If language police is what I think it is, it doesn't fine for bad command of the language, but rather for using the wrong language after being asked nicely twice.
You are presumably referring to the OQLF (a provincial institution, not a “Canadian” one) which enforces French as the dominant public language in Quebec. Given that Quebec, despite being surrounded by the Anglosphere, hasn’t ended up like Louisiana or Ireland where French or Irish as the primary native language is a distant memory, suggests that their efforts are successful.
The language police are mentioned on page 65 of "Solomon Gursky Was Here" by Mordecai Richler, published 1989:
The lot outside The Caboose, punctured with potholes, overlooked a lush meadow lined with cedars. There were picnic tables out there as well as an enormous barbecue, the engine a salvage job done on an abandoned four-stroke lawn mower. Sundays in summer the truculent and hungover Rabbit would turn up at seven A.M. to begin roasting a pig or a couple of shoulders of beef for the community dinner, all you could eat for five bucks, proceeds to The Old Folks Home in Rock Island. The Rabbit was once dismissed for pissing in the fire. "People was looking and it puts them off their feed." He was fired again for falling asleep in the grass after guzzling his umpteenth Molson and failing to notice that the spit hadn't been revolving properly for more than an hour. Then he beat up an inspector from the Commission de la Langue Francaise outside The Thirsty Boot on the 243. According to reports the inspector had ordered The Thirsty Boot to take down their sign and replace it with a French one. "Sure thing," the Rabbit had said, kneeing the inspector in the groin, just to cut him down to his own height before laying into him. "We're gonna put up a pepper sign all right. Only it's gonna read 'De Tirsty Boot'." After that he could do no wrong.
It is rather telling that Quebec had to repeatedly to use the "notwithstanding clause" of the Canadian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms (which is basically a legal way for the province of saying "fuck you, we don't care about your pesky rights") to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_33_of_the_Canadian_Cha...
It’s also worth pointing out that Quebec was conquered by military force, has never agreed to be bound by the Canadian constitution, and follows it under duress.
Indeed they may be violating something that the Canadian constitution — a document they never agreed to — describes as a “right”. On the other hand, on the scale of human rights, the right of business owners to publicly display English-only signs is a rather weak one and reasonable people could debate whether it’s fundamental and inalienable.
The CHRF rights that they circumvented "notwithstanding" are pretty generic and commonly recognized human rights, not something that the Anglos invented specifically for Canada.
And it was far more extensive than shop signs, but e.g. using genealogy to decide which children may or may not attend English-language schools. Although even wrt shop signs, you're still omitting important details - forcing shops to put French on signs is not unreasonable per se, but forcing them to make it larger than English even in cases where French is already perfectly visible and legible (i.e. beyond an obvious utilitarian purpose) is just petty revenge.
I also have to remind that the French are themselves colonial settlers in Canada, and that the requirement that French must be the "predominant language" on signs also applies to bilingual French/Native signs outside of official reservations.
In general, just because someone has been oppressed historically doesn't mean that they can't become oppressors themselves when they have the political power to do so. Quebec is not unique in that regard.
> The CHRF rights that they circumvented "notwithstanding" are pretty generic and commonly recognized human rights
And yet, the examples you posted don't really sound like serious human rights violations to me. So perhaps they are being interpreted expansively by Canadian jurisprudence.
> using genealogy to decide which children may or may not attend English-language schools.
Lots of places only let you attend school in the official language. So by letting people who are part of the Anglophone community (i.e., born to Anglophone parents, I guess what you're calling genealogy) attend English-language schools they're making _more_ concessions to the Anglophone minority than is generally accepted as required by human rights. I certainly don't see anyone in the political mainstream claiming that France is committing human rights violations by refusing to set up public schools in languages other than French.
> forcing them to make it larger than English even in cases where French is already perfectly visible and legible (i.e. beyond an obvious utilitarian purpose) is just petty revenge
It is not petty revenge. Well, maybe it is for some hardcore nationalists. But the more charitable interpretation, that French needs a bit of an extra push (beyond just requiring equal exposure as English) in order to withstand the huge pressure from the surrounding Anglosphere, is reasonable.
> I also have to remind that the French are themselves colonial settlers in Canada, and that the requirement that French must be the "predominant language" on signs also applies to bilingual French/Native signs outside of official reservations.
I agree with you here. Indigenous people should be able to protect their culture from the dominant surrounding Franco-Quebec culture just like Franco-Quebecers should be allowed to protect their own from the dominant surrounding Anglosphere, and I unreservedly criticize the Quebec government as hypocrites for not allowing them to.
I think it's disingenuous to describe actively forcing people to speak and write language other than their preferred one as "a bit of an extra push".
Speaking more broadly, languages aren't persons and so they don't have rights; people do. Francophone Quebecois should have the right to live in a society in which knowledge of French alone doesn't put one at a significant immediate disadvantage, but I don't think there's a right to not be offended by use of other languages around them, or to force other people to switch their primary language.
In the context of the sign law, regulations on absolute legibility of French text would be sufficient to achieve the former goal, while the actual law that Quebec has is about the latter - that is the whole point of the "extra push". If anything, I would say that that is a good example of hardcore nationalism, actually, because it places the interests of the abstract generalized nation over the interests of concrete people who live there.
