As they devise a welcome new policy to increase the use of English in Montreal's civic administration, Mayor Gérald Tremblay and his team will have to manage the politics of this touchy issue very deftly, indeed. The administration needs to be clear at every step that it respects provincial language law.

Expectations on one hand, and fears on the other hand, can easily run out of control on any issue related to language policy in this city. Any changes that violate the French Language Charter would provoke tensions and encourage fundamentalist attitudes that would surely undermine the many legitimate ways by which city hall can incorporate more English into its daily operations.

Not surprisingly, the Parti Québécois government is wary of Montreal's linguistic undertaking. It sent Mayor Gérald Tremblay a letter before Christmas encouraging him to invite the government to "accompany" Montreal down the path toward a megacity language policy. The city has accepted, and a meeting involving senior bureaucrats is set for next week. There's no doubt Diane Lemieux, minister responsible for language policy, will be playing chaperone throughout the process.

Ironically, the provincial government is in many ways a bilingual role model for Montreal. The Quebec government produces bilingual documents on budget day; the old Montreal before mergers never did, and neither did the Tremblay administration in last month's budget. Same story with the Quebec auditor-general's office, vis-a-vis Montreal city auditors then and now. For years, English documents have been easier to obtain from a whole host of provincial departments than from Montreal city hall. Even in the new information age, the Quebec government has managed to keep a step ahead of Montreal in some ways. There's an English option on the home page of the Quebec government's Web site, but no such option on the city of Montreal home page. True, the exquisite quality of English in Quebec budget documents owes something to provincial sensibilities toward Wall Street. But whatever the motive, the Quebec public administration is doing things that Montreal city hall can learn from.

But there are also legal limitations to what Montreal can do. Because of the provincial language charter, the city cannot legally post the Ville de Montréal name bilingually outside city hall, for example, nor can it use bilingual signs in boroughs that lack bilingual status. These restrictions chafe for many Montrealers, but the National Assembly is the proper forum to change the law; it would be a tactical mistake for Alliance Quebec or anyone else to try to use city hall's language-policy initiative as a springboard to push for full bilingualism.

While the legal clothing of the Ville de Montréal is French, the anatomy of this city is undeniably bilingual, and the circulatory system of civic administration should reflect this reality. However, we shouldn't forget that Bill 170, the mergers bill, created a highly decentralized new city where most services are run by the boroughs. With most anglophones living in boroughs that have inherited bilingual status under provincial law, they already have a lot of services in their own languages. It's really on the information side, at the centralized city level, where more English is needed.

These are the kind of precise messages about language that the Tremblay administration needs to convey. Handled with care, the new language policy could have the virtue of helping make Montreal civic administration more representative of the city itself.