What is it like to come home to Canada?

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

Scott Paper near New Glasgow is comparatively foul even when in operation.

Comparatively foul???

Jesus Christ, you could smell it in Charlottetown when the wind was blowing the wrong way, and we were about 100 km away!!!

The mill is closed down now isn't it?

[urbandreamer]

Another thing the media and particularly new Canadians get wrong: other than hockey culture, there is no common "white culture" in Canada. I'm boring you with my Mennonite experience, but Swiss German Mennonite culture is starkly different than Scots-Irish Canadian culture. Their fierce loyalty to their cousins, their extremely literal interpretation of the New Testament, their efficient production of agricultural products and furniture/millwork, their food, their shared Martyrs Mirror identity as a persecuted people, etc. How many different cultures joined to form a united Germany?

So stop with this lazy "white" people thing.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Jesus Christ, you could smell it in Charlottetown when the wind was blowing the wrong way, and we were about 100 km away!!!

Nanaimo has this issue too. Not sure if Saint John does these days but people used to complain about it.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by someone123

Nanaimo has this issue too. Not sure if Saint John does these days but people used to complain about it.

Saint John is much improved. It used to be horrible.

[WhipperSnapper]

white self loathing plays better than anti-Canadianism. Students in the Toronto District school system are going spend more time learning a map of indigenous territories from 500 years ago than a "colonialist" modern map of Canada with provinces and capitals.

[kool maudit]

"White" is a US thing. That country was 22% African after its revolution and fought a war over it a century later. We had nothing like that.

The rulers of Canada were "British".

I mean, of course they were white in a Kipling sense if they ever came across an African or an Indian, but you need to have had an apartheid system to really give those colour classifications weight and capitalization.

Our thing was the one where obviously there were "savages" and distant curiosities, but you couldn't get too into pure colour thinking lest you forget about the innate inferiorities of people like the Irish.

That all blew away with the Empire, leaving us to interpret our own history through lenses borrowed from our neighbour. It's not totally wrong to look at Canada's history through the lens of "white", but it's not right, either.

[urbandreamer]

^And hopefully like myself, 30 years later completely forget it. Public school is state propaganda. Disgusting rubbish.

Lately, I've been reading my great grandfather's letters. He was a Canadian journalist active between 1900 & 1950, particularly known for his war reports. As an Englishman, he was somewhat of an outsider. In the 1930s, he writes about connections meaning nothing in Canada, that it's more about ambition. Was he wrong?

In the US, "white" simply means having colonial ties to the country. You could be English, Scots-Irish, Irish, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French etc. Now there's some confusion when New York Jews & Hispanics call themselves white when it's convenient, but otherwise, like my ex, look upon us old stock "whites" with disdain.

[giallo]

Originally Posted by niwell

P'tit Renard makes a good point about GO RER and access to Markham, which does have the best Chinese food. Scarborough of course also has a ton of amazing hole in the wall places and you need to drive for that, but a weekend trip isn't too hard (makes it difficult to have a few pints though!). That being said there are still a lot of good places downtown - you aren't going to get a big meal of the same quality but more and more small places are popping up with the influx of younger Asians in the area, which predates COVID. I'm sure the versions in Markham are superior but over the past couple months I've gotten Xi'an style dishes, Malatang bone soup, braised chicken rice and Taiwanese breakfast (and more stuff I'm forgetting). Plus a lot of interesting non-ramen or sushi Japanese places that have popped up. Most of these are hole in the wall setups outside Chinatown proper but rather in the Yonge/College and University/Dundas area that I wouldn't have found without ordering apps and coworkers.

All of this has been much cheaper than "traditional" lunch offerings now that fancy sandwiches are running $15 and up! Plus for that I'd rather go to a nice butcher in my actual neighbourhood.

Thanks for the information, niwell.

A big bonus of Metro Vancouver is that everything is still relatively close together. A trip to Richmond or Burnaby (two cities we routinely go to eat), border Vancouver, and are reachable within 30 minutes by train or car.

Vancouver itself, has some really interesting food options, but mostly in East Vancouver (Fraser St and Victoria Dr. are becoming great places to gorge). Downtown is a mixed bag. I look at it as a "jack of all trades, master of none".

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

"White" is a US thing. That country was 22% African after its revolution and fought a war over it a century later. We had nothing like that.

The rulers of Canada were "British".

I mean, of course they were white in a Kipling sense if they ever came across an African or an Indian, but you need to have had an apartheid system to really give those colour classifications weight and capitalization.

Our thing was the one where obviously there were "savages" and distant curiosities, but you couldn't get too into pure colour thinking lest you forget about the innate inferiorities of people like the Irish.

It was its own form of insanity and it blew away with the Empire, leaving us to interpret our own history through lenses borrowed from our neighbour. It's not totally wrong to look at Canada's history through the lens of "white", but it's not right, either.

The only real conflict involving political violence and deaths in modern Canada was between two antagonistic groups who were both white and separated in the old continent of origin by a channel of water roughly 35 km wide.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by thewave46

Piteå is almost what one would like a remote resource/paper mill/industrial town to aspire to in this country.

I'm trying to think of one that didn't rot out completely in my experience.

Rouyn-Noranda, QC?
Sturgeon Falls, ON?

Something about being an older farming community without growing too large or being in Quebec just does a better job of preserving the core of a place.

There are some ghastly examples of rot in Northern Ontario and westwards. Maybe it's a culture of throwing out the baby with the bathwater in the name of modernity being more ingrained the newer the place is?

Rouyn-Noranda has some very decent streetscape density along that road for a few blocks, but alas, inevitably, it comes to this: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.2422...6656?entry=ttu

[kool maudit]

Originally Posted by Acajack

The only real conflict involving political violence and deaths in modern Canada was between two antagonistic groups who were both white and separated in the old continent of origin by a channel of water roughly 35 km wide.

I am reminded of those old Victorian books that go on about things like "the pecularities of the Hungarian race". There are so many ways to be "racist"! There are so many ways to despise the outgroup.

It's so historically provincial to insist on viewing these conflicts solely through the lens provided by the US slave states. It is like trying to figure out whether the Houthis are in fact the "Jansenists" of the Yemeni civil war.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by lio45

For example, something like this:

Those fields you see in this pic, won't be big box stores and surface parking a decade from now, I promise, and that's absolutely regardless of how many Parisians decide to relocate there.

(I don't even know where this is, just that it's somewhere in France. I'm sure it's somewhere in the NorthEast, from the architecture.)

And yet even in picturesque rural France all is not well.

France’s ‘sad’ rural towns pose real challenge for Macron’s second term
Rural decline boosts Marine Le Pen and makes it harder for the president to reconcile a divided nation.

TONNEINS, France — Tonneins should be an idyllic place to live. Full of history and charm, the small town perches above the River Garonne in southwest France and is surrounded by gently rolling countryside. Sounds like an expat’s dream.

And yet, more than half the town’s voters backed the populist, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in last weekend’s presidential election.

Despite the area’s natural beauty, the signs of decline and decay are everywhere. Youths hang around the main square, there are entire streets with boarded-up shops and, overlooking the river, an empty bandstand recalls better times.

“It’s a sad town,” said an elderly woman sitting on a bench with a couple of friends. “There used to be a butcher, a baker, a grocery store, there’s nothing left now,” chimed in another....

https://www.politico.eu/article/how-...h-countryside/

Another common theme you see is one familiar to Canadians: the inability to attract medical professionals to these areas.

[urbandreamer]

My ancestors fought on the Plains of Abraham. They commanded English ships, lived on the Isle of Wight, and were educated in France! Of French Norman ancestry. The British taking control of New France was really just the aristocratic French Norman's conquering another Isle from a rival claim to the throne.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

I am reminded of those old Victorian books that go on about things like "the pecularities of the Hungarian race". There are so many ways to be "racist"! There are so many ways to despise the outgroup.

It's so historically provincial to insist on viewing these conflicts solely through the lens provided by the US slave states. It is like trying to figure out whether the Houthis are in fact the "Jansenists" of the Yemeni civil war.

Turns out all those hours spent watching US movies and TV had an effect after all.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

I suppose the builders of our industrial cities just never loved them. Not New Glasgow, not Manchester, not Detroit. They really only existed for 25-70 years anyway. Blink and you miss it. Our generation's backward-looking affection couldn't save them.

They were also populated by people moving from rural areas, such as Newfoundland outports, who worked for wages and were subservient to the large employers. In the "trade will liberalize Russia and China" era some North Americans spoke about how the unemployed in these towns would become software engineers or whatever (in Canada in practice this was a strategy of doing nothing and watching people decamp to Alberta). I would imagine Scandinavian policies were different.

In contrast places like Charlottetown were comparatively "bourgeois" even in 1800, and the economic base of farming and fishing around the town hasn't changed all that much. The Maritimes are somewhat like southern vs. northern England with the "southern" analog in the Maritimes being a blob in the middle of NS running up to PEI.

[kool maudit]

Originally Posted by someone123

They were also populated by people moving from rural areas who worked for wages and were subservient to the large employers.

In contrast places like Charlottetown were comparatively "bourgeois" even in 1800, and the economic base of farming around the town hasn't changed all that much.

That's a good comparison. I suppose that, despite their solid-seeming brick buildings and even skyscrapers, there was something artificial about these places. Or maybe artificial isn't the word, but somehow innately impermanent.

[urbandreamer]

^It's apparent that most of Canada was built to be quickly exploited then forgotten. Read about Yale, BC for example.

[kool maudit]

Originally Posted by urbandreamer

^It's apparent that most of Canada was built to be quickly exploited then forgotten. Read about Yale, BC for example.

"In its heyday at the peak of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, it was reputed to be the largest city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco. It also earned epithets such as "the wickedest little settlement in British Columbia" and "a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah" of vice, violence and lawlessness."



Sounds like a mountain version of Port Royal, Jamaica.

All these little outposts and fly-by-night capitals. Sometimes I think us Anglos really are a pirate race, just a bunch of wandering Phoenician sailors. I think our French and German friends have expressed these views at lower moments in our relationships. Something too restless in there, not true builders.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

"In its heyday at the peak of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, it was reputed to be the largest city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco. It also earned epithets such as "the wickedest little settlement in British Columbia" and "a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah" of vice, violence and lawlessness."



Sounds like a mountain version of Port Royal, Jamaica.
.

Or Mos Eisley spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.

(Beat Molson to it.)

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Rouyn-Noranda has some very decent streetscape density along that road for a few blocks, but alas, inevitably, it comes to this: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.2422...6656?entry=ttu

Places in NW Quebec tend to be a teeny tiny step up from their size peers in NE Ontario.

Even a town like Ville-Marie with only 2500 people isn't too bad.

Though they're all generally several full notches below northern towns in Scandinavia.

On Rouyn-Noranda, it's culturally decent for its size and location, and I think I've mentioned that it has a decent film festival that draws cinematic types from all over the world.

French cultural icon Serge Gainsbourg went there and famously said: "The epitome of snobbery isn't going to Cannes, it's going to Rouyn-Noranda".

According to legend he caught a nasty cold there and that's what killed him a month or two after he visited.