Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
It's fascinating how non-British or un-British Anglo-Canadians and Anglo-Canada are when you consider how recent the British roots of millions of people are, compared to how to distant the roots of French Canadians in France are. (And of course the fact that Canada still has legal ties to the British monarchy.)
I bet you François Legault doesn't have any known relatives in France at all, and this is basically the case for all French Canadians except for a handful of people where fairly recent (think a couple of decades) immigration is what is involved.
Whereas Doug Ford's grandparents were born in England. He is just a bit older than me, so he would likely have known a number of British members of his family as a child.
Since I grew up in Anglo-Canada, I know how common this is. Many of my classmates had British parents and even more of them had British grandparents.
This just doesn't exist for French Canadians.
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I think it has to do with the fact that Anglo-Canadians descend from way more than just British people, because for 150 years the immigrants integrated only in the Anglophone culture, so Anglo-Canada is very diverse. French Canada was much more closed in, with only a few Irish immigrants integrating in the Francophone culture, so the French Canadians still predominantly descend from French settlers, which explains the higher degree of connection with France.
That plus the fact that as a small dominated group in an Anglophone ocean, they need to keep a link with France to sort of maintain their "francité", so to speak. If the French Canadians were 300 million and at the head of the superpower of North America, surely the ties with France would be far less strong, and the Francophones of North America would not be looking towards France a lot, the way the Americans don't look towards the UK a lot. But as a small minority you have no other choice but keep in touch with the old motherland really.