The act that was done by the hospital administration— which, as you have probably read, was condemned by the local mayors and quite a few other members of the majority population—reversed a practice that had been in place for 50 years and, more interestingly, for 40 years under the provisions of Bill 101. Several previous governments had reviewed the situation and found that the practice was entirely in compliance with Bill 101, so arguing, as this government did, that they were just enforcing the law is just not how we see it.
We actually have quite a lot of expertise in regard to the internal structure of the obligations under the law. In our sense—and this is concurred in by the people running the hospital and many other hospitals around the province—the signs that were up were justified under the health and safety exemption. Basically, when you arrive at the hospital, there aren't that many unilingual anglophones who couldn't read urgence for emergency, but if there's one who is going to die in the parking lot, that's a very bad result. The same example would apply to all the internal signs, which were taken down as well. It's not as good an image for the TV spots, but the signs taken down internally make a real difference for the safe functioning of this institution.
For the benefit and with the understanding and complete buy-in of the community, nobody is talking about the French character of the institution being compromised in any way, but that there should be an English sign as well—lower down, to the right and in smaller letters—as has been tolerated, and as has been permitted under the law and as a matter of social consensus. It's a really big disappointment if we're going to move in this direction of effacing the language for no local social reason; there wasn't conflict; there wasn't....
Anyway, I'm going on here.