Posted at 10:00 a.m.
The old unilingual Anglophone saleswomen of yesteryear have been replaced by young bilingual salespeople who approach you in English first and often find it hard to accept or simply refuse to answer us in French. Stop fooling us with the myth that now everything happens in French first in Montreal. Rather, there is a constant erosion of the French fact after the improvement that had been created by the adoption of Bill 101.
To say that the problem of the reduction of French in the public space in Montreal will be solved by the goodwill of Anglophones is as illusory today as it was when the Quebec government passed Bill 101. At the time, the Government of Quebec had to act with a law on the protection of French for this situation to change, otherwise nothing would have changed for the better. In 2022, the same observation applies.
The myth that the majority of Anglophones and Anglophile allophones will spontaneously adhere to the French fact without constraints does not stand up to any serious historical analysis.
Bill 101 was the catalyst for the actual establishment of French in Montreal at the time. It helped some of the native Anglophones to embrace the French-speaking reality of Quebec and directed newcomers to learning French instead of English, which was, before Bill 101, the language they mostly chose.
If we don’t give ourselves the means to protect our language, which is a minority in the North American context, no one will do it for us. A law does not regulate everything, but it indicates the seriousness of the position of Quebec society and, thus, encourages all citizens to respect the linguistic reality of Quebec.