MONTREAL – A group of 23 bilingual municipalities has asked the Quebec Superior Court judge Silvana Conte to suspend several parts of the province’s 2022 language reform, arguing that the application of the law – which overbearingly imposes French – will cause them “serious and irreparable damage”. 

Lawyer Julius Grey pointed out to the Montreal court that the law contains, in fact, measures that will have “enormous consequences” for cities that have the right to serve citizens in both English and French, while under the reform to Municipalities without official bilingual status are prohibited from communicating with residents in English.

Attorney Grey said the law could: prevent Cities from writing contracts in English; ensure the government can withhold federal subsidies from cities that do not comply; give the “language guarantor” broad search and seizure powers that surpass even those of the police.

“The Quebec Language Office (Office québécois de la langue française) can request any document and inspect whatever it wants” Grey said. “It’s more than the police can do without a warrant”. In fact, according to the lawyer, that Office would have the right to seize materials that could include employees’ personal information, budget documents and even legal advice that should be protected by professional secrecy. And it could require municipalities to issue disciplinary sanctions against employees who don’t comply.

Grey asked the judge to suspend the application of several provisions until a full hearing can be held on the validity of the law, for which the government has proactively invoked the notwithstanding clause to protect itself from some legal challenges. Grey also added that some of the municipalities involved in the lawsuit are overwhelmingly made up of English speakers and noted that it would be difficult for them to enter into contracts or continue to have monolingual English-speaking employees.

For its part, the Quebec government, represented by lawyer Charles Gravel, claims that the “rebel” municipalities have not provided any evidence of having been harmed by the law. There is no evidence that seizures have occurred, he said, or that benefits have been cut, and the Cities’ concern should not be enough to suspend the law without evidence that it has caused harm. In a nutshell, he states that the Cities’ concerns are exaggerated.

But Steven Erdelyi, city councilor of the city of Côte-St-Luc, in the Montreal area, doesn’t think so: his municipality receives 3 to 4 million dollars a year in subsidies, mostly from the federal government, that help pay for infrastructure. “In an instant, the minister responsible for the French language could cut the subsidies for the 23 bilingual cities, which amount to 110 million dollars over four years” said the councilor, who also reported an increase in “linguistic inspections” of the businesses in your area. Dale Roberts-Keats, mayor of Bonne-Espérance, a town of 695 near the Labrador border, also said the section of the law that stipulates contracts must be in French had created a lot of confusion. “It is absurd that in our municipality, where 99% of the population has English as their preferred language, we cannot draft contracts with suppliers in our community in English” she said.

The “Quebec civil war” of languages ​​continues in the Court.

The imagine above is taken from the website www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca (Office québécois de la langue française)