MONTREAL — To get an idea just how pervasive the English language is in tech, take a look at the digital innards of the political party that wants to banish the language from Quebec’s offices and workplaces.

The webpage of the governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) runs on HTML’s multicoloured gobbledygook. In HTML-speak, the line <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″> scales the page to the user’s device, making it readable on a screen of any size. Like nearly every website on the planet, the CAQ site is a reminder how the very building blocks of the internet are themselves formed from the English language.

In the blinkered realm of Quebec language politics, tech’s English ubiquity underscores a pesky truth. In May, the CAQ introduced Bill 96, “an Act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec.” To answer the obvious question: yes, French is the official and common language of Quebec; it has been for nearly half a century, and is spoken by roughly 94 per cent of the province, according to Statistics Canada data.

But further measures are necessary, the CAQ says, so as to reverse the French language’s alleged decline. Such fears spring up intermittently in these parts, often in the pages of the Quebecor-owned tabloid Journal de Montréal, which regularly devotes ink and journalistic effort to exposing the tyranny of the “Bonjour Hi” greeting. (It “scratches the ears so much,” fumed columnist Josée Legault.)

Predictably enough, Bill 96 is all stick, no carrot. To wit: it would compel businesses with 25 or more employees to have “francization committees” (currently, this applies only to those with more than 50 workers.) It mandates that most internal documents be written in French, with exceptions only in cases pertaining to “health, public safety or the principles of natural justice.” It bolsters the inspection and investigation powers of the Office québécois de la langue française. It limits the number of spaces in the anglophone system of finishing schools, so as to curb the (allegedly) frightful tendency of French kids getting their post-secondary education in English. 

And the CAQ added a few chef’s kisses to the bill’s provisions. Its author, Simon Jolin-Barrette, once considered banning the phrase “Bonjour Hi!” And the party has promised to excise the front-facing English bits from its website. 

Should it become law—and it likely will, as all of the province’s parties voted to table it—Bill 96 will pose both structural and existential problems for the province’s tech sector. There are 1,300 startups in Montreal alone, according to a 2019 Bonjour Startup Montréal report. And while their home base is this always-beautiful, sometimes-maddening island in the Saint Lawrence, their ambitions are effectively borderless. Fifty per cent of them already have a presence in the U.S., according to the report, while 34 per cent of their founders were born outside of Quebec.

One need only traipse through the offices of a Montreal startup to see the result of this vagabondish existence. I’ve often done so, and have come to realize that the carefree mix of English and French—which, along with smoked meat and strip clubs, is the stuff of Montreal cliché—is a necessity in tech. Perhaps it’s that the language embedded in coding itself, or how venture capital tends to speak English—as does much of the outsourcing talent that performs crucial development work for small startups. Perhaps it’s the patent absurdity of trying to translate words like “cloud,” “cookies” or “content.” Whatever it is, no law can alter tech’s abiding reality.

“In my personal opinion, English is 100 per cent unavoidable,” says Cristina Zilic, a vice-president at CloudOps, a cloud-consulting firm. “The language around how you apply these technology principles and methodologies is primarily in English.”

To be sure, there are no plans to actually police the English words embedded in computer code. “The use of a programming language is compatible with a French working environment,” Quebec justice ministry spokesperson Paul-Jean Charest told me. And CloudOps certainly promotes the use of French in its Montreal offices. The company offers its employees twice-a-week subsidized French-language courses. There’s #conversationsenfrancais, a dedicated Slack channel where employees are paired up for virtual water-cooler talk exclusively in French. 

But the fact remains that CloudOps, like nearly 40 per cent of the city’s startups, has customers beyond Canada’s borders. “In order for us to offer an inclusive work environment, we cannot make French the official language of how we operate, because that excludes people who live elsewhere in the country and do not speak a word of French,” Zilic told me. “The tech space is an English-language environment.”

Then there’s the expense. One of the endearing things about startups, other than the often screwball ideas behind them, is the lengths they will go on shoestrings and prayers to make themselves look legitimate. 

CloudOps, which is both established and well funded, figures it will take two full-time translators to handle the company’s internal documentation. The majority of the city’s burgeoning tech firms couldn’t even consider this luxury. “Most startups need to prioritize what they do on limited budgets, and language isn’t one of them. If you have to choose between eight million people in Quebec and 300 million in North America, you choose the latter,” Séraphin Hochart, a mobile app developer, told me.

In fact, having a Quebec address, and the regulatory burden it will entail, actually puts Quebec startups at a further disadvantage. Telework, the abstract concept that COVID-19 turned into reality, has meant American companies can poach talent at will. And unlike the CloudOps of the world, those American companies aren’t constrained by any language law. 

Of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, only the latter responded to my questions about whether their internal documentation is in la langue de Guy Lafleur. “We use French throughout our Quebec operations, dedicating significant resources to ensuring that employment-related documents, software, equipment, signs, communications, trainings, and other job materials are available in French,” said company spokesperson Kristin Gable. As for the other tech colossi, you can’t help but think they’d be shouting it from the rooftops if they were actually abiding by the spirit of the proposed law.

There is a further irony in all of this. Premier François Legault has heaped praise and treasure on the province’s tech sector, where the average job pays $78,000, according to a government report. He has pitched IT as a balm to COVID-19-related job losses, and practically begged foreign tech companies to set up shop here. He has relaxed his government’s earlier constraints on immigration, a wellspring for the province’s tech industry. 

And yet with its identity-related laws—Bill 96 as well as his so-called “secularism law,” Bill 21, which prohibits the wearing of religious attire in certain professions—the government is hobbling the very industry it wants to foster. English has been a reliable bogeyman for generations of Quebec politicians. Yet scapegoating the language as it applies to tech is worse than cynical. It is to deny the reality written into its very code.