Quebec should stop trying to legislate language by itself

Quebec has recently undergone a new wave of tightening enforcement of its language laws - targeting any products sold whose text is not fully bilingual. As usual, this will have the impact of driving out suppliers who are unwilling to make the change for all of Canada, or to create new supply chains for Quebec alone. Remaining suppliers can then charge more due to the decreased competition.

Aside from the fact that commerce is designated as an area of federal jurisdiction, Quebec is unwise to go it alone on its regulation of product language laws. Canadian consumer packaging laws already require that a product identifies itself in English and French, and compliance with this law is nearly universal in the country. The Quebec law would go further, requiring all text to be in French or bilingual. 

However, when going it alone, Quebec stands to lose more compared with standing together with the rest of the country. It is (necessarily) a smaller market than Canada as a whole. Many companies already do not operate in Canada, and many products are not available, or are priced higher compared to other markets due to our small market size. When Quebec cuts itself off from the rest of Canada, this effect compounded  for the province. 

Instead of acting alone and suffering the consequences of its restrictions, Quebec should try and get the best of both worlds - pushing improved linguistic labelling laws at the federal level can help interpretability for Francophones, not just in Quebec, but across the country, while pricing will be relatively unimpacted, since Canadian language laws already require supply chain compliance, and since the English-Canadian population essentially acts as a force multiplier for the Francophone population when acting at the Federal level to protect French. 

However, the Quebec government is unlikely to go this route. It sees itself as the sole legitimate government of Quebecers, as is evident in its adopted slogan "Votre gouvernement". Working with the federal government to improve the lives of its citizens is not on its agenda. For the CAQ, the federal government is a tool to be positioned as an external enemy to drive populist support, rather than a potential partner for the government's aims. 

Already, much of English Canada is unenthusiastic about federal language laws designed to protect French, since English Canadians do not really benefit from these laws. Quebec's lack of enthusiasm to take advantage of their demographic weight, and to instead act alone ironically hampers its own efforts for the French cause.