Quebec’s latest language flap was mercifully short-lived.

One day after French language commissioner Benoît Dubreuil issued a report recommending the province reduce access to English content on government websites to ensure the content is available only to Quebecers with the “right” to see it under Bill 96, Minister of the French Language Jean-François Roberge said that’s not in the cards.

“We have no intention of having some kind of password or identification mechanism,” Roberge said after the release of the report last week. “We’ll keep what I would call the good-faith mechanism that we currently use.”

Phew. That’s a relief for English-speaking Quebecers. The population can be trusted enough not to illicitly consult government web pages in English — otherwise anglos would soon have had to jump through new hoops to check out income-tax brackets on Revenu Québec’s site or find the operating hours of the local Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec succursale.

But it’s not simply a matter of “all’s well that ends well.”

Cumbersome “identification mechanisms” are impractical, which is likely the main reason Roberge ruled them out. But that doesn’t mean English information won’t be surreptitiously scaled back in other ways. A retrenchment could still happen as “death by 1,000 cuts” rather than in one fell swoop.

Anglophones have to constantly be on the lookout for the rollback of our rights in ways that seem to become increasingly absurd.

Think of the Office québécois de la langue française’s attempt to make the Société de transport de Montréal change “Go! Canadiens Go!”........

© Montreal Gazette