I am a Canadian anglophone from British Columbia with highschool French. My children have been raised in the USA with no French. It would be easier for me to take a job and move my family to The Netherlands than to Montreal. (Not a hypothetical example. I turned down an offer a few years ago at a company that wanted to hire me there. My children would have had to learn Dutch, but would have gone to school in English.)
If you are founding a company and want access to anglophone talent, would you prefer to start it in Montreal or Amsterdam? What are the economic implications of this fact for Quebec?
Quebec has made a decision to value remaining French above economic growth. That's somewhat reasonable. But if you've chosen that, you should be honest with yourselves about the choice you made. And shouldn't be puzzled that your economy has not done so well.
For a lot of people, it is more important to be strong in our values than to ignore them for the sake of the economy even if it means losing economical growth. For Québec to be strong it needs to be true to itself. Selling out our heritage for profit would be unthinkable.
You could argue that some laws make no sense and I would agree on some points but people are very afraid to lose what makes Québec what it is and some harsh measures are put in place.
As I said, the decision is somewhat justifiable. But there are plenty of comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888145 which show no awareness of how policy actually translated into economic effects.
I believe that you should either make the decision with full awareness of consequences, or else make the opposite decision. But don't make the decision and then be dishonest about what the consequences were.
I am a Canadian anglophone from British Columbia with highschool French. My children have been raised in the USA with no French. It would be easier for me to take a job and move my family to The Netherlands than to Montreal. (Not a hypothetical example. I turned down an offer a few years ago at a company that wanted to hire me there. My children would have had to learn Dutch, but would have gone to school in English.)
If you are founding a company and want access to anglophone talent, would you prefer to start it in Montreal or Amsterdam? What are the economic implications of this fact for Quebec?
Quebec has made a decision to value remaining French above economic growth. That's somewhat reasonable. But if you've chosen that, you should be honest with yourselves about the choice you made. And shouldn't be puzzled that your economy has not done so well.