FR/EN Bilingual Labels: What Quebec Law Requires

Two separate obligations, not one

A new snack brand owner in Montreal spends weeks getting the French and English text on a label to look balanced, same font size, same position, mirrored layout, and assumes that settles it. Then a distributor's compliance reviewer sends the label back, pointing out that "balanced" isn't the same thing as "French can't be subordinate to English," which is a different, stricter test under provincial law. A lot of food businesses assume bilingual labelling is a single rule. It's actually two, and they come from two different levels of government.

Federally, the CFIA has long required that most mandatory information appear in both English and French, with roughly equal prominence between the two. That applies across Canada, no matter where you sell.

In Quebec, the Charter of the French Language adds another layer: French not only has to be present, it can never be subordinate to English on the product, its packaging, or any accompanying documents.

Businesses that only check the federal box often get caught off guard here, because a label can satisfy the CFIA's roughly-equal-prominence rule and still fail the Charter's stricter "French can't be subordinate" standard, the two tests aren't identical, and passing one doesn't guarantee the other.

What Bill 96 changed as of June 2025

The new Bill 96 provisions affecting products took effect on June 1, 2025. The underlying principle hasn't changed, French can't be secondary, but one specific point shifted for trademarks.

If your trademark contains a generic or descriptive term in English, think "whitening" on a toothpaste or "mint flavor" on a product, that term now also has to appear in French on the product, even if the brand name itself stays in English.

A trademark registered with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in a language other than French can stay unilingual, unless a French version of that same trademark is also registered, in that case, the French version has to appear.

Products already manufactured before June 1, 2025, without a French version of the trademark registered before June 26, 2024, can keep being sold until June 1, 2027. After that date, the transition period is over, and a product manufactured after June 1, 2025 doesn't benefit from this grace period, even if the business was already selling other products beforehand.

Think of a spice blend sold under a trademark like "FireHot," with the words "extra spicy" printed underneath in English only. Under the post-2025 rules, "extra spicy" is exactly the kind of generic, descriptive term that now needs a French equivalent on the package, even though the invented brand name "FireHot" itself can stay as-is. It's a narrow change, but it catches a lot of labels that were otherwise already compliant.

"Clear predominance": what it means in practice

The Charter uses the phrase "clear predominance" of French. For outdoor commercial signage, a storefront, a sign, that translates into a fairly precise rule: the space taken up by French has to be visibly larger than the other language.

For a product label, the logic is a bit different: French has to be at least as visible, as legible, and as permanent as English, without being crowded out by the design or pushed into a corner. It's a principle more than a fixed formula, when in doubt, confirm your specific case with the OQLF rather than guessing at a ratio.

In practice, we see this trip up producers who reuse a US-market label as a starting point: the English brand name and product claims are already laid out prominently, and squeezing in French as an afterthought, smaller type, tucked along one edge, rarely holds up to a "clear predominance" review, even if every required word is technically present somewhere on the package.

Fitting it all in without overcrowding the label

The real challenge here isn't legal, it's visual. Doubling every line of text in French and English on an already tight format pushes you toward an unreadable label fast.

The most common fix: group bilingual copy into blocks instead of alternating line by line, and reserve smaller type for secondary information, address, lot code, rather than the elements that need to stand out, like the product name and allergens.

It's as much a layout exercise as a compliance one. That's where a printer who understands both sides of it, the legal requirement and the readable result, saves you time.

We've seen the opposite mistake too: a label so focused on legal compliance that it becomes visually cluttered, with near-identical blocks of text stacked on top of each other. A shopper skimming a shelf for a few seconds doesn't read either language carefully at that point, which defeats the purpose the rule was trying to protect in the first place.