Is Canada not economically relevant to the continent? French is an official language of Canada, on equal footing as English. By law anything imported into Canada must include both English and French labelling, software, instruction manuals etc. For parts of the US that trade a lot with Canada, French is at least as economically relevant as Spanish.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 19 hours ago
Quebec isn’t Canada.
Having to get documents translated is a cost of doing business in Canada. You don’t have to speak both languages to conduct business in Canada.
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 19 hours ago
Quebec is in Canada, it’s also not the only Francophone region in Canada. There are also most certainly major economic zones in Canada where you would need to know French to conduct business. And I assume you could also hire a translator for Spanish, no?
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 19 hours ago
But we’re talking about economic utility. Quebec isn’t Canada; it is much smaller.
In contrast, Mexico has a GDP near Canada as a whole and there isn’t a bilingual legal framework to support business deals. Furthermore, there are more Spanish speaking countries to make deals with in the Western Hemisphere; the closest that French has is Haiti.
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 19 hours ago
Quebec is one of the most economically active regions in Canada. But we can out that aside for now because, again, Quebec is not the only francophone region in Canada. The province I’m from doesn’t even recognize French as an official language, yet there are people who live here who are born here, are educated here, and work here, and die here, all without ever achieving more that basic English proficiency because they are so immersed in the Francophone subculture here.
So if what you are worried about is legal frameworks, then yes, you don’t need your lawyer to be bilingual to do business with Canada in some cases. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that the people who you hope to do business with, and your potential customer base, might not know anything beyond broken English (if they know any English at all).