10.7 million Canadians speak French. Most Toronto brands still just translate their English video for Quebec. Here is why that costs them the market.
Close to 10.7 million people in Canada can carry on a conversation in French, and nearly one million of them live outside Quebec entirely, according to a recent breakdown of bilingual marketing in Canada. Most national campaigns built out of Toronto still treat that audience as an afterthought.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has worked on both sides of a national brief: build the English campaign first, then hand it to a translator once the creative is locked. The French version arrives late, reads like a translation because it is one, and the Quebec market notices.
The translation trap
Three mistakes show up again and again in national campaigns run out of Toronto. The first is translating instead of localizing: running English copy through a translation pass without adjusting tone, humor, or cultural references that land differently in Quebec.
The second is sequencing: building the English version, then adapting it for French, rather than developing both at the same time with the same creative weight. The third is invisibility: treating French as a Quebec-only concern, when close to 650,000 Francophones live in Ontario alone, plus sizeable communities in New Brunswick, Manitoba, and beyond.
| Approach | Translation | Localization |
|---|---|---|
| Timing | After the English version is locked | Developed alongside the English version |
| Talent | Same actors, dubbed or subtitled | Quebec talent, native delivery |
| Result | Reads as a copy of the English ad | Reads as made for the audience |
What a real Quebec reach looks like
The upside of getting this right is bigger than most Toronto brand teams expect. A single creator-led reel for Porter Airlines, produced with One Way talent Alexane Pelletier, reached 1.3 million views, almost entirely organic.
That kind of result rarely comes from a dubbed version of an Ontario ad. It comes from a production team, a creator, and a script built for the audience from the first draft, the same way American brands have started tapping Montreal for cost and quality reasons.
What working with a Montreal team actually gets you
A Montreal production partner solves the Quebec problem by design, not as an add-on. The crew is bilingual from the first call, the talent roster already reaches a French Canadian audience natively, and Quebec's film and television tax credit, up to 25 percent plus a bonus for VFX and animation work, often brings the total cost below a comparable Toronto shoot.
For a brand running a truly national campaign, that combination means one production can serve both markets properly instead of one market well and the other as an afterthought.
For a sense of what a well-built brief and budget look like before that first call, this 2026 pricing guide breaks down real cost ranges by format.
