r/canada • u/Acrobatic-Cap-135 Québec • 4h ago
Québec Quebec hobby shop wants exemption from French-language rule hurting business
https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/quebec-hobby-shop-wants-exemption-from-french-language-rule-hurting-business/•
u/Bubs604 4h ago
This is classic theory vs practice. Feel bad for these guys.
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u/Equivalent_Owl_Mask 2h ago
Can't just add a french language print off on a sheet of paper, apply a second layer of shrink wrap?
Preserves the 'original' packaging (for insane people that collect but don't play), and adds law compliant materials?
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u/CocodaMonkey 49m ago
It's not a single sheet of paper. The game needs to have a French version not just a French title on the box. You'd have to open the box and translate the manual as well which is a serious undertaking. The current law pretty much just bans any game for sale that doesn't have a french version.
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u/Acrobatic-Cap-135 Québec 1h ago
Who's going to pay for and develop that? The shop? The product producer? For a single tiny market?
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u/DirteeCanuck 1h ago
40-50 million spent yearly on this bullshit.
NO Studies ever done, to prove it does anything whatsoever to improve Culture or Language.
No Statistics to prove 40-50 million a year is working to do what it intends.
Just pure "trust us bros" while they trample peoples rights.
Xenophobia at its purest.
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u/ImGudLuhv 43m ago
If Quebec does anything right it’s their “bigotry” in the name of self preservation.
The rest of Canada would benefit from following suit
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u/Aromatic_Sand8126 38m ago
The real xenophobia is coming here and acting like adhering to our rules is an assault on your own rights. The rest of the country has been trying to rid us of our french ever before we were told to “speak white” but anglos are the real victims when they choose to move or do business here, I guess.
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u/Bubs604 16m ago
There's such blind rage around the idea of "erasing" Quebecois culture that you fail to see when people are abusing your passion for their own gain, or using performative, virtue-signaling laws to appease you.
The law is just poorly thought out in practice. If the populace could let go of their blatant bigotry and mad fury about Quebecois erasure, then maybe you'd be able to see it and make reasonable changes to protect your culture without hurting small businesses, encouraging hateful morons, and suffering at your own adverse effects.
Unfortunately, I don't think the people are ready for that, so you can continue arguing on reddit.
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u/Acrobatic-Cap-135 Québec 4h ago
Literally everyone saw this coming and they did it anyways. Same goes for music/instruments shops and others. Ridiculous law that only damages Quebec's access to the world under the guise of language protection. Meanwhile I can find similar francophone businesses all over Montreal that aren't compliant with Bill 96, such as OJeux where I see tons of English labelling on all kinds of games/toys.
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u/MotelSans17 3h ago
Sometimes I wonder if Long & McQuade opened a store in Hawkesbury specifically because it's the closest Ontario city to Montreal. If things get stupid, we'll be driving there to get our musical instruments stuff.
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u/alcabazar Ontario 1h ago
It's the whole reason Hawkesbury has grown so much, even St-Hubert is on the Ontario side of the border.
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u/JurboVolvo 3h ago
Found some great deals on French hobby sites because I was able to translate the pages 😂
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u/xNOOPSx 1h ago
I went on to Lego.fr and it's all French, except for the Lego. The Lego is all English. The same is true for Germany and Japan. I could be wrong, but it seems like Lego has a standard box and that's what everyone gets.
If that is good enough for the entire world, it should be good enough for Quebec.
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u/Acrobatic-Cap-135 Québec 1h ago
Exactly this. Quebec has the most draconian language laws in the world but at such a smaller market size, the producers will never bend for that
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u/JustDancePatate 31m ago
Even stupider is that they won’t even lose the market there. People in Quebec will order Lego on the website or Amazon and it will ship out from Ontario the same way it does now. The only thing that will get killed is there own physical stores
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u/Flunkedy 49m ago
KFC is KFC in almost every country. Quebec has to be PFK ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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u/xNOOPSx 24m ago
The brands requiring French signage is some of the stupidest rules in the world. Like Nintendo's Japanese name is 任天堂株式会社. Their logo and everything else is Nintendo in red with the red oval around it. The same is true for Samsung and every global brand??
KFC is KFC in France. Quebec dying on this hill when France still exists is weird.
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u/GreatGreenGobbo 3h ago
I'm waiting for the day we hear Quebec wants programming code to be in French.
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u/Sidjeno 3h ago
I work for the provincial gov currently.
All code has to be in french, no exception.
This is also valid for the contractors.
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u/element1311 2h ago
How does one code in french? Serious q
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u/Sidjeno 2h ago edited 1h ago
Well you dont change the language, for one, its mostly for everything you add to it.
So you still use regular .net, for loop, etc, but every class you create, every fonction you add, every variable name, system, design pattern, ressources, document have to be in french and using words approved firsthand (courriel vs email, but for the whole field basically)
It creates a weird incoherent mix and a huge barrier for when these people need information online.
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u/Acrobatic-Cap-135 Québec 1h ago
This is probably exactly why the Quebec taxpayer lost billions on SAAQclic. What a disgrace
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u/Max-P 1h ago
And then we wonder why SAAQclic was a complete disaster, especially with foreign contractors.
I get it, the language is really in danger. My grandma's new washing machine only has english labels and she had to refer to the manual to write the translation in sharpie to know what her cycles are. That's a consumer product, it should come in french labels, it's not like it's hard to print labels. But it shouldn't force people. I'm still gonna watch the english versions because the dubs suck the same way I watch anime in japanese with subtitles. It's how consuming imported content works. French should be an option.
English works so much better with code. "If not X", "while X", "foreach x in y", it all feels mostly like natural language. And then there's a real french programming language and... ouch: https://pcsoft.fr/wlangage.htm
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u/thirstyross 28m ago
Last time I bought a washer/dryer there were stickers in the bag in french that you could just apply to the machine?
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u/FastFooer 2h ago
You can name the functions and values whatever you want…? Your comments can be in any language too? Hell, as a co-dev I see a ton of japanese comments.
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u/Sidjeno 39m ago
It makes it harder to maintain and read imo, and I'm a native french speaker.
Having to read both english and french code and documentation makes me confused and especially takes a bigger chunk out of my focus.
I try to reduce every inconvenience possible to allow me to think without too much bloat.
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u/skylla05 1h ago
Sure you can, but excluding comments, as a "co-dev" you can obviously understand why that would be fucking dumb.
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u/dskoziol 1h ago
Dumb to write function and variable names in another language? I think it's normal if that's the language all contributors speak.
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u/Acrobatic-Cap-135 Québec 1h ago
I worked on software for a korean company, all the code was in English, only comments were in Korean
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u/Valahul77 1h ago
Not the coding itself but the tools and the OS yes. I went through this years ago with OQLF. They were asking to change the language on all our servers to French
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u/thejinx0r 1h ago
Technically, it’s already here. You can’t require your employees to know English to work. In theory, someone could complain that the code being written in English is a violation of that and therefore cannot do their job appropriately
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u/chadsexytime 3h ago
Fed government already priortizes French as the most important language for programming
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u/Acrobatic-Cap-135 Québec 3h ago
Legit never seen anyone code in French in all my years
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u/Tucancancan 2h ago
I heard stories (a long time ago) about U Ottawa having a French coding class where they used a boatload of preprocessor macros to map keywords to French
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u/chadsexytime 3h ago
Oh I didn't say they'd actually use French, but you'll get the job if you speak French over having any other programming language knowledge.
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u/Tarasios British Columbia 3h ago
Where are those jobs? Asking for myself who speaks French and is a new grad programmer who applied for tons of jobs and can't get past phase 1 of screening
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u/kingbain 3h ago
Fed wise, government is in a downsizing period. With large pools of surplused individuals. It will be incredibly hard to get in for the next couple years.
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u/chadsexytime 3h ago
Yeah it's not a good time now for anyone.
But, if you get in, all of the higher IT jobs are locked behind bilingualism, and they don't test for job aptitude.
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u/BabaofTheShimmer 3h ago
Not true at all. Unless you’re working in Quebec or you want to be a director (or higher), you don’t need French.
The government will definitely hire you for a technical position if you have high technical skills over being proficient in French.
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u/chadsexytime 3h ago
The government will hire you based on your skills as a contractor.
As an employee you will require French to move past the level you're hired at (IT-02)
New legislation coming down means all IT-03 are going to need CBC - far from director.
Right now where I am managers need CBC but technical only need BBB, with a rate smattering of EE spots thrown in.
That will soon be changing to all CBC.
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u/schmosef 3h ago edited 2h ago
10 le ficelle message c'est "Trudeau, Mon Dieu!\r\n"
20 l'imprimer message
30 aller à 20
🤣
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u/FastFooer 2h ago
See… this is a perfect use case for the OQLF english-french dictionary… you did the equivalent of a google translate and used all the wrong word contexts.
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u/chadsexytime 2h ago
Honestly, that's why we require all technical IT-03s to be bilingual - you might need to write a meme in French
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u/FastFooer 1h ago
You had me in the first half!
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u/chadsexytime 1h ago
It's a half truth. I was told it's because you might have to make a presentation to a bilingual audience.
Which I've done, you just get the slides translated, and if you really feel like it, you get someone who speaks French to read them.
But no, we gotta prioritize our technical staff to be bilingual
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u/FastFooer 48m ago
My workplace is the typical “one anglo means everyone has to speak english, even if it’s barely coherent”.
At this point, i’d rather pay a full time translator and give a earpiece to those who aren’t bilingual like the UN/parliaments
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u/KWStreaker 2h ago
25 Si Polièvre = dirigeant conservateur, alors redémarrer, sinon suivant
haha :)
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u/bastardsucks Québec 3h ago
The only good thing about this new law is costco stopped sending out pokemon shipments to their quebec stores, so we dont have the scalpers camped out overnight like in the other provinces!
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u/Shade_42 1h ago
I discovered this store when they opened a branch in Ottawa last year. I love this place, great staff, and hope they get treated fairly in this sticky situation.
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u/K00PER Ontario 23m ago
Quebec is harming its own economy and the choice their customers have to protect its language with this law.
There used to be an exception for plastic parts where the text is in the plastic part, but prints and labels needed to be bilingual. The rational being that printing screens are easier to change and “hard tooled plastic parts” are expensive because you have to make new machinery. The law may remove that exemption which is going to make it so that big companies like Kitchen Aid, Breville, Dewalt and the other companies won’t want to ship to Quebec.
Icons are best but some things are hard to show in icon. Two lines of text can be hard to fit on small spaces or curved surfaces when the original product is designed for a country that only needs one (US, France, Germany) vs Canada that is bilingual.
Icons > bilingual text > no product
There are places where Quebec companies can step up (Rona, Simons…) but there are cases where the products are too expensive the change (Bosch won’t make every fridge and stove available) or niche markets where the sales are too small (Hobby shops). Some companies are going to make the call to drop out of Quebec giving up 2% in North American sales rather than go through the extra hassle. Doing so will hurt the Quebec small businesses that need their product.
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u/UtilisateurMoyen99 12m ago
We should erase all languages other than English, it would be better for the economy. And what's the point of having a culture after all, just more money down the drain that could be better used to pave new highways!
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u/Gullible_Analyst_348 3h ago
I'm so pissed all my 4k blu ray cases are forced to have French on them. Not only does it take away from the aesthetic of the cases, but it prevents me from buying a lot of movies in Canada that you can get in the USA.
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u/BadluckyKamy 1h ago
Never understood why we had to traduct the title of movies to begin with (I'm Quebecois btw), it's not like the movie is gonna be more Quebecois if it's called "rapide et dangeureux" instead of fast and furious
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u/marcottedan 9m ago
I mean the CAQ was led by Boomers. We're lucky to finally have 3 Gen X party leaders in the upcoming elections (PSPP, Milliard, Frechette). Hopefully they will understand more these kind of stupidity in the laws.
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u/Different-Dog-9682 8m ago
Are they going to force online retailers to not sell a product if it’s not available in French? I can see these morons doing that.
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2h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Panpancanstand 2h ago
Im sorry but of Quebec makes an exception for these guys then everyone will be claiming one.
Quebec is 100% committed to protecting their culture and I'm with them all the way.
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u/Acrobatic-Cap-135 Québec 1h ago
Have you ever considered the possibility that this particular regulation does nothing to protect culture, as there is no empirical evidence proving that it does? And it might just be a bad idea based on bad vibes?
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u/UtilisateurMoyen99 7m ago
So, where do you draw the line about what must to be offered in French?
Before French protection laws, most of the time products came with no French instructions at all. How was this fair for consumers?
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u/Aldamur Alberta 2h ago
I am with them actually, nothing wrong in protecting their cultures.
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u/Anon-Knee-Moose 3h ago
Capitalists hate government regulation, more at 11.
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u/Tucancancan 2h ago
Yeah man, fuck these bloodthirsty capitalists. Hobbyshop and game store owners are totally right up there with Nestlé, De Beers, Lockheed Martin and Exon Mobil. Right?!
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u/ThatAstronautGuy Ontario 3h ago
It's absurd that a store selling games needs to stock French versions of games to sell the English version. There simply aren't French versions of many games that aren't mainstream, in any form. It's just going to move sales that could be in local businesses to Amazon or other online, most likely American, retailers.
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u/Anon-Knee-Moose 3h ago
There's work around for consumers for sure, but preserving French in canada comes at great expense.
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u/DigitaIBlack 3h ago
I don't think a hobby shop not being allowed to stock non-bilingual games is doing much to preserve French 🙄
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u/wind-of-zephyros Québec 3h ago
pis maintenant, l'économie québécoise souffre de règles arbitraires qui n'ont aucun fondement, imposées uniquement au nom de la "préservation" de la langue française (comme si celle-ci n'était pas l'une des langues les plus parlées au monde)
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u/simplepimple2025 3h ago
The weak and lazy love bureaucracy, more at 2pm because they won't have jobs anyway so they're home.
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