I originally thought you were kidding. But dang, you were not!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_d...

> Citing a Montreal restaurant for having a small "recommended on Tripadvisor" sticker in the bottom corner of a window. The complaint was that the sticker was in English and there was no French version displayed.

> Issuing a letter of complaint to the owner of a board game store for mostly selling board games with English packaging, though French versions did not exist for the majority of the games in question

> Demanding the town of St. Lazare remove "Welcome" from the town's welcome signs, leaving only the French version, "Vous accueille", though one-third of the town's residents were native English speakers. The town instead opted to remove all words from the welcome sign.

> Citing a small business in Chelsea for replying in English to English comments on the store's Facebook page without writing a second, French version of the response

> Citing a restaurant that specializes in grilled cheese for having "Grilled cheese" on their sign rather than the French version "sandwich au fromage fondu

I'm amazed such a thing legally exists in 2022 in a Western, developed country like Canada.

Thank you poster, I learned something new today.

Edit: This too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastagate

> Pastagate is the informal name of an incident that began in 2013 in Quebec, when, on 14 February, an inspector of the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) sent a letter of warning to an upscale restaurant, Buonanotte, for using Italian words such as "pasta", "antipasti", "calamari", etc. on its menu instead of their French equivalents

Yeah in my original comment I was a bit careless in dropping the nuance of the situation. Even as a anglophone Québecer I'm actually in favor of laws to protect the French culture (look at Louisiana which only has a small handful of native French speakers as an example of what can happen without such protections)

But, I think it's a good example of showing Québec does things different than the US, and their libertarian notions (for good and for ill) do not totally apply for the province

Why? US and Anglo-Canadian corporations will not spend a penny more than they need to advertise and serve a largely bilingual population. Not protecting the French language will lead to its quick marginalisation, as has happened to approximately all minority languages surrounded by much bigger cultural and economic entities, with few exceptions. If you think preserving a different culture is important, the law is logical and required.

My grandmother was forced to shop in English through the mail-order catalogue, even though she did not know a word of it. She managed to do it, but collectively we decided we would no longer allow anglophones to force English-only services on a francophone community. That's it.