A few days after the Supreme Court of Canada delivered its ruling in the 1988 case of Ford v. Quebec (Attorney General), a decision which approved multilingual commercial expression, the Parti libéral du Québec (PLQ) government of premier Robert Bourassa amended Bill 101 with Bill 178.
The only exceptions were "foreign-language" signs indoors, subject to approval by the Office de la langue française, and advertisements carried in non-French media, such as the Montreal Gazette.
To override the Supreme Court's ruling, Bourassa invoked the notwithstanding clause of the Quebec and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
[1] The Supreme Court's decision was jeered by Quebec nationalists and applauded by Anglo rights activists.
Since then, the bilingualism debate has periodically reared its head, from debates over the amount of English spoken in downtown stores to the Italian menu flash-in-the-pan called Pastagate.