Bilingual Ecommerce for Quebec: Bill 96 and Law 25

Section 52 of the Charter of the French language requires catalogs, brochures and similar publications, which the Office québécois de la langue française reads to include websites, to be in French, with any other version available only on terms at least as favourable. How far that reaches a merchant with no establishment in Quebec is a question for your counsel. This is general information, not legal advice.

Yes. Section 50.2, added by Bill 96 and in force since its assent on 1 June 2022, requires a business to inform and serve a public other than consumers in French as well, so a business-to-business store, its account area, its quotes and its invoices are inside the rule. This is not legal advice.

In practice it means the French version carries the same products, content and functions as the English, at the same time, and is as easy to reach: French as the default for Quebec visitors rather than a link in the footer, the same checkout, the same emails, the same search. A French site that launches a product a week after the English, or that hides a feature, is not at parity.

Under section 205 of the Charter as amended by Bill 96, a company faces a fine of CAD 3,000 to 30,000 per offence, with higher ranges for a second or subsequent offence, and the Office québécois de la langue française acts on complaints from the public. Separately, Law 25's administrative penalties run up to CAD 10 million or 2 percent of worldwide turnover. This is not legal advice.

A person in charge of personal information, with their title and contact details published on the site; a privacy policy in clear terms, with customers told when it changes; technology that identifies, locates or profiles a visitor disclosed in advance and left off until the visitor activates it; a privacy impact assessment before personal information leaves Quebec, which includes most hosted analytics; and, since 22 September 2024, a copy of a customer's data in a structured format on request. This is not legal advice.

The duty to ship privacy settings at their most private by default excludes browser cookies by its own words, but technology that identifies, locates or profiles a visitor has to be disclosed and left for the visitor to switch on. In practice that means analytics and advertising tags wait for consent, the banner says what each one does, and the privacy policy matches. Whether a given tag profiles is a question for your counsel. This is not legal advice.

Your own team or a professional translator you approve. We do not write French copy and we would rather say so than deliver machine translation under another name. What we build is the structure around it: the glossary, the translation tasks that open with every new product or page, the review step on staging, and the parity check that stops anything publishing in one language only.

Two mechanisms. The workflow opens a French task for every new product, page, banner and email template, so an English change always has a French counterpart in progress. The parity check runs before every release and lists any string, page or email still in one language, and the release waits until the list is empty or someone signs off the exception.

Yes. The fr_CA and en_CA store views sit on one website with one catalog, one set of prices and one admin, and a visitor from Quebec lands on the French view by default with a switch to English. Provincial tax, carriers and payment are configured once at website level, so the second language adds content, not a second store.

Both. On Magento and Adobe Commerce the structure is a store view per language on one website. On Shopify it is the platform's translation and markets tooling with French set as the default for Quebec. The mechanics differ; the duties under the Charter and Law 25 do not, and the workflow and the parity check are built for either.

It affects the products themselves. Since 1 June 2025, generic or descriptive words inside a trademark must also appear in French on the product or on something permanently attached to it, with a transition to 1 June 2027 for products made before that date under conditions the regulation sets. Product pages were already covered by section 52, so the descriptions, attributes and images on them are in French regardless. This is not legal advice.

The gap audit takes a week or two. A store that already has the right structure and only needs the workflow, the consent banner and the missing content is a matter of weeks. A store that needs store views, a rebuilt search index, bilingual emails and invoices and the privacy pages from scratch is a few months, and the plan you receive after the audit carries dates for your store rather than an average.

Individually, after the gap audit, because the size of the list decides the size of the work. There is no price list on this site. You receive the gap list, the store-view and workflow plan, and an estimate against each item, so the number is attached to a scope you can read.

Yes, and most Quebec work starts that way. The gap audit reads the store as it is, in both languages, and the report says what is sound, what is missing and what it would take. Where the structure is right and only the content lags, the fix is the workflow and the translations; where the structure is wrong, the report says so with the numbers.