Members of Montreal's nationalist St. Jean Baptiste Society paid a visit to the Office Québécois de la Langue Française on Tuesday morning — to deliver hundreds of complaints.
With a little fanfare, and with the media on hand, they walked across Sherbrooke St. from their headquarters to the OQLF's headquarters with a box containing no less than 423 complaints — all dealing with the language of web sites.
A political scientist spent the last eight or nine months researching about 1,200 web sites belonging to companies working out of the Technoparc in St. Laurent, and found that of those 1,200 companies, about 70 per cent of their web sites were in English only.
Maxime Laporte, the group's president, says it's a question of respect.
"That means that francophone consumers have commercial information of lesser quality than anglophone consumers," Laporte told CTV News.
The OQLF will now conduct an investigation — though for the moment, it's not clear when, or if, any of those complaints will result in the offending companies receiving official notices from the language body.