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Originally Posted by kool maudit
I was last in Halifax in 2013, and I didn't find it to feel very provincial at all. For its size and isolation, in fact, it was really pretty worldly and the universities, colleges and port connect it to the broader world quite efficiently (the commercial sector still feels a bit good old boy-ish, though).
The other thing, I think, is that English-speaking Canadians have a peculiar horror of provincialism, or seeming provincial. I think this is because we internalized a lot of that frontier/periphery feeling from our country's early history and are very eager to show the world that it no longer applies. There is this real hunger to appear up-to-the-minute.
Yesterday I found myself talking to a couple of Croatians about their country's recent election, and they were trying to explain how their electoral system works and what the problems are with it. They were in fine spirits, but their conversation was punctuated with well-meaning asides like "in order to understand this, you need to understand how stupid we Croatians are about [this or that thing]" and "this would work better in someplace like Finland, but we are too backwards still". It reminded how relatively rare it is for Canadians to air the dirty laundry of their self-perceptions like this, especially to outsiders. These guys were insouciant about it, though – Croatia obviously wasn't "the best", in fact it was worse, to their eyes, than its neighbours in distinct ways, but it has been there forever and will be there forever and to be Croatian is a fine thing all in all. That's the security we don't really have.
All that to say Halifax, I think, is very worldly for what it is. Paradoxically, it's only departure from that ideal is its slightly brittle sense of self-satisfaction, that little twinge that shows it's still striving.
(Quebec probably doesn't strive in the same way because Quebecers, for whatever reason, do not seem as concerned with "climbing the ladder" of the francophone world as we are with climbing the anglo one.)
The last time I was in Halifax, in fact, I flew in from Rome and my first meal, at La Frasca on Spring Garden, gave up nothing to the very similar one I had had the night before in Italy's 2500-year-old capital, right in the middle of the place on the Via Borgognona.
That is not too bad for a small city in Atlantic Canada. That would not have been the case 100, 50 or even 15 years ago. Even the smallest details were right.
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Quebec City IMO also does these fineries very well. As well if not better than Halifax.
I think a lot of its alleged provinciality is related to what you and I both alluded to in our previous posts.
And also the fact that people tend to view it through a particular lens: that of Anglo North America. If you view it through the rest of the world's lens including Europe's BTW it doesn't stand out so much.
My wife has a Franco-Ontarian friend whose entire family is from Quebec City and she frequently rants about how backward her family members are there because they don't speak English and don't know Jimmy Kimmel or Tina Fey or SNL or watch Ellen de Generes or a bunch of other American pop culture icons. What she doesn't realize is that they simply have their own equivalents for all of this stuff. Or that they might be reading Henning Mankell or Paulo Coelho while she is reading Danielle Steel. And they probably dress better than she does.
Note that she is not the most worldly and cultured person to begin with so it's even funnier.
All other pairings are possible of course:
Sophisticated Franco-Ontarien vs. Rube Québécois
Rube Québécois vs. Sophisticated Franco-Ontarien
And so on...
But I do find that judgements of Quebec City are often (but not always) made based on its buy-in to Anglo North America (or lack thereof), as if that was the only thing that mattered.
And I say this as a person who does have some issues with Quebec City.
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