Unfortunatly, yes, it is for real. In their frantic search of preservation of french language, the government doesn't seem to understand that maintaining a bilingual site is far more expensive that an english or french only site. If a web site is aiming local market, it's OK to make it french only or bilingual. But a major advantage of doing e-commerce is to drop the frontiers and aim for the global market. In that area, the common language is english. If I were to start an e-commerce site that sell books around the world, I would be greatly disadvantaged against a site like Amazon, because I would need to provide french and english pages at my site. This law is just making it harder to Quebec companies to fight against the competition.

Just my 0.02CAN$

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>An aside: I read an article today that says that Quebec is starting to slam locally-hosted websites that are not bilingual. Is this for real? Jeez....