June 2025 is barely a year away; a very short deadline, especially if we include the summer, when business is slow, estimates Michel Rochette, president for Quebec of the Retail Council of Canada, who reacted to the new signage requirements.
“It’s just a few months to make changes that, in some cases, will affect dozens and dozens of merchants,” he says. “For some banners, it’s a huge change.”
The regulation, which aims to combat the erosion of French in commercial signage, requires that French appear “clearly predominant” on the front of a business. Concretely, there must now be twice as much French on the surface area, if there is also another language. We will no longer be satisfied with a little “les cafés” in front of a name in a foreign language that is much more prominent.
The Retail Council of Canada had asked for more time to allow businesses to make changes that are sometimes more complicated than they seem. “We repeated it to the minister,” says Michel Rochette, who specifies that he carried this message on all platforms: “give businesses time to comply.”
Especially, he says, that’s what was originally announced. “When the government revealed its intentions in 2022, with the adoption of Bill 96, it announced that for the upcoming changes, businesses would have three years to adapt. »
At the Quebec Employers Council, we also believe that the deadlines required by Quebec are too tight.
“According to the regulation, businesses have until June 1, 2025 to comply; it is too little to carry out in-depth changes in business models,” argued in a press release Me Sandra De Cicco, Vice-President – Labor, Health and Legal Affairs of the Council.
Quebec also announced that the Office québécois de la langue française will increase its surveillance.
Could a merchant who is in the process of making the changes benefit from some tolerance after June 2025?
According to the Retail Council of Canada, if a complaint is filed, Quebec will then have all the powers to enforce the regulation. “The law is the law,” says Michel Rochette. And the law says: it’s June 1st. »
Merchants expect to have details on product inscriptions in a few months, in the fall. We are talking here about indications on products, such as household appliances – in the case of a unilingual “on-off” mention, for example.
“The accumulation of all these rules necessarily sends the signal that the Quebec market is a single market,” says Michel Rochette, who is also thinking about the provisions governing the sustainability of future products.
According to him, in the cases of multinationals for whom the Quebec market represents a fraction of sales, and the only French-speaking market, “it may be easier to say that we are going to concentrate on other markets.” He believes that the discourse that surrounds and will surround these rules is of great importance. Merchants must understand that Quebec “is open to the economy.”
“We ourselves are an export market,” he says. Our Quebec producers sell abroad. It’s important that there is some form of reciprocity. »