Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana
The Legault government hasn’t forgotten the past. It’s just ignoring it.
It’s been only six years since “Pastagate,” the farce that made Quebec an international laughingstock. That’s when the province’s “language police,” as many anglos call them, ordered an Italian restaurant to change a menu because the names of the dishes were in Italian only.
Now, there are two persistent myths about Pastagate. One is that the province’s language-law enforcement agency, the Office québécois de la langue française, declared the Italian names illegal. In fact, it ordered the restaurant to add French equivalents.
The other myth, promoted by Quebec’s political class, is that the OQLF misinterpreted Bill 101. In fact, while the agency confessed under orders from its political masters to having been “overzealous,” its interpretation of the language law was correct.
Pastagate followed what was already a familiar pattern. The Office, responding to pressure from Quebec’s small but noisy flock of language hawks to crack down on violations of Bill 101, received a complaint about the menu.
The complaint obviously originated with one of the Bill 101 hobbyists who know the more than 200 articles of the law by heart, and go looking for even minor infractions of obscure rules to report to the OQLF. (Yes, there are such people.)
The Office dutifully investigated the complaint. It found that while there was a version of the menu describing each dish in French, the names of the dishes were in Italian only, a violation.
When the owner of the restaurant received the Office’s order to change its menus, instead of quietly complying, he protested in social media. The mainstream media picked up the story of Quebec’s language police ordering an Italian restaurant to change a menu bearing the Italian names of Italian dishes, called it “Pastagate,” and spread it around the world, making the province look ridiculous.
Commentators and politicians ran for cover, blaming the OQLF for overzealousness and lacking judgment in, after all, doing its job the way some of them had been pressuring it to do it.
The then Parti Québécois government, which had proposed legislation giving the Office additional powers, abruptly reversed itself, ordering it to confess to abusing the ones it already had, and find some pretext to drop the case.
It did, and the government made the chair of the OQLF the scapegoat by sacking her.
These days, Hollywood loves remakes, and apparently, so does the Legault government. It’s working on one that follows the script of the original Pastagate.
The minister responsible for French in the nationalist Coalition Avenir Québec government, Nathalie Roy, has ordered the OQLF to enforce Bill 101’s rules on the language of commercial signs more strictly.
The premier himself took the hard line on enforcement this week. The Lachute hospital ordered by the OQLF to replace its bilingual signs with ones in French only “was not respecting the law,” François Legault said. “Bill 101 must be respected. That’s what we will do.” Nationalist commentators declared that Legault had passed a test of his resolve, and applauded.
(One member of Legault’s government was slow to understand the message. Legault’s parliamentary assistant for relations with English-speaking Quebecers, Christopher Skeete, contradicted his boss, then hastily backed down, looking politically incompetent and ineffectual, and hasn’t been heard from since.)
And this week, a Le Journal de Montréal columnist reported a “rumour” that the government intends to “strike a great blow in favour of French.” Gilles Proulx did not name a source for the “rumour,” but one of Legault’s ministers is his niece.
In Roy’s order to the OQLF to crack down, she contradicted herself by also telling the Office to exercise “good judgment” to avoid another Pastagate.
She was already covering herself and setting up the OQLF for blame in anticipation. Because we’ve seen this movie, and we know how it turns out.
