“The CAQ said we would continue to get health care in English, yet they are doing everything they can to complicate things,” said protest organizer Claudia Ottaviano.
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A group of demonstrators is planning to hold a protest and rally on Saturday afternoon in front of Santa Cabrini Hospital to denounce verifications of health-care facilities by the province’s French-language watchdog, the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF).
“What the Office québécois de la langue française is doing is unacceptable,” protest organizer Mario Napolitano said. “We don’t want them to go into places for people to heal. They go into businesses. It’s too much now. People who go to the hospital are at their worst, and they’re going in, pestering the staff.”
Bouchard added that the visit was also intended to verify whether staff were “able to operate the biomedical equipment in French” and whether the instruction manuals were in French.
The visit to Santa Cabrini and to the Jewish General Hospital last year (where a language inspector requested that donor plaques in English and Yiddish also be added in French) is part of an effort by the OQLF to expand its verifications beyond businesses. The OQLF aims to ensure that Bill 96, the Coalition Avenir Québec’s overhaul of the Charter of the French Language adopted in 2022, is enforced.
“Basically, we want to call them out,” Napolitano said, alluding to the OQLF. “We need the average person to call them out. We’re working with a lot of old folks groups in Saint-Léonard, Italian groups. We expect quite a few. There are a lot of old women’s associations and men’s soccer clubs we’re trying to get to actually come out.”
Claudia Ottaviano, another protest organizer, argued that the “OQLF’s recent actions on the staff at Santa Cabrini Hospital … is overreach by the government, intrusive, and counters anglophones’ rights to health care in English.
“The CAQ said we would continue to get health care in English, yet they are doing everything they can to complicate things.”
Bill 96 requires that all government workers, including those in hospitals and nursing homes, use French “systematically” in written and oral communications with their clients, with certain exceptions, like emergencies.
Anna Gainey, MP for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount riding, posted on X that she was “very troubled about what I’m hearing. I will be meeting with colleagues, community leaders and other elected officials to understand the impact on our community and our institutions.”
Anthony Housefather, MP for Mount Royal riding, took to X, too, denouncing the language directive as “misleading.” He added that “in any designated bilingual institution (French/English) any patient who asks should be served in English.”
Meanwhile, West Island Liberal MNA Gregory Kelley called on Premier François Legault to “quickly organize a meeting with community leadership to sort this out.”