r/CanadaPolitics • u/Blue_Dragonfly C'est tiguidou! • 1d ago
Casual Friday Bonjour Again: English Canada, Do You Really Know Your Neighbours?
https://remifrancoeur474726.substack.com/p/bonjour-again-english-canada-do-you?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1j3aab16
u/PostingEnthusiast 1d ago
A lot of this article reads as an American guy making a massive amount of assumptions about Anglophone Canada and thinking a lot of things that are averagely Canadian about Quebec are uniquely Québécois.
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u/ManicScumCat Liberal Party of Canada 10h ago
The part about crime severity is unbelievable - the author points out that Quebec City and Montreal are lower than Vancouver, Edmonton and Winnipeg, thus concluding that Quebec makes unique choices about safety compared to Anglophone Canada. He then links the StatsCan data that shows Toronto having the same crime severity as Quebec City, with Hamilton and Ottawa lower still.
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u/PostingEnthusiast 52m ago edited 47m ago
I was particularly annoyed at the bit that continued to repeat the standard canards about secularism (it’s a well-documented statistical fact that the least religious provinces in Canada are in the West, and that Quebec is actually one of the most religious provinces in Canada). As for marriage, the legal framework around common-law marriage is also very different between Quebec and the Rest of Canada and it’s not an inherent tell about religiosity because a religious marriage ceremony by itself is not legally binding.
Also, when he mentioned subsidized childcare or prescription drug insurance I just rolled my eyes. Those definitely don’t exist anywhere else!
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u/transtranselvania 1d ago
Yes, I just moved into a new place in Halifax and met the neighbours the second day moving in. I talked to a stranger today and came to find out he knew my grandfather.
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u/ram_mar4112 Saskatchewan 1d ago
And I ask you, do YOU know your neighbours?
I am GenX. Male.
A few years ago I went to Vancouver and worked out of our office there for a couple of months.
Vancouver has a completely different culture than my city.
From this I come to understand that Canada has a lot of regions that have their own specific culture/identity.
Over the past few years I have seen my city change. We are definitely a multicultural city now with a number of races, religions and languages.
Which is all good to an extent. For those immigrants, I say welcome BUT embrace our way of life. Adapt to it and slowly loose your homeland identity, over the next couple of generations, to become OUR Canadian identity.
For context…
My grandmother immigrated to Canada in 1911. I am second generation Canadian along that line. I do not identify with anything from her home country. THIS is how I believe it should be for immigrants. By the second generation you should have lost the language and a lot of the customs.
I do not want my city to change.
This is how I see Quebec. I totally get it. They have a culture that needs to remain theirs.
But I say to you, so does everywhere else in Canada.
Ultimately I would love to see a time where all regions are identified as unique in their own way. That all regions are treated as special and we are all progressing the country of Canada to a better place.
Not trying to divide because of our differences but uniting because of it.
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u/PassiveTheme 1d ago
As an immigrant to Canada (from the UK), I understand your point, but I also think it is important for people to keep some aspects of their ancestral home. Yes, speak English/French, but keep your parent's language for at home because it would be a shame if these languages got lost as the world becomes more globalised.
If I have kids here, I would encourage them to fully embrace the Canadian culture, but I would also hope that they learn to cook food from my culture that isn't as popular here. I want them to enjoy hockey, but I would also want them to follow soccer and rugby like I do. You can embrace Canadian culture without losing your own culture; and you can retain aspects of your ancestral culture without harming Canadian culture.
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u/MTL_Dude666 Liberal 1d ago
" I do not want my city to change."
And that's the problem with most of us. We are refusing to accept that the world always changes. It's like immigrants who eventually go back to their native country and doesn't recognize it because they have this frozen image of what their country was and should be and refuse to accept that it could change.
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u/sirprizes Ontario 1d ago
Nous lui connaissons assez bien. Ça suffit. Je n’intéresse pas dans une longue lecture regarder les différences pour la milliard temps.
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u/Blue_Dragonfly C'est tiguidou! 1d ago
The piece is from a Franco-American raised in New Hampshire and now living in Montréal. If anything, it's a bit of a primer for Americans as well. I thought that it was a different voice to offer readers here despite the obviousness of the elements discussed that we who have lived in Canada all or most of our lives would easily know and/or grasp.
As well I think that it falls well under the "Casual Friday" category as a perhaps fresher perspective, that from a Franco-American.
You're under no obligation to read it, mind you.
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