirement relating to the knowledge of a language other than FrenchQuebec Office of the French Language, 2022