You're not too far off. Companies have to, with growing size, do more and more stuff in french. At large companies that aren't exempt you must have a french keyboard for example and code comments have to be in french.
Any large company should have a policy document which states the absurd rules including installation of French software versions and use of French keyboards, hiring and e-mail policies. I believe the policies only apply to businesses with over 50 employees so you would not have encountered them in the public sector.
Wow. I've heard that all of these "you have to use French" rules in Quebec are a reaction to years of French-Canadians in Quebec being treated as second class to the English-Canadians. Doesn't make them any less stupid.
A more cynical one would be that very few anglophones would ever vote "Oui" in a secession referendum. Therefore the Parti Québécois had motivation to make life as uncomfortable as possible for english speakers, hoping they'd give up and move to Ontario.
Probably both explanations have some amount of truth to them.
I think it does. Language discrimination can be an extremely vitriolic form of oppression, and don't underestimate how much it sucks to be a second class citizen in your own country. Just look at the AAVE thread on HN a couple of weeks ago.
AAVE is one dialect among dozens in the US that will get you discriminated against. I grew up in Appalachia (West Virginia/southwestern Virginia line) and when I'm at home or with friends/relatives, my natural dialect is potent.
However, over many years, starting in late high school, I trained myself to speak in a more standard form of English to protect myself from the discrimination of the "hillbilly" stigma. This is my formal dialect, and I use it in business and in formal/sem-formal scholastic settings. My father was the one who encouraged me to do this. As a child, I noticed that he spoke differently when making business calls. He told me that, when "you are trying to make money, trying to learn to make money, or dealing with somebody who wants your money, you speak their language."
This knowledge of using a non-native, standard dialect in business/government/education communications is extremely common, and is especially common amongst the mainstream African American community. The issue with AAVE is only when children are raised in broken families by parents who are too ignorant/disengaged/etc to teach children the standard, formalized dialect that every other ethnic group in America is expected to adhere to. I can't speak in a courtroom in my native dialect and be taken seriously, even if I'm in Charleston, West Virginia. (The exceptions to this are in identity politics. Lots of deep southern politicians use their native accent, and then there is the Charleston dialect, which uses proper grammar but drops the "r's", so is therefore acceptable in formal settings.)
But that's my point. Dialects are entirely arbitrary, yet there is overt discrimination against particular ones, combined with classist and or racist overtones. Given that sort of discrimination, one can at least put together a picture of why the French in Quebec are as protective of their language as their historical marginalization.
My family is from Bangladesh, which separated from Pakistan (in an independence war), over language differences. Historically, those language differences were a proxy for the cultural marginalization of Bengalis within the Pakistani state.
So when we hear about the Quebecois requiring the use of French, and we think "oh those silly French Canadians" we have to remember that there is a lot more to language than just how people speak.
Quebec? I don't see it happening. It has been like that for as long as I can remember. They can't even enter McDonald's contests like Monopoly. They have their own separate contests.
> They can't even enter McDonald's contests like Monopoly.
This is plain wrong. The McDonald’s Monopoly contest is held in all (participating) Canadian McDonald’s restaurants, including Quebec’s. Source: I live in Quebec.
Yes and it's run separately from the rest of Canada's monopoly. Look at the fine print on the prizes in the Ontario McDonald's monopoly which clearly states that it excludes Quebec. Source: I live in Quebec.
The Imp of the Recursive in my head was imagining an alternate programming culture like a Quebec version of steam-punk.