Quebec statutory holidays in call routing

Quebec's statutory holidays are not the same list as the rest of Canada. The Journée nationale des patriotes falls on the Monday preceding 25 May, and the Fête nationale on 24 June. Neither is a holiday in most other provinces. A phone system configured against a generic Canadian calendar will ring an empty office on both.

The two to check on any imported calendar are the first two. The Patriotes date moves (it is the Monday that precedes 25 May, not a fixed number), so a calendar entered once by hand is wrong the following year.

Nothing errors when a holiday is missing. The office is closed, the line is open, and the caller hears ringing followed by whatever your no-answer path does. If that path is voicemail, you find out days later. If it is a queue with no agents, the caller waits and hangs up, and you never find out at all.

The failure has no log line, which is what makes an annual calendar review worth the twenty minutes.

Three decisions sit behind a holiday calendar that works: where the list lives, whether a holiday gets its own message, and what happens on a day nobody configured.

Per-location, not per-company

If you have an office in Quebec and one elsewhere, they do not close on the same days. A single company-wide holiday list is wrong for one of them by construction.

Holiday is not the same as closed

A holiday often wants a different message (naming the holiday, giving the return date) where after-hours can be generic. Treating them as one exit means the 24 June caller hears the same thing as the Tuesday 7pm caller.

Decide the default

The question is what happens on a day nobody configured. Answering as if open is the more dangerous default, because it produces a ringing line into an empty office.

Business hours live on a schedule attached to a location, so a Quebec office follows the Quebec calendar and another follows its own. The business-hours block has four separate exits (open, holiday, emergency, closed), so a holiday can carry its own message rather than reusing the after-hours one; call menus and hours describes the step itself. Where that calendar lives and the order it decides in: holiday routing you set once. If your line is already answering on a calendar somebody else entered, tell us what it does today.

One design decision worth knowing, because it is deliberate and it surprises people: a number not bound to a flow rings 24 hours a day. Hours only apply inside a flow. We fail open rather than closed, on the reasoning that silencing a business's phone line has to be something you chose, never something you inherited from a misconfiguration.

The emergency exit is separate again: a per-location switch that outranks both hours and holidays, for the day the building floods and the calendar is irrelevant. What to say when you flip it: the snow-day message.

Dates above are for 2026 and the Patriotes date moves annually. Employment-standards obligations around statutory holidays are a separate question from call routing: that one is for an employment adviser. Related: building a French-first IVR.