French language requirements of Bill 96 and June 1, 2025: Common Misconceptions

With the approach of June 1st, many of our clients are coming to us to ensure that they are compliant with Bill 96 by the « due date ». This is not surprising considering the attention that this particular date has attracted, both in the media and law firm marketing publications, when discussing the new amendments to the Charter of the French Language (“Charter”) enacted by the bill.  But what exactly is happening on June 1st, and more specifically not happening on June 1st? In this blog post, we will deal with a few common misconceptions that our clients have been faced with.

My product packaging and labelling has to be compliant with Bill 96 by June 1st

The requirement pursuant to which no language other than French may be given greater prominence in the packaging and labelling of products sold in Quebec has been in force since 1977, when the Charter was first adopted.

There is a change coming into force on June 1, 2025, to the effect that all generic terms or descriptions of a product will follow that same rule regardless of whether they are incorporated in an application or registration for a trademark in a language other than French, with the exception of name of the enterprise and the name of the product as sold, as well as designations of origin and distinctive names of a cultural nature, which may appear in a language other than French.

As explained in a prior post, these new requirements were enacted to curb the practice whereby manufacturers would file for trademark applications covering wide expanses of the product label in order to be able to claim that such portion of the label should be dealt with as a trademark and therefore be allowed to appear in a language other than French only, to avoid having to translate as much as possible of the label. This practice was seen as potentially depriving French speaking customers of relevant information on the products.

Note that these new requirements benefit from a grace period, and until June 1, 2027, products that are non-compliant with them with may be distributed, retailed, leased, offered for sale or lease, or otherwise offered on the market, provided (i) they were manufactured before June 1, 2025, and (ii) no French-language version of the product’s recognized trademark within the meaning of the Canadian Trademarks Act was registered as of June 26, 2024. Note that this grace period only applies in respect of the new requirements regarding generic and descriptive terms, and not to the overall requirements to have French inscriptions be as prominent as inscriptions in another language, which as noted above have been in force for almost 50 years now.

My website has to be available in French by June 1st

Bill 96 did not materially change the requirement of having websites available in French to the benefit of the Quebec public. Therefore if your website is non-compliant, you are already non-compliant as of today, and may have been so for quite some time.

That said, because of the media exposure given to the coming into force of certain other changes to the Charter on June 1, 2025, you may expect an increased risk of having a consumer complaint filed with the regulator (the Office québecois de la langue française) regarding a non-compliant website.

I have to register with the regulator by June 1st if I have more than 25 employees

That is partially correct. The obligation to register with the regulator (as a first step of your francization journey) kicks in once you have had 25 employees or more for a period of six (6) months, in which case the registration has to be completed within six (6) months of the end of that period.

The change brought forth by Bill 96 has been to reduce the employee threshold triggering registration from 50 employees to 25 employees. Therefore, if you have had more than 50 employees for a long time, you may also have been non-compliant for some time.

That said, you can again expect additional scrutiny from the regulator following June 1, 2025. I invite you to consult the related blog post on the francization process from our labour and employment group.

My storefront signage has to be in French by June 1st

While the use of a trademark in a language other than French remains permissible, the obligations regarding the presence of French in public signage have indeed received a huge boost under Bill 96. The use of a trademark in a language other than French has been permitted since 2016, as long as a sufficient presence of French was also visible. But from June 1, 2025, the space dedicated to French text must be at least twice as large as the content in English, including in the case of public signage visible from the outside of a building. The regulator has been kind enough to provide useful visual guidance on what storefronts would be deemed compliant from June 1st.

While for many businesses, this is one of the Bill 96 changes with the most significant operational and financial impact, with no relief period being granted for the implementation of the necessary changes. It is worth remembering that a large number of establishments have already expended significant sums to come into compliance with the previous obligations regarding public signage that came into force in 2016 (with a 3-year relief period having been granted at that time).

Given all of the new changes coming into force on June 1st, we expect the regulator to be quite busy over the next few months. We will closely follow how it chooses to enforce these new rules. Our team will be happy to assist you navigating your compliance journey.