Montreal’s transit agency says too expensive to display ‘Go Habs Go!’ before winter

Montreal’s transit agency says city buses won’t be flashing the “Go! Canadiens Go!” NHL hockey slogan any time soon, despite getting the green light to do so by Quebec’s language watchdog.

The electronic signs on each of the city’s more than 1,000 buses have to be updated manually. 

Isabelle Tremblay, spokesperson for the Société de transport de Montréal, says the agency doesn’t have the money to modify them before the winter, during the regularly scheduled period to update signage. The Canadiens NHL season opener, meanwhile, is set for Oct. 8 against the Toronto Maple Leafs.

“One thing is certain: No changes to the buses can be made in the short term,” Tremblay said in an email.

The agency had removed the slogan from bus signs and replaced it with “Allez! Canadiens Allez!” to appease the language office, which enforces the province’s strict rules on the use of French. The watchdog had taken issue with the word “go,” calling it an anglicism.

It reversed course this June, after Quebec French-language Minister Jean-François Roberge intervened, declaring that the expression “Go Habs Go” was part of Quebec culture. The word Habs, short for “habitants” — a description of early settlers — is often used instead of the NHL team’s full name, the Montreal Canadiens. 

Tremblay said the agency typically only updates the signage displayed on its buses once per year, in the winter; doing otherwise would be too costly. “We insist on using the usual update processes,” she said.

Modifying the screens is a complex task because each bus has to be updated manually with a USB key, according to internal correspondence between the agency and the language office obtained by The Canadian Press through an access to information request.

The public transit agency is struggling with an aging network it says it can no longer afford to maintain. In March, it decried a roughly $258-million reduction in provincial funding over three years for the upkeep of the metro system, far from the $585 million it had asked for.