Chris Selley: Latest trial balloon from Quebec is another attack on minority rights

At this point, allowing Quebec to proceed on its current course is a bigger threat to the Canadian federation than the prospect of it leaving ever was

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-latest-trial-balloon-from-quebec-is-another-attack-on-minority-rights?fbclid=IwAR0R-q2_CGnvh17aaFZRjZscuZBojoU9peHvA5MHh-izMI7LYXq0XAQqhfs

One of the fascinating things about Quebec politics is that it’s often impossible to predict which absurdities will become controversial and which will be accepted as reasonable. The province’s linguistic and more recently cultural debates operate in an atmosphere so divorced from normal reality that it’s impossible to know how any new idea or event might react to its unique and volatile mixture of gases.

The classic example is Pastagate: An inspector from the Office québécois de la langue française found an Italian restaurant’s menu was riddled with Italian — calamari, antipasti — and issued the appropriate cease-and-desist notice. At no point did anyone suggest he had misinterpreted the law. Despite universal scorn and worldwide mockery, at no point did anyone successfully explain why this inspector’s actions were obviously ultra vires, while the OQLF’s other insane diktats — say, forcing a bilingual community newspaper to segregate English-language and French-language content such that English-only advertising will never appear on the same page as a French-language article — were reasonable.

As a result, Quebec politics is like a festival of trial balloons. Most recently we saw languages minister Simon Jolin-Barrette float the idea of banning merchants from greeting customers with “bonjour-hi” — a Downtown Montreal-ism that turns language hawks crimson with rage — only to have Premier François Legault shoot it down a couple of days later amidst widespread ridicule.