Ormstown's own language directive permits flexible communication in English for health, safety, and natural justice reasons. Its residents deserve to benefit from it.
The Ormstown Observer exists because of a simple conviction: everyone should be able to understand the rules that govern them.
That conviction is not a political position. It is not a statement about language law, or about the place of French in Québec public life. It is a belief about what democratic participation requires at its most basic level — that residents of a community, regardless of which language they read most fluently, should be able to follow what their elected council is doing, understand the notices posted on their behalf, and know their rights and obligations before they find themselves on the wrong side of them.
It is from that starting point — not from frustration, and not from a desire to relitigate Bill 96 — that this editorial is written.
Open the Ormstown municipal website at ormstown.ca. There is no language toggle. There is no English option. There is no acknowledgment that a portion of the community reads primarily in English. The site loads in French, and that is the entirety of the experience available.
Turn to the municipality’s Facebook page — the other primary channel through which Ormstown communicates with its residents. Three days ago, the municipality posted a public safety notice directed at residents of rue Hector and surrounding streets. Workers would be conducting continuous pump tests from June 22 to 25, twenty-four hours a day. A generator would be running around the clock. Residents were asked, for safety reasons, not to approach the worksite and to respect the signage in place.
The notice was posted entirely in French. At the bottom of the post, in small grey text: See translation — a link to Facebook’s automated translation tool.
That link is not a municipal accommodation. It is a third-party algorithm. The municipality did not provide it, does not control it, and takes no responsibility for its accuracy. It is, nonetheless, the only English-language resource available to an anglophone resident trying to understand why there will be noise outside their window at 3 a.m.
This is the communication environment Ormstown’s English-speaking residents navigate today — for public safety notices, for council decisions, for bylaw changes, for budget announcements, for permit requirements, for everything a municipality communicates to the people it serves.
What makes this particularly worth examining is that Ormstown has a formal, publicly available document that speaks directly to this question.
On September 8, 2025, the municipality adopted its Directive relative à l’utilisation d’une autre langue que la langue officielle — Resolution 25-09-277 — as required of all Québec municipal bodies under the Charte de la langue française as amended by Bill 96. The Directive is published on the municipality’s own website, under Politiques, programmes et subventions.
Under Theme 3, which governs communications with individuals, the Directive formally commits the municipality to communicating in a language other than French — specifically the “second most important language on the territory” — in the following circumstances:
“Lors de situations qui peuvent poser un risque pour la santé de la population, la Municipalité se donne le devoir de communiquer dans la langue officielle et dans la deuxième langue en importance sur le territoire.”
(In situations that may pose a risk to public health, the Municipality commits to communicating in the official language and in the second most important language on the territory.) This includes boil-water advisories and contamination notices.
Evacuation notices, fire, extreme weather events. The Directive goes further still: a municipal representative may use another language when a resident’s inability to understand French technical terms “peut engendrer un enjeu de sécurité sur le territoire” (could create a safety issue on the territory). This is done, the Directive states, “par souci de sécurité et pour éviter tout enjeu de non-respect d’un permis ou d’une réglementation” (out of concern for safety and to avoid any issue of non-compliance with a permit or regulation).
“La Municipalité peut utiliser une autre langue, en plus de la langue officielle, dans ses communications lorsque les principes de justice naturelle l’exigent pour bien comprendre des règlements, des procédures administratives, des constats d’infraction et des obligations financières.”
(The Municipality may use another language, in addition to the official language, in its communications when the principles of natural justice require it in order to fully understand regulations, administrative procedures, notices of infraction, and financial obligations.)
Read those three clauses together. The municipality has formally committed to bilingual communication when public health is at risk. When public safety is at risk. When residents must understand their legal obligations, their administrative procedures, or the fines they face.
Now consider the pump test notice on Facebook — a public safety communication asking residents to stay away from a worksite — posted with no English whatsoever, leaving anglophone residents dependent on an automated translation tool to understand why, for safety reasons, they should keep their distance.
The Facebook post is one example. It is not an isolated one.
Council meeting minutes are published in French only. Bylaw adoptions — including bylaws that directly affect what residents may build on their property, how they must manage their waste, or what permits they are required to obtain — are posted in French only. Public notices about consultations, zoning changes, and borrowing bylaws appear in French only. Budget announcements, which determine what residents pay and what services they receive, are communicated in French only.
None of this is a violation of Québec law. The Charte de la langue française establishes French as the sole official language of municipal administration, and the municipality is complying with that requirement.
The question this editorial raises is a different one: given that the municipality’s own Directive explicitly recognizes comprehension as a legitimate justification for using another language — in safety situations, in legal situations, in situations involving regulations and financial obligations — why does that recognition not extend to the primary channels through which all of those things are communicated?
Permit requirements are a core function of a municipal website. Council minutes are how residents learn what was decided on their behalf. Bylaw adoptions are legal instruments that govern what residents can and cannot do on their own property. A boil-water advisory is, by definition, a public health communication. These are not edge cases. They are exactly the situations the Directive addresses — precisely the circumstances where the municipality has said, in writing, that comprehension matters enough to justify flexibility.
Bill 96 is frequently cited as the reason English has disappeared from municipal communications across Québec. That citation reflects a real legal change. It is worth being precise, however, about what the law requires and what it leaves to municipal discretion.
The Loi sur la langue officielle et commune du Québec, le français, sanctioned June 1, 2022, establishes French as the sole official and common language of the Québec state. Municipal bodies must demonstrate exemplarity in its use, promotion, and protection. Formal institutional bilingualism — the right to operate in both languages as a matter of official status — is reserved for municipalities where English-speaking residents represent more than 50% of the population under article 29.1 of the Charter. Ormstown does not meet that threshold, and this editorial does not suggest otherwise.
What the Observer has not found, in reviewing the Charter, the Directive framework, or the Politique linguistique de l’État, is any provision that expressly prohibits a municipality from providing clearly identified, informational English content — bilingual summaries of public notices, accessible recaps of council decisions, plain-language explanations of bylaw changes — where French remains the authoritative version.
Supporters of French-only municipal communications argue that limiting English content encourages the use of French in public life and better reflects the objectives of Bill 96. That concern deserves to be taken seriously. The question raised here is not whether French should be the language of administration — it should be, and this editorial does not contest that. The question is whether municipalities must choose between protecting the French language and ensuring that residents can understand the government that serves them. The Directive framework — which the province requires every municipality to adopt precisely to address situations where comprehension requires accommodation — suggests those two goals are not mutually exclusive.
Ormstown is not alone in facing this question, but the choices made elsewhere in Québec are worth noting.
The Ville de Sherbrooke — the sixth-largest city in Québec, where French is the mother tongue of approximately 87% of residents and English speakers represent roughly 4.5% of the population — maintains a functional English section of its municipal website at sherbrooke.ca/en. Sherbrooke does not hold special bilingual status under article 29.1 of the Charter. It has reached its own conclusions about what informational English content can coexist with French primacy.
The Ville de Québec — the provincial capital — maintains English-language content at ville.quebec.qc.ca/en, with a note that the Charter of the French Language and its regulations govern how that content may be consulted. The framing is deliberate: Québec City has found a way to offer English accessibility while being transparent about the legal framework that governs it.
These cities are not presented here as proof that Ormstown’s approach is wrong. They are presented as evidence that at least some municipalities — including prominent ones with strong francophone majorities and no special bilingual status — have concluded that English informational content can coexist with French primacy under the current law.
This editorial is not a claim that Ormstown has broken the law. The municipality adopted its Directive, published it, and launched a modern French-language website. It is communicating through its official channels. Those are not failures.
What this editorial asks is a narrower question: given what the Directive permits, and given that the municipality has formally recognized comprehension as a legitimate concern in safety, legal, and administrative contexts, does the current approach fully reflect the spirit of those commitments?
A bilingual summary of a public safety notice is not a concession to institutional bilingualism. A plain-language English recap of a council meeting is not a threat to the French language. An accessible explanation of a new bylaw, posted alongside the authoritative French text, is not a violation of Bill 96. These are the kinds of accommodations the Directive framework was designed to make possible.
The municipality describes its website as the primary reference for municipal affairs in Ormstown. Its Facebook page is the primary channel for time-sensitive community notices. If those tools do not reach everyone they are meant to serve, the community is smaller than it needs to be — and some residents are navigating their civic life with less information than they are entitled to have.
The Ormstown Observer is a bilingual civic watchdog, and it is bilingual by design — not because the law requires it, but because we believe that the conversations that shape a community should be accessible to everyone who lives in it.
We cover council meetings because residents deserve to know what was decided on their behalf. We publish in both languages because we serve a community where both languages are spoken. We verify our sources because claims about public institutions must be grounded in evidence.
This editorial follows the same standard. Every claim made here about Ormstown’s communications is supported by a primary source — the Directive, the municipal website, the Facebook page, the public notices. We are not arguing that Ormstown is acting in bad faith. We are arguing that the gap between what its own policy permits and what its current practice delivers is worth closing.
The municipalities of the Haut-Saint-Laurent — and of the broader Montérégie — face the same question. Many made the same choice Ormstown made in the months following Bill 96: English content removed, often entirely, on the assumption that the law required it. That assumption is worth revisiting — not to undermine the law, but to use the flexibility it provides.
The directive system exists precisely because the province recognized that both of those things matter.