Quebec (Attorney General) c. 156158 Canada Inc. (Boulangerie Maxie's)
[1] The defendants are all Anglophone merchants who operate their businesses in or around the Montreal area. They are charged with having violated various provisions of the Charter of the French Language (hereinafter referred to as CFL) that prohibit or restrict the use of a language other than French on public signs, posters, advertising, brochures and packaging.
[2] The nature of the violations to the CFL is best described by grouping them into four different categories :
1. Bilingual outdoor signs (French-English) that failed to respect the marked predominance of the French language (s. 58 of the CFL). In essence, the fault of the defendants lay in posting a sign wherein the space allotted to the English text was equal to the space allotted to the French text. For the Attorney General of Quebec, marked predominance at section 58 of the CFL requires that the French text on a sign be at least twice the size of the characters or space allotted the text printed in the other language.
2. Commercial signs written in a language other than French (s. 58 of the CFL). Here, the merchants were at fault for having commercial signs written only in English.
3. The inscriptions on a product, on its container or on its wrapping, or a document supplied with it were not in French or did not have a French equivalent (s. 51 of the CFL).
4. Catalogues, brochures, folders, commercial directories and any similar publications that were not drawn up in French (s. 52 of the CLF): Here, the fault of the merchants lay in promoting their goods and services on the internet exclusively in English.
