MONTREAL — Say you are the owner of a small Montreal-based tech firm. On one hand, things are likely pretty decent. The pandemic, having tightened consumer’s already-snug embrace of their devices, means your products are in demand. Various levels of government have promoted your industry, showered it with money and otherwise told the world just how important you are to the post-pandemic relaunch of the economy. Plus, you live and work in Quebec, “one of the best places in the world to invest in information technology,” according to Premier François Legault.

On the other, there’s Bill 96. Passed into law on May 24, the “act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec” not only saddles you and your business with the burden of enforcing the province’s language laws. It also allows the state to enter your business based on an anonymous complaint, without warning or warrant, and inspect the data on your computer systems and electronic devices. The state can fine your business up to $20,000 should said data not contain the requisite amount of French.

The law is the latest gambit on the part of the province’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government to convince voters that a) French is in dire straits in these parts; and b) only it can do something about it. Ostensibly legislated to counter that alleged erosion of French in Quebec, the law instead lays bare the province’s near-schizophrenic relationship with businesses in general and tech in particular.

Outwardly, the province remains open for business in any language. “Share in our linguistic and cultural diversity!” trumpets Investissement Québec, the provincial government’s investment arm, to would-be businesses and investors. Montréal International, the city’s economic development agency funded in part by the Quebec government, boasts that the city is home to more English speakers than Vancouver. 

Those arriving here expecting multilingual joie de vivre will quickly find themselves disappointed, however. Under Bill 96, the state will cease communicating with new arrivals in any language other than French in six months, essentially compelling immigrants and those on work visas to learn the language in half a year. It forces citizens to pay for translating legal documents from English to French. And it compels businesses with between 25 and 49 employees to enforce the French language charter, a burden previously borne only by larger companies.

The law goes after not only the language spoken within a business’s walls, but the language of the data coursing through it as well. Appended to the section allowing the OQLF to enter private businesses, a vestige of the 1977 language law, are provisions allowing inspectors to take photographs and obligate anyone on the premises to give these inspectors access to any “electronic device, computer system or other medium” so that they may “verify, examine, process, copy or print out such data.”

And unlike the original law, Bill 96 preemptively invokes the notwithstanding clause, allowing it to override Sections 2 and 7 to 15 of the Constitution Act—including the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. “Before, the government and the OQLF had to act under the supervisory jurisdiction of the courts. Under Bill 96 the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms has been suspended and there will be no recourse to the courts,” business and public law lawyer Eric Maldoff told me recently.

To be fair, the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) has had the power to inspect the use of French in businesses for 45 years. The resulting, entirely predictable consequences of policing the printed word have been well documented. Over the years, the province has confiscated English-only Matzos, attempted to have the word “‘pasta”’ stricken from the menus of an Italian restaurant and, in the midst of a pandemic that ultimately saw the shuttering of 17 per cent of the province’s restaurants, protested the use of the word “‘takeout.”

As you can imagine, many are worried about Bill 96’s law’s scope. The province’s college of doctors said it could adversely affect the rights of linguistic-minority patients. Some lawyers have said the inspections would compromise client-attorney confidentiality. And Quebec businesses now face the prospect of having their data (business plans, correspondence, even intellectual property) reproduced and trucked away to a government office and its content measured for appropriate levels of French. 

(Astonishingly, given the rather profound effects the law could have on its members, the conseil du patronat said it couldn’t make anyone available to speak with me. Montreal’s chamber of commerce, which declined my interview request, decried the law’s potentially “pernicious effects” on Quebec businesses in an interview with Le Journal de Montreal last month.)

For tech companies, the problem is even more fundamental. There are more than 1,300 startups based in Montreal, and half have a presence in the U.S., according to a 2020 Bonjour Startup Montréal report. Operating completely in French is a near-impossibility, since the language of tech’s borderless world is English. “I believe institutions in Quebec should be French, but English is the lingua franca of tech, and with this law we’re going to regress our economy by being less integrated and connected,” Ian Rae, the founder of Montreal-based cloud platform CloudOps, told me.

The province’s justice ministry takes much umbrage at the suggestion that this amounts to search and seizure. “The OQLF does not currently carry out searches or seizures during its inspections, and Bill 96 does not allow it either,” ministry spokesperson Isabelle Boily told me by email. Boily did confirm, however, that photocopied and/or photographed material could be removed from inspected businesses, and that inspectors can do all of this based on an anonymous complaint and without a warrant.

The worst part about the government’s small-minded legislative austerity: it’s all for naught. As the OQLF itself noted in a 2018 study, more than 70 per cent of workers speak French. And as La Presse journalist Pierre-André Normandin recently pointed out, the percentage of French-speaking immigrants between 2011 and 2016 rose compared to immigrants who arrived before them—part of a larger trend that saw French gain ground over time, in part at the expense of English. 

But no matter. The government will continue to flog Quebec’s openness and inclusion when hunting for foreign investment, just as it will appeal to Quebecers’ baser fears in order to win elections like the one in October. Quebec’s people, its economy and its very society are forced to bear the brunt of this hypocrisy.

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.” @MartinPatriquin