Quebec, the French Language, and Quebecois Identity

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by niwell

One of the big comments from my British relatives (this goes for Australian ones / friends from South Africa as well) is how warm it is inside houses during winter here. No matter how cold it gets outside. British housing tends to run damp and drafty, making for a somewhat miserable experience when it's cold out. Apparently the worst housing quality in Western Europe, though I'm not sure what metrics that's based on. A lot easier to appreciate winter when you can go inside to warm up with relative ease.

Anything pre-1980 in the UK seems pretty poorly insulated, by our standards. The older they are, the worse it gets. The really old stuff is wonderful to look at, but difficult to heat.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Yeah, people have a tendency to see everything negatively here. The French are always very negative. Plus we have super strong far-left parties doing their best to make us feel guilty, plus our public TV and radios have non-stop programs about the catastrophe of climate change.

Talking of which, I've just seen this. From the chief foreign affairs commentator at the Financial Times.



Unfortunately, it's not the same here. I was counting on some warm autumn with global warming to compensate for the rather coolish and soggy summer we've had, but the autumn has been pretty disappointing here, and the past few days noticeably colder and very gray.

I don't know if we can still have a day above 20 C in November. Doesn't seem likely in the next 2 weeks. And by late November it will be game over.

[big T]

Originally Posted by Acajack

The anglophone community has already considerably transitioned away from its British roots, as evidenced for example by the people who run Montreal's English school board:

https://www.emsb.qc.ca/emsb/about/go.../commissioners

I don't think there is a true British Isles surname amongst all of the commissioners there. It's very predominantly Italian and Ashkenazi Jewish.

It's ironic that in Quebec the true descendants of the original anglo community are probably divided in three, with one third still in the province and still part of the anglophone community, one third living outside Quebec (mostly in the ROC with some in the US) and one third seamlessly assimilated into the francophone majority.

Yet the community continues to grow demographically due to the assimilation of newcomers of all origins to the anglophone sphere, and tomorrow's torchbearers for "historic English" in Montreal will be that Vietnamese kid you mention, plus Palestinians, Brazilians, Romanians, etc.

It's as if a Polish dude moved to Winnipeg, noted that there is lots of Franco-Manitoban history in the province and in parts of the city like Saint-Boniface, learned French instead of English and started getting all aggressive about French and calling anglophone Winnipeggers racists and shitheads. Now multiply that by a couple hundred thousand.

Absolutely, and my point was that this current makeup of what we'll agree to call "Montreal's historic anglo community" as seen in the EMSB dates back to a time where Quebec had not asserted its current French form - not to the extent it did since the quiet revolution anyway.

Hence the "historic" part; folks arriving now are immigrants to a French Quebec, like it or not. So consciously deciding to come here and not integrate into francophone majority culture is quite deliberate at this point. Expecting the people of Quebec to accept that has nothing to do with respect for a historic community established long ago in a very different political and social context, and everything to do with perpetuating that political and social context which was rejected decades ago. It's seen as confrontational because it is. (and, maybe these anglo-oriented immigrants in Qc are misled rather than ill-intentioned, but then you'd have to look at the federal policies that support that)

Molson speaks of feeling unwelcome in his own city, and I hope most reasonable people would agree that this is an unfortunate side effect of tensions building because of what I wrote above. But I don't think you have to hate Anglo-Montrealers to want Montreal to be French going forward.

I also think opinion polls can be deceiving, like when you see a lot of support or fondness for Montreal as a bilingual entity -- that's all great and if I'm honest I quite like that too, but we'd do well to remember that bilingual life is a luxury afforded by having a strong French majority. The opposite wouldn't last a generation.

[ToxiK]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Montreal would not be the metropolis of all of Canada unless it was a legitimate bilingual city. At one time, this was it's destiny, but, the PQ, Bill 101 and a couple of referenda put an end to that.

Which is too bad, because I think Montreal is a more interesting city than Toronto. It would have done well as the NYC of Canada.

Bilingual the Canadian way, meaning English...