I think if you own a specialty store, you don’t have the financial authority to make political statements and potentially alienate your demographic. If you think the store owner made the choices he did as some sort of a statement and not because they sell what they are able to obtain, well, i guess that’s on brand with how most French québécois think. Very little rational logic and everything a personal attack.
It was never a case of the store ONLY having English games. They sold both, but the OQLF said a) the owner cannot talk to customers in English, b) they cannot sell games that don’t have a French translated version and c) cannot sell English games if the French version is sold out.
Read on the “Frenchification of Brussels”, this is exactly what would happen in Montreal without language laws (in favour of English)
By advocating for “free market” business language you’re being an Anglophone chauvinist without even realizing it. When you are the linguistic majority and lingua Franca, it’s easy to say “let people decide and see where we end up”, we all know where it’s ending up. Most French Montrealer won’t care to be served in English in their day to day but 50 years down the road, they’d be devastated to see French All but gone.
It’s actually sad how little cultural awareness anglophones have sometime. For anybody not an anglophone, language is a huge part of culture because it creates a cultural enclave. A québécois or a Pole or an Italian have access to a local culture you know nothing about, and we’d like to keep it for our grandchildren, but thanks for your concern.