MONTREAL - Quebec governments, particularly those of the sovereignist persuasion, like to preen when the world takes notice of the province.
Not so last week, however.
Two things got Quebec unusually prominent coverage beyond its borders. One was the raid on Montreal’s city hall by the provincial anti-corruption squad. Even bigger news abroad was the crackdown by the province’s language police on one of Montreal’s leading Italian restaurants, Buonanotte, for having Italian words, such as pasta, on its menu.
“Heaven forbid!” was the rest of the world’s tongue-in-cheek reaction. Pastagate, as the scandal was risibly dubbed, made it onto CNN and Fox News and resonated as far away as New Zealand. Needless to say, the Italian papers had a field day with the story of an Italian restaurant found to be too, well, Italian.
(Almost as risible was the reaction of some of the province’s prominent French-language hawks to the brouhaha. Former PQ MNA and language hardliner Pierre Curzi suggested it might be a sabotage operation on the eve of public hearings on the province’s latest language law, while professional anglophobe Mario Beaulieu of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste denounced it as anti-Quebec propaganda.)
An embarrassed Parti Québécois government reacted by leaning on its language-enforcement authority, the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), to say that it had acted with an excess of zeal in going after Buonanotte for its offending menu. Then on the weekend, the minister responsible for the province’s language law, Diane de Courcy, pleaded that the OQLF should not be judged on the basis of a single incident.
But it turns out that the tongue-trooper descent on Buonanotte was far from an isolated case. After its owner spoke out, others were emboldened to report similar harassment over trivial violations of the letter of the language law in their establishments.
Owners of several Italian restaurants in Quebec City said they had been subjected to similar nitpicking over Italian terms on their menus. One establishment, Portofino Bistro Italiano, was ordered to add the word restaurant to its sign and stationery, as though francophones might be unclear on what the establishment was about.
World-class eatery Joe Beef in Montrealwas subject to harassment for a pair of innocuous decorative signs in English on its premises. When a language inspector descended on Holder, a popular Parisian-style brasserie in Old Montreal, she was shocked to find the words Hold and Redial on the staff telephone, and a switch marked On/Off on the microwave, and ordered the owner cover them with tape.
Also found unacceptable at Holder were the letters WC on a toilet door and the word steak on a kitchen chalkboard where the chef wrote his grocery list. Pleas that WC, even though it stands for water closet, is common usage on public bathrooms in France, and that steak is as commonly used in French as in English, were of no avail.
(As La Presse columnist Yves Boisvert wrote in reporting the Holder episode, if you were to quibble to a Parisian waiter serving steak-frites that you would prefer to have it called biftek – as the OQLF decrees – you would be liable to have it delivered in your face.)
For all the giggles to be had in sending up the petty absurdities of language law enforcement in Quebec, the crackdown on restaurants is in part motivated by complaints from an intolerant minority of language fanatics, and in part by the desire of OQLF functionaries to please their PQ political masters who campaigned on a platform calling for further repression of languages other than French in the public sphere.
It is small-minded and excessively intolerant, and there is nothing funny about that.
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Photograph by: John Mahoney , The Gazette