Colby Cosh on the real tension behind Bill 101 and the Pasta Affair
By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - 0 Comments
In Sunday’s Montreal Gazette, Don Macpherson offers a convincing argument that Quebec’s pasta-police scandal has been deliberately obfuscated by the Parti Québécois ministry. The Office Québécois de la Langue Française, he suggests, did not misinterpret the law in a fit of “overzealousness”: he figures they probably interpreted it correctly, as written. The main text of Bill 101 specifically insists that menus must be written in French; there are exemptions in the regulations for packaging of “exotic product[s] or foreign specialt[ies]”, but the exemptions don’t make any mention of menus.
Macpherson suggests that, in the great tradition of Westminsterian democracy, some anonymous uncivil servant is being thrown under the proverbial autobus for following through on both the letter and the actual intention of the law. “The point here,” he says, “is not that the names should be illegal, but that in Quebec, they are”—along with, as other reporting has revealed, English-language knick-knacks on restaurant walls and English-language buttons on their telephones and microwave ovens. “Zealous” surveillance of businesses for linguistic purity, after all, isn’t some wacky unintended consequence of Bill 101. It’s the essence of the thing.
But couldn’t this analysis be carried up to another level? The original flashpoint of the scandal was the OQLF’s orders to a restaurant that had the word “pasta” on the menu. Given the premise of cultural protection that justifies the existence of an Office of the French Language, shouldn’t the real objection be to the presence of… the stuff itself? Isn’t Italian cuisine just as much of a homogenizing, globalist cultural intrusion as the English language? Montreal is famous for just about every kind of cooking that’s not authentically Québécois, from French-French food to bagels and smoked meat to Joe Beef’s spaghetti homard. Doesn’t this represent a definitive failure of the PQ’s cultural immune system?
This is perhaps the real tension behind the Pasta Affair. The purpose of Quebec language law is to reinforce the permanent “just visiting” status of every ethnic and cultural group other than French-Canadians, including Montreal Anglos who are hardly less indigenous to the province than its francophones. It is thought unseemly to make this explicit; how much less so to point out that when it comes to a hundred non-language aspects of culture, Montreal is a resplendent machine, possibly unique in the world, of cultural remixing and appropriation and innovation.
One might even say it’s the English language of cities. And, of course, it’s precisely the lack of engineered cultural defence that made the English language so dominant on the globe. (It was carried abroad on a vast military empire, but then, so were Dutch and Mongolian.) But the minute the Parti Québécois accepted that premise, it would have to, in the words of Douglas Adams, vanish in a puff of logic.
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Quebec hoping to turn ‘Pastagate’ page; review its handling of language law violations
By Nelson Wyatt, The Canadian Press - Monday, February 25, 2013 at 5:37 PM - 0 Comments
MONTREAL – A public-relations stew involving pasta has pushed the Quebec government to re-examine…
MONTREAL – A public-relations stew involving pasta has pushed the Quebec government to re-examine its recipe for handling alleged violations of the province’s language law.
Stories about overzealous employees of the provincial language watchdog have multiplied in recent days, following the report about an Italian restaurant being reprimanded for having Italian on its menu.
The co-called Pastagate story received a whopping 60 times more news coverage outside the province than a recent trip where Premier Pauline Marois tried drumming up foreign investment in the province, according to a media-analysis company.
The government moved Monday to turn the page.
Diane De Courcy, the minister responsible for Quebec’s Charter of the French Language, announced an internal review aimed at improving the performance of the Office quebecois de la langue francaise.
“Unfortunately, the results of certain inquiries have lent themselves, with reason, to very severe criticism,” she said in a statement on Monday.
“This is not desirable, not for the businesses, not for the Office personnel, not for francophones or anglophones.”
She said her department will act quickly to see how complaints about language-law violations can be handled “without creating initial irritants.”
“Pastagate” stems from a visit by an inspector for the Office quebecois de la langue francaise to a trendy Montreal restaurant.
Buonanotte owner Massimo Lecas was told after an investigation that the menu violated Quebec’s language law and that Italian terms such as pasta had to be replaced with French-language equivalents.
The story burned up social and mainstream media and the Office relented, admitting the inspector was overzealous and should have considered a cultural exception contained in the language law.
But that story has prompted a number of other restaurants, including some famous ones, to go public with complaints about similar dealings with the OQLF.
The head of a company that does media analysis says the story about the crackdown on Buonanotte, which is popular with sports and entertainment stars as well as politicians, got significantly more coverage in out-of-province news reports than a recent trip where the premier promoted Quebec.
“Every time the media mentioned, as an example, the visit of Pauline Marois in New York, we got 60 mentions for the Pastagate,” said Jean-Francois Dumas, president of Influence Communication, when asked to compare the public-relations impact.
While most of the stories were in Canada, Pastagate was chronicled in 350 articles in 14 countries, as far away as Australia, when it broke last week.
“It’s in the traditional media,” he said of the news outlets that picked up the story.
“I mean all the newspapers, radio, TV and the web version of traditional media.”
Influence, which has been operating for 12 years, looks at coverage in 160 countries with its partners. It tracks traditional and social media, such as Twitter and Facebook.
Dumas noted that the Pastagate coverage comes after a period of negative news out of the province that included sometimes-rowdy student protests, investigations into political corruption and lurid crime such as the case of alleged dismemberment killer Luka Rocco Magnotta.
In the same week as Pastagate grabbed headlines, the media was also abuzz with an alleged incident of police brutality in Trois-Rivieres, Que., that was apparently caught on camera and went viral, including on CNN.
It’s been a humbling few months, news-wise, he said.
“We’re not proud of Quebec right now,” he said, adding that the TV and phone-in show coverage in the rest of the country of Pastagate is “embarrassing” for Quebecers.
Dumas says the coverage probably won’t scare off investors, a belief that was echoed by Carlos Leitao, chief economist for the Laurentian Bank.
“I don’t think it has any meaningful impact on business decisions,” he said of negative coverage.
“Having said that, if it persists, if it continues, if there are several news (stories) like that, then it might start to colour some business decisions.”
