One pundit dubbed it the Great Bagel Meeting.

At a Parti Québécois convention in November, party president Jonathan Valois decried the decline of French in Quebec. “Not being able to buy a bagel in French annoys me,” he complained.

Montreal’s famous bagel shops are a new front in Quebec’s always simmering language war, but the language of service in retail outlets has long been a sore point.

Every so often, an undercover reporter from the tabloid Journal de Montréal sets out to prove it’s easier to get a job for a unilingual anglophone than for a unilingual francophone. Usually, this involves low-paying jobs in downtown stores and cafés.

Many anglophones scoff at grumbling about unilingual-English store employees. Almost 70% of Quebec anglos are bilingual, and those who aren’t would find it extremely difficult to land a well-paying job.

But the issue touches a nerve among francophones, federalists and sovereignists alike.They bristle when recounting incidents of being unable to shop in their mother tongue in the second-largest French-speaking city in the world — more than 30 years after Bill 101 was brought in to protect and promote the French language.

Francophones (whose mother tongue is French) have fallen to minority status (49.8%) on Montreal Island: this statistic sent shock waves through Quebec when it was reported by Statistics Canada two years ago. Less publicized was another statistic: French is still the main home language of 69% of Montrealers, a slight drop.

The province’s governing Liberals, who don’t have to call an election until 2013, won’t risk upsetting today’s relative linguistic peace by toying with Bill 101. But Premier Jean Charest is down in the polls and in his third mandate. The last premier to win a fourth mandate was Maurice Duplessis, in 1956.

In Opposition, the PQ, playing to its nationalist base, is mulling hardline solutions. The party is looking at extending Bill 101 to the 175,000 businesses in Quebec with fewer than 50 employees, currently exempt from the law. If those businesses are targeted, they would have to serve their customers in French and make French the language of work.

It would be expensive to police so many companies. Quebec already has a language watchdog: the Office québécois de la langue française, whose terminology dictionary, incidentally, suggests Quebecers use the word “baguel” rather than bagel.

If the province were to increase the size of the Office proportionally to cover all those extra businesses, its staff would jump from about 100 to more than 3,000, and its budget would increase by $250 million dollars a year, according to estimates by Montreal Gazette columnist Don Macpherson.

On the education front, Bill 101 applies only to elementary and high schools. At the November convention, the PQ suggested applying Bill 101 to English CEGEPs (two-year colleges between Grade 11 and university), as well as to English daycares. Under such a change, only those educated in English in Canada would be able to send their children to English CEGEPs and daycares. Immigrants would be excluded.

Why the change? Many immigrants prefer English-language daycare. And once they finish their obligatory primary and secondary French education, almost half of immigrant children head for English CEGEPs. The PQ fear these children will be assimilated into English culture.

Of course, all this talk of a “new Bill 101” could be nothing more than between-election bagel-rattling. The PQ may decide not to alienate the numerous francophones who send their children to English daycares and CEGEPs to make up for the paltry English taught in French schools. Many francophones also realize the decline of French in Montreal is — at least, in part — self-inflicted. Immigrants are desperately needed because of Quebec’s low birth rate. And an exodus of francophones to off-island suburbs is part of the reason why non-francophones now make up the majority on Montreal Island.

But the bagel scandal quickly faded after interlopers intervened. Ten days after the PQ meeting, a New York Times blog described Montreal bagels as “completely flavourless” and “dense, a little tough and totally bland.” In English or translated into French, to anglophone or francophone, federalist or separatist, them’s fightin’ words. IE