I lived in Montreal for 6 six years, as a student and for my first job. I speak a bit of French, but not much. One day in Place Ville Marie I was getting a coffee at Starbucks. I accidentally bumped into someone in line, and I said "sorry". He snarled at me angrily and said "Get out of here, go back to Toronto". I don't think I had never been to Toronto at that point in my life.

Mostly that does not happen. Mostly people are okay if you try to speak French. But if you slip up or bump the wrong person, your English can certainly make you the target of hateful and mean language.

There is also a forced, legal "racism" against language, in that it can be prohibitively difficult to start a company in English. There is a systematic approach where the government and the locals will make your life more expensive, more complicated and less likely to succeed unless you do fully understand French.

Edit: That said, I love Montreal. It's probably my favourite city in North America, I miss it tons and tons. I live in the Bay Area now, but feel like Montreal is my home and I can't wait to go back.

> There is a systematic approach where the government and the locals will make your life more expensive, more complicated and less likely to succeed unless you do fully understand French.

Sucks to say it so directly, but that's the point and people vote for exactly for that (people also vote against this, so don't put everyone in the same boat). There was abuse up to that point, so the laws are harsh now.

In our history, there was a lot of oppression agaisnt french speaking people so people are still pretty afraid. The only contact that anyone over 80 years old had with english speaking people are from oppressive boss that abused them at work. I do agree on that point that the older population can be racist, but anyone under 30 should be more understanding. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec#Quiet_Revolution

Yup, you can forget a director-level position unless your last name is Tremblay or Gauthier. Grew up in Montreal and loved it, but bounced to SF the second I had the chance.

Quebecers are my favorite Canadians!

But there is definitely language racism, especially with the language laws.

Here are some examples to prove my point:

On a phone call with the government to renew an ID card, my bilingual Montrealler friend messed up her French grammar. The government agent said "I cannot understand you" and hung up the phone! Made her call back and wait on hold and be more careful with her grammar.

The Bitcoin Embassy put up a webpage for international Bitcoin trading targeted to people beyond Quebec who speak English, and yet the Language Police stopped them because they hadn't translated everything to French before publishing the page! The government prevents international business simply because it's not French enough. But the whole point of international business is to target OTHER people.

My friend is COO of a large, successful international enterprise software company (I won't mention the company). All his programmers use English keyboards, but his company will be shut down if they don't use French keyboards. So they keep a stash of French keyboards in the closet. Every few months, the Language Police do an inspection and they have to bring out the French keyboards and pretend that they are using them to do all their work as good French citizens.

This last friend has lived in BOTH Palo Alto and Montreal for the last 15 years, and before that lived in France and Iran. He says that Quebec is more Racist than France.

I've heard stories about inspection for the keyboards but never experienced it myself. I only have been working for the past 5 years but for something you say happen once a month, it look like I'm pretty lucky. I'm on an English keyboard by the way.

I guess there is language racism, people here are expected to speak English when most of us doesn't handle it that well. When we travel in an English country, we have to speak in English, when we travel to a Spanish country, we do our best to talk Spanish, we expect the same of you. Sadly even people that have been here for a long time doesn't even try to learn French. Most of the superior I had are only speaking English.

Don't you learn Spanish as a second language in US? How would you react if you would be expected to use Spanish that much?

> My friend is COO of a large, successful international enterprise software company (I won't mention the company). All his programmers use English keyboards, but his company will be shut down if they don't use French keyboards. So they keep a stash of French keyboards in the closet. Every few months, the Language Police do an inspection and they have to bring out the French keyboards and pretend that they are using them to do all their work as good French citizens.

Wow, French here, I find this most shocking. Can't the programmers use the French keyboard all the time but simply map it to the US layout (I do that myself).

Only the physical products need to be in french. The reason behind this is that an employee that doesn't know a word of english has to be able to use all the tools without having to ask for a french version (a french speaking employee in a workplace where the management is english speaking may get discriminated against otherwise).

My keyboard is french, but its layout is english and so is my OS and all my softwares. However, I had to change the language myself since everything come out of the box as french.

Of course there is racism, there is racism everywhere. The difference with Québec is that the racists are racist against wealthy white people who are not use to be on that side of the medal.

> So they keep a stash of French keyboards in the closet.

Here, even if we are french speaking, we simply stick french stickers on things. No need to buy extra products this way ;)

Stickers work too, but I'm guessing that in their case they just don't want to deal with applying stickers to a lot of keys and then removing them. We also had to put some stickers on vending and coffee machines.

We used to be audited every year but after we made a lot of progress they starting coming once every 2-3 years.

I think they started auditing after complaints, we're a manufacturing company in the suburbs with 99% French speaking employees but a lot of the stuff we had was English only. Fun fact, our parent company in Texas was careful and made sure we had French documentation/communication but French speaking office employees didn't seem to care.

It is sad to me that nobody in this thread knows what racism is.

'wealthy white people'

Like.. the... French Canadians?