British citizen creates national uproar in Quebec

[The Minsky Moment]

There are people who refused to do business with Israel, at some point, and even now, because they see it as a "Jewish State" and its frustrating to them. 

Not the same.  Business that decide not to do business in Israel do so because they either have some ideological opposition to very notion of the state or because they are intimidated by those that do.  What Malthus is talking about is deciding not to business because of costs of complying with bureaucratic or regulatory hassles. 

Apparently it is easier to do business in English in Israel (or France or that matter!) than in is in a province of Canada, which should give some pause.

[Malthus]

Maybe as a whole Quebec was empoverished but all that wealth would have been in the hand of the English minority & that was inacceptable. Every choice & every law since the Revolution Tranquille have been made with the "le Quebec au Québécois" mantra.

See, if some Chinese people owned a company (or many companies) generating wealth in Ontario, most Ontario folks do not take the position that their wealth is meaningless to the province because they are Chinese.

[Grey Fox]

All French is Ok. Quebec is an unilangual French Province.

[Berkut]

IMO, if you ahve to pass laws to protect your "culture" it is already dead, and you are just making its arms and legs move about with strings anyway.

[Grey Fox]

Maybe as a whole Quebec was empoverished but all that wealth would have been in the hand of the English minority & that was inacceptable. Every choice & every law since the Revolution Tranquille have been made with the "le Quebec au Québécois" mantra.

See, if some Chinese people owned a company (or many companies) generating wealth in Ontario, most Ontario folks do not take the position that their wealth is meaningless to the province because they are Chinese.

The Chinese minority doesn't repress the english majority for being English tho.

[Malthus]

So it would be illegal then for me to post an ad in strictly English, for example? A completely private advertisement?

One of the Atlanta suburbs, Snellville if I remember correctly, had a ban on any Spanish-only signage and required that the English text be larger than the Spanish text on any signs.  Looks exactly like the Quebec thing.

That is stupid and xenophobic as well, although at least there you are only be stupid and xenophobic towards the minority in your country. It has its own economic consequences, although probably not as severe as if some part of LA decided that you MUST post everything in Spanish.

Does the Quebec law mandate that all signs be in both French and English, or is all-French ok?

All French = Okay.

[Berkut]

All French is Ok. Quebec is an unilangual French Province.

Wow.

[The Minsky Moment]

Except for paris, they are indeed dicks there.

paris is a large central city and has many of the same issues as other cities of this nature.
The stereotype of Parisian rudeness (which is exaggerated over the reality) is just as strongly held within other parts of France as it is outside France.

Not unlike with NYC.

[Valmy]

IMO, if you ahve to pass laws to protect your "culture" it is already dead, and you are just making its arms and legs move about with strings anyway.

That is, indeed, the whole point.  They are fearful their culture is getting destroyed so they are scrambling to protect it.

[HVC]

Except for paris, they are indeed dicks there.

paris is a large central city and has many of the same issues as other cities of this nature.
The stereotype of Parisian rudeness (which is exaggerated over the reality) is just as strongly held within other parts of France as it is outside France.

Not unlike with NYC.

It's not that the parisians themselves are rude (or not in my experience anyway) it's the service that is rude. from taxi drivers to waiters and hotel staff. People who i'm used to be obnoxious pleasant coming from NA.

[viper37]

Certainly. There have been court cases of businessmen fined for not having French "predominate".

and in these cases, there was simply no french.

Moreover, it isn't really significant to my point whether the laws are enforced stringently or not, as business people doing due dilligence have to assume that they will obey the existing local laws, not flout them because they aren't strictly enforced - and plan for the costs of doing that. Which, in Quebec, always means printing up special "Quebec only" materials to conform to Quebec's bizzare language laws.

You know, nowadays, everything produced in the NAFTA is printed in English, Spanish and French at the very least.
I just bought a Polar watch last week.  It came with instructions in English, French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Korean and some other.

My Windows Ultimate allow me to switch between French&English menu, as well as 40 other languages.

Silly me.  Of course.

I should see that writing instructions and packaging for every language of the world is not a problem, unless you happen to ship to Quebec.

Silly me.

[Berkut]

Except for paris, they are indeed dicks there.

paris is a large central city and has many of the same issues as other cities of this nature.
The stereotype of Parisian rudeness (which is exaggerated over the reality) is just as strongly held within other parts of France as it is outside France.

Not unlike with NYC.

The difference with NYC though is that they are mean to everyone - including other New Yorkers.

The reality, since I have visited several times in the last couple years, is that I could not really tell the difference in the spread of niceness, until you start driving. Then it isn't so much that everyone is nasty, but that there is an entirely different view of what is "polite" driving from the rest of the entire country. In that there is zero weight given to any kind of need to be "polite" at all.

I wonder how much all these perceptions are grounded in any kind of reality - if I visited Montreal, for example, is there really any actually higher chance of someone being a douchebag because I would not even pretend to try to speak French?

[crazy canuck]

Maybe as a whole Quebec was empoverished but all that wealth would have been in the hand of the English minority & that was inacceptable. Every choice & every law since the Revolution Tranquille have been made with the "le Quebec au Québécois" mantra.

See, if some Chinese people owned a company (or many companies) generating wealth in Ontario, most Ontario folks do not take the position that their wealth is meaningless to the province because they are Chinese.

There are some places in Vancouver where you will see only Chinese signs, including store signs, real estate signs, all manner of signs.

I dont have a problem with that.

If I lived in a City which was predominantly Chinese so that almost all signs were in that language I would also not have a problem.

The differenct in Quebec is that the majority of citizens were French speakers while the majority of signs were in English.  A different case really.

[Berkut]

Certainly. There have been court cases of businessmen fined for not having French "predominate".

and in these cases, there was simply no french.

Moreover, it isn't really significant to my point whether the laws are enforced stringently or not, as business people doing due dilligence have to assume that they will obey the existing local laws, not flout them because they aren't strictly enforced - and plan for the costs of doing that. Which, in Quebec, always means printing up special "Quebec only" materials to conform to Quebec's bizzare language laws.

You know, nowadays, everything produced in the NAFTA is printed in English, Spanish and French at the very least.
I just bought a Polar watch last week.  It came with instructions in English, French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Korean and some other.

Silly me.  Of course.

I should see that writing instructions and packaging for every language of the world is not a problem, unless you happen to ship to Quebec.

Silly me.

And yet....nobody needed to pass a law demanding that your watch have instructions in German, did they?

Rather, it simply made economic sense for your watch maker to include them since they would like to sell their watches to the Germans, so they did so.

No xenophobic language laws required at all...

[Valmy]

The difference with NYC though is that they are mean to everyone - including other New Yorkers.

Which is exactly what we were saying about Paris so that really is not a difference.