MONTREAL - The brittle thaw in linguistic relations between Quebec's two solitudes is being tested by a fresh round of activism aimed at such popular unilingual brand names as Best Buy, Future Shop and Payless.
Emboldened by Imperial Oil's (TSX:IMO) recent decision to back away from renaming their Marche Express stores in Quebec to On The Run, groups dedicated to protecting French in the province are eager to tackle what they see as a threatening tide of English.
"The proliferation of brand names in English compromises the French face of Montreal,'' Mario Beaulieu, spokesman for Mouvement Montreal Francais, told a news conference Saturday.
Beaulieu's group was distributing flyers Saturday outside a downtown subway station that urged consumers to boycott stores in the province that only have English brand names.
He said the presence of unilingual store signs such as Future Shop and Best Buy "adds to other factors of anglicization, like the bilingualism of public services and the undue demands of English in the labour market.''
Mouvement Montreal Francais was among the French-language that scored a coup in lobbying Imperial Oil to stick to the French-language name of its Quebec stores.
But the renewed militancy of language activists could come at the cost of the relative linguistic peace Quebec has enjoyed in recent years.
Memories of the heated disputes over the provinces's sign laws that marked Quebec politics in the 1990s are still fresh for many anglophones.
Brent Tyler, a former president of the now-defunct anglo-rights group Alliance Quebec, warns that Quebec's anglophones have never fully accepted Bill 101, the law which requires French to be predominant on commercial signs.
"The reality is that the grassroots of the English community has never agreed with this law,'' Tyler said in a phone interview.
Tyler, a Montreal lawyer who now fights for increased access to English schools, dismissed Beaulieu's arguments with harsh words that harkened back to some of the pre-referendum rhetoric of the early 1990s.
"These fanatics...run to the barricades when there is the slightest indication of more English,'' Tyler said. "It's pathetic really, it's comical, because the French language is not threatened in Quebec.''
According to figures from Statistics Canada, the proportion of Quebecers reporting French as their mother tongue has remained stable in recent years, while the anglophone population has continued to decline.
But despite provisions in Quebec's language laws that allow companies to use English trade names, Tyler doesn't expect the issue will go away quietly.
"This subject is going to become considerably hotter now, because we're going to start talking about it,'' he said.
