Bilingual by default: what the Official Languages Act and Law 25 mean for your digital content

Two different obligations, one practical answer

Organizations in Atlantic Canada tend to encounter language and privacy law from two directions at once.

The first is domestic. New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in Canada, and its Official Languages Act places obligations on provincial institutions and on municipalities that meet certain thresholds. If you run a city, a regional service commission, a crown corporation or an agency of the province, you have a duty to serve the public in both English and French, and the website is part of how you serve the public. The federal Official Languages Act applies in parallel to federal institutions and to organizations that deliver services on their behalf.

The second comes from next door. Quebec is the largest nearby market for tourism, for professional services, for post-secondary recruitment and for anyone selling into Montreal. Marketing into Quebec brings two statutes into play: the Charter of the French Language, which governs how French must appear in commercial communications, and Law 25, Quebec’s modernized private-sector privacy law, which governs how you collect, store and use personal information about people in the province.

These are different laws with different triggers and different penalties. We are not lawyers and this article is not legal advice; your counsel should confirm which obligations apply to your organization and how. What we can say from the digital side is that both sets of rules reward the same design decision: build bilingual by default rather than translate as an afterthought.

Parity, not translation

There is a familiar pattern in which the English site is the real site and the French site is a copy that lags. New content appears in English first. The French version arrives later, sometimes much later. Forms exist only in English. Error messages, confirmation emails and PDF attachments are never translated at all.

From a legal standpoint this is a risk. From a resident’s or a customer’s standpoint it is a message: you are the second audience.

Parity means the French and English experiences are equivalent in content, timing and function. Every page, every form field and validation message, every email the system sends, every downloadable document. A francophone visitor in Dieppe or Edmundston should be able to complete a task entirely in French, start to finish, without being bounced to an English page because somebody did not get to that part.

Parity is easier to achieve when it is designed into the content workflow, and nearly impossible when it is bolted on after launch. The decision to publish in both languages simultaneously, or not publish at all, is a governance choice. Make it explicitly.

URL structure and hreflang

How you structure bilingual URLs affects search visibility, analytics clarity and the user’s ability to switch languages without losing their place.

The common approaches are a language directory (yoursite.ca/fr/ and yoursite.ca/en/), a language subdomain (fr.yoursite.ca) or a separate domain for each language. For most organizations in the region the directory approach is simplest to manage and to measure. Whichever you choose, apply it consistently, and give every page a true equivalent in the other language at a predictable address.

Then tell search engines about the relationship. The hreflang attribute signals that two pages are versions of the same content in different languages and regions, so that a French-speaking searcher in Moncton or Laval is shown the French page rather than the English one. Without it, search engines guess, and they often guess wrong. Each page should reference its own language version and its counterpart, and the references must be reciprocal.

Two further details that get missed: translate the URL slugs themselves (a French page about permits should not live at /fr/permits), and make the language toggle take the visitor to the equivalent page, not to the other language’s homepage.

Forms, consent and cookies under Law 25

Law 25 changed what a consent experience in Quebec has to look like, and if your website collects information from people there (through forms, newsletter signups, analytics or advertising cookies), it likely affects you even if you are based in Fredericton or Halifax.

The themes that most often reach the digital team are these, and each one should be confirmed with counsel for your situation:

• Consent has to be meaningful. Pre-ticked boxes and consent buried in a privacy policy do not meet the spirit of the law. Consent for non-essential tracking is generally expected before the tracking fires, not after.
• Privacy by default. Settings that affect personal information should default to the most protective option. That includes the cookie banner.
• Plain language, and in French. The consent request itself, the privacy notice and the explanation of what is collected and why should be understandable, and available in French for Quebec users.
• A named person. Organizations are expected to designate someone responsible for personal information and to make that contact available. That is a line on your privacy page, and it should be in both languages.
• Breach and assessment obligations. These are internal processes rather than website features, but your website vendor should know what data the site stores and where.

Practically, this means a consent banner that appears in the visitor’s language, blocks non-essential scripts until consent is given, records the choice, and can be revisited. It also means auditing your forms: every field that collects personal information should have a purpose you can state.

French-first presentation under the Charter

The Charter of the French Language has been in force for decades, and recent amendments extended its reach into commercial websites, social media and customer communications for businesses operating in Quebec. The requirements are detailed and the thresholds vary, so this is squarely a matter for counsel. The design implications, though, are worth understanding early.

In broad terms, French must be at least as prominent as any other language in commercial materials aimed at Quebec. For a website, that touches the default language a Quebec visitor lands on, the order and sizing of language options, product and service descriptions, and the language of the chatbot or support channel. It can also touch social media accounts that are directed at the Quebec market.

If your organization is marketing into Quebec, the practical question is whether your site can detect or offer French first for visitors who want it, and whether your French content is genuinely complete rather than a subset.

Who signs off on French copy

Machine translation has become good enough to be dangerous. It produces fluent text that is sometimes wrong in ways an anglophone reviewer cannot see. A municipal notice that uses the wrong register, a tourism page that translates a place name, a form label that means something slightly different in Acadian usage than in Quebec usage: these are small errors that erode trust quickly in a community that notices.

Decide, in writing, who is accountable for French copy. Options include a staff translator, a contracted professional translator, or a francophone reviewer who checks machine output before anything publishes. What does not work is nobody. Build the review into the publishing workflow so that a page cannot go live in one language without its counterpart passing the same check.

A French page that reads like a translation tells your audience exactly how much you thought about them.

What to do first

Run a parity audit. List every page, form, automated email and downloadable document on your site, and mark whether a French equivalent exists, whether it is current, and whether a user can reach it without switching back to English. Most organizations we work with in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are surprised by the gaps, particularly in forms and system emails. That list, shared with counsel alongside a summary of what personal information the site collects, is the starting point for everything else.