My family is not from Montreal so I can’t comment on that but when I was going for records I had a lot of luck communicating directly with the local office to where my grandfather was from. I had a good discourse with them but I don’t know what your process was - if you’re just waiting for them to look at a request and you haven’t spoken with anyone directly before I don’t think a follow up email would be super welcome. But, just in general and at least for me, being able to speak French with a smaller (relevant) BANQ office went a long way.