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Who gets to coin a word
The office Gabriel means is the Office québécois de la langue française, and the thing worth understanding is not the institution but what its record actually shows about language planning. Some of its coinages won completely. 'Courriel' is now the normal word in Québec, has entered French dictionaries, and is used in France. 'Pourriel' for spam, 'baladodiffusion' for podcasting, 'covoiturage' for car-sharing — which came from France — all took. Others failed entirely: 'clavardage' for online chat is known and largely unused, and the proposed replacements for 'email' in France ('mél', 'courrier électronique') never displaced 'mail'. The pattern is reasonably clear in hindsight. A coinage succeeds when it is short, transparent, arrives before the borrowing is entrenched, and gets used in official and media writing where people encounter it repeatedly. It fails when it is longer than what it replaces or arrives late. France has its own version of this, which learners often do not know: the Académie française issues pronouncements, and the Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française publishes official French equivalents in the Journal officiel, binding on government writing. 'Ordinateur' for computer is one of its successes and is now simply the word. So the difference between France and Québec here is not that one plans its language and the other does not — both do — but how much is at stake, and therefore how seriously the public takes it. Which is the real asymmetry. In France, resisting an anglicism is a matter of taste and mild national pride, and the people who care most are often mocked for it. In Québec, the same act sits inside a demographic situation that lesson 60 takes up, and it is correspondingly less funny to the people doing it. A visitor who treats 'courriel' as a quaint provincial curiosity has misread the room; a visitor who simply uses it has done something small, free and noticed. For your own writing, the practical rule is to match the place. In Québec: courriel, stationnement, fin de semaine, magasiner, chandail rather than pull. In France: mail, parking, week-end, faire du shopping, pull. Both sets are understood everywhere, so this is politeness rather than correctness — but it is the kind of politeness that tells somebody you have been paying attention.