What Bill 96 means for a home care agency hiring in Montreal

What to take away

What Bill 96 changes for a Montreal home care agency

Bill 96 is the short name of An Act respecting French, the official and common language of Quebec. Adopted on May 24, 2022 and sanctioned on June 1, 2022, it amended the Charter of the French Language (CQLR, chapter C-11), the statute administered by the Office québécois de la langue française — the OQLF. Most of its provisions came into force on June 1, 2023.

For an agency, the practical shift is that French is no longer only about signage or a slogan. It reaches recruitment, internal communications, contracts of employment and the documents you hand a client.

Size matters, and the Charter sets the numbers. An enterprise with 50 or more employees must register with the OQLF, implement a francization program and obtain a francization certificate; at 100 or more employees it must also set up a francization committee. Bill 96 pushed the duty lower: since the June 1, 2023 phase, an enterprise with 25 to 49 employees must register with the OQLF. Below 25 employees there is no francization duty, but French service to clients and French in hiring still apply.

Montreal makes this harder and easier at once. The labour pool is bilingual, but so are the clients, and a family in Côte-des-Neiges may ask for service in French while a family in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce asks in English. Both requests are legitimate.

Start with a written language policy. Who speaks what with clients, which documents exist in French, how you assess a new hire's French. Our compliance checklist for new owners covers the paperwork side of that file.

One caution: the rules on hiring and managing staff are separate from the language rules and apply regardless. A Montreal home care agency is a provincial undertaking, so its employment relationships fall under Quebec law — the Charter of the French Language and the Act respecting labour standards — not the Canada Labour Code. Federal rules reach it through payroll and immigration, not through language of work.

What non-compliance costs

Bill 96 increased the fines set out in the Charter's penal provisions, and it widened the OQLF's reach: the Office can act on a complaint or open an investigation on its own initiative, demand an enterprise's francization records and require it to file a francization program. An agency above the threshold with no registration, no program and no certificate is exposed twice — to the OQLF, and to any CIUSSS reviewing its contract.

French-language duties in job postings and interviews

A job posting for a Montreal caregiver role has to be available in French. If you also publish an English version, the French version cannot be an afterthought tacked on later.

This is where most agencies slip. They write the English ad first, run it on a job board, then translate. The order is visible, and a complaint about French job postings Quebec employers publish is easy to substantiate when the English text is the original.

Write the French posting first. Then translate into English if you need it. Keep both versions, with dates.

Interview language rules are less rigid than postings but still matter. A candidate has the right to be interviewed in French. If your hiring manager cannot conduct an interview in French, that is a staffing problem, not a candidate problem.

The Charter's rules on the language of labour relations sit under all of this. An employer may not require knowledge of a language other than French unless it can show the requirement is necessary for the duties, and it must state its reasons for the requirement and how it will verify the candidate's knowledge. In a Montreal posting, an English requirement therefore needs a written reason — a client who speaks only English, a contract that demands it — and the test you used.

Practical steps for a Montreal hire:

Be careful with credential language. A posting that demands perfect written French for a role that never involves writing will thin your applicant pool for no reason. Match the requirement to the task, and write down why you set it.

For the wider hiring sequence, our how to hire reliable staff piece walks through screening and reference checks that sit alongside these language steps.

CLSC and soutien à domicile contracting in Quebec

Quebec does not run home care the way Ontario or Alberta do. The Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux sets direction, and the CLSC network delivers soutien à domicile (home support) at the local level.

That means many Montreal agencies earn revenue through CLSC contracts, referrals or subcontracts rather than through a single provincial payer. Each CIUSSS runs its own contracting process, and each one writes its own terms.

Language clauses appear in those contracts. A CLSC serving a francophone population will expect French service as a condition, and it may audit for it. Some contracts also require French documentation for every client file you touch.

Read the language clause before you sign, and price it. If a contract requires a bilingual coordinator on every shift, that is a wage cost, not a formality.

Budget for the CLSC relationship to be slower and more documented than private work. Referrals can pause while a file is reviewed. Keep your private client base alive alongside it.

Payroll on that revenue still runs through the usual federal channels. Employer source deductions, including CPP, EI and income tax, are set out on the Canada Revenue Agency's retenues sur la paie page, which is itself published in French.

Client documents, consent forms and French-language services

Client document language requirements are the part of Bill 96 that touches care directly. A consent form, a service agreement or a care plan handed to a francophone client should be in French.

This is not only about contracts. It covers the documents a client signs and the documents a family reads to understand what is happening with a parent.

Translation quality shows. A care plan rendered word for word from English reads oddly in French, and families notice. Have a francophone staff member or a professional translator produce the French version from the French, not from the English.

Keep a French version of every recurring document:

Then check the ones you did not think of. Voicemail greetings, the website contact form, the automated text that confirms a shift. If a francophone client meets English at any of those points, that is a service gap.

Your public-facing presence counts too. A Montreal agency whose website exists only in English will struggle to be found by the francophone families who need it. Our local SEO checklist covers how language and location work together in search.

Hiring staff who can work in French: where the rules bite

The rules bite hardest at the point of hire, because that is where you either build French capacity or decide to do without it.

Three groups of staff need different levels of French:

Write those levels down. Then assess against them, and record the assessment. A short spoken test at interview, scored and filed, is worth more than a checkbox that says bilingual.

Recruitment from outside Canada brings its own rules. Caregiver immigration streams and work permits are handled by IRCC, and the French-language page on aides familiaux sets out the caregiver pathway. Candidates arriving through those streams may have strong French and limited English, which suits a Montreal client base well.

Where you hire from matters for retention. A caregiver recruited from a francophone region who is placed only with English-speaking clients will leave. Match language to assignment, and track it.

Our hiring and training guide covers how to build the training side once someone is through the door.

A worked example

An agency in Villeray posts a caregiver role in English only, interviews in English, and hires a bilingual candidate. Six months later a CLSC contract review asks for the French posting. There is none.

The fix is not retroactive. What the agency can do is rebuild the file: a French posting for the next vacancy, a language policy, French client documents, and interview notes that record the language offer. That file is what an inspector or a contract officer will ask for.

Keeping a language compliance file for inspections

An inspection or a contract review usually starts with a document request. If your language records are scattered across email and someone's laptop, you will lose days assembling them.

Review it quarterly. Staff turn over, documents get edited, and a French version can quietly fall out of date when the English one changes.

This sits inside the broader licensing picture, which our licensing and compliance guide sets out for Quebec and other provinces. Language is one file in that cabinet, not the whole cabinet.

One last check on the numbers. Montreal's population is aging, and demand for soutien à domicile keeps rising, which is why the language question is a growth question and not a cost centre.

Statistics Canada's Census of Population is where to look up the age and language profile of the specific borough or CLSC territory you serve.

Common questions