The company hired to investigate how frequently Quebec store workers say “Bonjour-Hi” encountered problems as its 23 undercover shoppers fanned out across the province over seven months.
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But the Office québécois de la langue française, which paid Segma Recherche $224,000 for the study, insists that some of those problems — and their solutions — must remain a secret.
Between August 2022 and April 2023, Segma dispatched observers posing as regular customers to 7,314 businesses in six regions — everything from dépanneurs to clothing stores, restaurants and hotels.
Their job was to observe and document the language in which customers were greeted and served.
The OQLF’s report on the study, published in April 2024, highlighted a decline in French-only greetings.
Observers in the Montreal region were welcomed in French alone 71 per cent of the time, a drop from the 84 per cent seen in 2010.
Combined French-English greetings such as “Bonjour-Hi” went up to 12 per cent, from four per cent.
The findings were “further proof that constant vigilance is needed against the decline of French and that we must strive to restore the French language to its rightful place in our society,” French Language Minister Jean-François Roberge said.
In its press release and 49-page report, the OQLF did not mention that Segma encountered difficulties during its investigation.
In response to a Gazette access-to-information request, the OQLF released the “administrative report” that Segma submitted to the language watchdog after it completed the investigation. It details how the company conducted the work.
Two pages of the 35-page document are devoted to “special problems encountered and solutions found” by Segma.
One of those pages is completely blacked out in the copy provided to The Gazette.
In her response letter, OQLF official Véronique Voyer said the agency could not make the page public because of Article 24 of Quebec’s access-to-information law.
That article states that “no public body may release information supplied by a third person if its disclosure would likely hamper negotiations in view of a contract, result in losses for the third person or in considerable profit for another person or substantially reduce the third person’s competitive margin, without his consent.”
The Gazette asked the OQLF whether the lack of transparency about issues encountered during data collection could cast doubt on the reliability of the study, and why problems were not mentioned in the communiqué or report.
“The redacted information does not pertain to the study’s validity,” OQLF spokesperson Nicolas Trudel said.
In a followup email, the OQLF said the redacted information “related to the administration of the research firm. No issues encountered during the production of this study raise any doubts about its validity.”
Reached by The Gazette, Segma president Raynald Harvey referred all questions to the OQLF.
It is impossible to speculate on the nature of the information that the OQLF removed from the document.
The Gazette has asked the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec to review the OQLF’s decision to withhold the information.
The commission can order or recommend that a public body release documents.
Since the 1980s, Quebec has employed what it describes as a “rigorous scientific method” to analyze the language of greetings and customer service in stores, conducting participant observation studies to track and measure how interactions unfold.
To understand how the OQLF carries out its investigations, The Gazette undertook an analysis based on the findings of six reports prepared over three decades, as well as OQLF documents obtained through access-to-information requests.
The Gazette last year filed an access request for all internal documentation related to the 2024 study.
The government body provided six documents totalling 185 pages. The only other details the OQLF redacted were the names of Segma employees.
A second page about problems Segma faced was not redacted. It focused on issues related to the information the OQLF provided to Segma about where to send the secret shoppers.
The company was given postal codes corresponding to areas to focus on. However, the information included residential streets with no visible businesses, a problem Segma blamed on the growing number of home-based firms.
“The consequences in terms of collection were an increase in unproductive trips to areas where no businesses could be visited, increasing the number of hours required to carry out the same number of visits,” Segma said in the document.
The company said the problem was corrected after the OQLF provided more postal codes that corresponded to areas with publicly accessible businesses.
With offices in Montreal and Chicoutimi, Segma is a research and polling company with public and private customers.
In 2017, the OQLF commissioned a different company — Advanis Jolicoeur — to collect data for a similar study on the language of greeting and service in Quebec businesses.
Advanis Jolicoeur’s administrative report to the OQLF, obtained by The Gazette in 2019, also included a section on problems investigators faced.
The OQLF did not blank out any pages that time.
In that report, Advanis Jolicoeur highlighted challenges faced by its observers, who discovered that many of the road sections they were deployed to lacked the types of businesses they were instructed to investigate.
Upcoming in the Science of Bonjour-Hi series:
Wednesday: Focus shifts to whether French service is ‘spontaneous’ rather than just available
Thursday: Did ethnicity of observers play a role in surge of bilingual greetings?
Read the Bonjour-Hi explainer: How Quebec uses undercover agents to investigate language in stores