Stop asking Quebec managers for English the job does not use

When I reviewed our Quebec job postings in 2022, nine of fourteen district and regional management roles listed English as a requirement. Nobody had decided that. The requirement had accumulated, posting by posting, because the people who wrote the descriptions worked in English and assumed that anyone senior would need it. My position is that a company operating in Quebec should be able to give a written reason, based on the duties, for every language requirement other than French in a Quebec role, and that the cost of operating across two languages should be carried by the head office rather than by the careers of capable Quebec managers.

I hold that view as an employer's practice, not only as a legal reading. Quebec's Charter of the French language gives workers the right to carry on their activities in French and limits when an employer may require another language. Since the 2022 amendments, an employer must be able to show that the duties genuinely need the other language and that it has taken reasonable steps to avoid the requirement. Those obligations are real, and I take them seriously. But a company that treats them only as a compliance threshold will meet the letter and miss the point.

How the requirement crept in

The mechanism is ordinary. A head office in Ontario holds its operations calls in English. A district manager in Quebec who struggles on those calls is described in a performance review as a weak communicator. The next posting for the role asks for fluent English, because that seems to be what the role needs. Within a few years, the language of the head office has become a qualification for Quebec promotion, and nobody has made a decision anyone could defend.

The cost shows up in who gets promoted. In 2021, three of our eleven store-manager appointments in Quebec were internal. Our Ontario stores, with similar turnover, promoted from within at roughly twice that rate. When we looked at the Quebec candidates who had not been appointed, several of the strongest had been rated down on communication, and the communication in question was with head office in English. Their stores performed well. Their French-speaking teams and customers had no complaints about how they communicated.

There was a second cost, less visible. Of our 310 training modules, 42% existed only in English, so Quebec colleagues either completed them in a second language or did not complete them. Training completion in Quebec stores was 58%, and we had been treating that as a motivation problem.

A written reason for every exception

From late 2022, any Quebec posting that requires a language other than French must carry a short written reason based on the duties: who the person must speak or write to in that language, how often and why the work cannot be arranged otherwise. Someone outside the hiring line reviews the reason. Twelve of the fourteen management roles dropped the requirement. The two that kept it are roles that deal daily with English-speaking suppliers, and the reason says so.

The test is deliberately practical. A reason such as contact with head office fails, because the head office can arrange interpretation or write in French. A reason such as weekly telephone negotiation with three English-speaking fencing manufacturers passes, and the posting then states how much English is needed and for what. Writing a reason takes a hiring manager about ten minutes. Most of ours found that they could not write one.

We also changed the things that had created the requirement. Company-wide operations calls now have simultaneous interpretation. Training for Quebec stores is written in French with Quebec store colleagues, not translated afterwards, and we re-authored 130 modules in that way. We delayed our new scheduling application by seven months until managers could use it in French.

The results took two years to show. Training completion in Quebec stores rose to 93%. When the scheduling application launched there, 96% of store managers were using it within eight weeks, a higher rate than in Ontario. In 2024, twelve of fourteen store-manager appointments in Quebec were internal. I do not attribute all of that to language. The hub-store programme that develops successors in small towns reached Quebec in the same period. But the internal candidates who were appointed included several whom the old postings would have excluded.

The cost of a bilingual head office

This approach costs money, and the cost falls on the head office. Interpretation and translation cost us about C$380,000 a year. Re-authoring training cost most of a C$2.4 million one-off budget. The delay to the scheduling application postponed more than C$1.2 million of savings. Some Ontario colleagues found interpreted meetings slower and said so, and they were not wrong.

The objection I hear most often is that a senior manager in a company run from Ontario will have a better career with English, whatever the posting says. That is true, and I would not discourage anyone from learning a language. The question is who should carry the cost of the company's choice to run its head office in one language. Before 2022 our Quebec managers carried it, in promotions they did not receive. Now the company carries it in its budget, where a board can see it and decide whether it is worth paying.

There is a limit to my argument. Some roles in Quebec do need English, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest and, for those roles, unworkable. The written reason exists for them. I also learnt that a French-first approach in Quebec does not cover all our French-speaking colleagues. Four of our stores in New Brunswick serve mainly French-speaking communities, and until 2025 their staff received English-only material because our review had been framed around Quebec law rather than around the people who work for us.

My suggestion to any company with Quebec operations is simple. Pull every Quebec management posting from the past three years and read the language requirements. For each, ask whether someone could write a reason that would satisfy a colleague who does the job. Where nobody can, remove the requirement and look at what the head office would need to change. That change is the real cost of operating in Quebec, and it belongs in the head office's budget.