Quebec updates list of 'designated' English-speaking, multilingual health centres

A woman walks into the MUHC hospital in Montreal, Sunday, April 26, 2015. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

Quebec has updated its official list of English-speaking and multilingual health centres.

According to the province's Charter of the French Language, "municipalities may be recognized when more than half the residents of their territory have English as their mother tongue."

A similar rule applies to health and social service establishments, which are only recognized by the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) as having special language status when they provide services to a majority of people who speak a language other than French.

"'Designated' institutions and facilities are required to make all their health and social services available in English to English-speaking people," the government notes.

These are the health centres in Quebec that have been appointed for what the government calls "English expression":

Capitale-Nationale

Côte-Nord

Estrie

Laurentides

Laval

Montreal

Montérégie

Outaouais

Private establishments

Estrie

Lanaudière

Montreal

Four health centres have also been designated as ethnoculturally accessible places:

"These services enable people who are not sufficiently fluent in French or English to understand and be understood by health care professionals," the government notes. "Interpreters improve and facilitate verbal and cultural communication between health care professionals and patients."

Despite this list of bilingual health centres, the government points out municipalities and boroughs may, at any time, receive a notice from the OQLF that their special linguistic status has been withdrawn.

This includes Greenfield Park, a borough in Longueuil on Montreal's South Shore, which lost its bilingual status in December 2022 after the OQLF reported that only 27.4 per cent of its residents declared English as their mother tongue on the 2021 Statistics Canada survey.

Montreal's Pierrefonds-Roxboro borough lost its status after 35.8 per cent of residents said they primarily spoke English.

In Dollard-des-Ormeaux, that number rose to 45.2 per cent; in Dorval, 47.2 per cent and in Kirkland, 45.8 per cent.

All these municipalities lost bilingual status following the census.