Yesterday the Quebec national assembly unamiously passed a resolution to request merchants no longer use the currently common greeting “bonjour/hi” but rather replace it with just bonjour.

French is after all the official language of la belle province, and including English in the greeting is annoying, apparently.

A one sided approach

Of course the required greeting for all federal agencies “bonjour/hello” is okay, Canada the nation is bilingual  so this greeting is common sense but it is in fact mandated by the agencies.

Almost all my siblings work for the federal government and they have told me it is a serious offence for any employee to not open the conversation in both official languages.

If the government representative is prompted to continue in a language they do not speak (not all federal employees are bilingual, although many are) they must immediately seek support of a colleague that does speak the language the citizen prefers (English or French)

Contravening this requirement is considered a serious performance infraction and if discovered becomes part of your permanent performance record and if repeated can lead to dire concequences.

Is Quebecs appraoch this really important?

The national assembly is really reinforcing the symbolic importance of language to the culture.  For bilingual Canada reinforcing the multilingual culture is a critical statement for our country.

All provinces come under this bilingual umbrella and although Quebec considers itself unique I find this trivial waste of time on language trivialities insulting to the rest of Canada.

Imagine the furor in Quebec if another province requested their merchants to never greet a customer with bonjour.

Ah the insanity of it all, can’t we just be friends?