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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25087 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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The government of Quebec will cut funding for out-of-province students to study at English language universities in Quebec. The justification being that these students are a threat to the French language and that they leave after graduation (if you see a contradiction there, you're not alone).

Tuition at McGill (one of the top universities in Canada) will increase from $8,992 to $17,000 a year, making it much harder to compete with the likes of the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. Bishop's University expects to lose a third of its students possibly not to survive.

In Canada, every province subsidizes about half the cost of Canadian students attending its universities, regardless of their province of origin. The result is that, while international students pay full price, Canadians can attend university anywhere in the country and pay similar tuition rates. These subsidies are funded in large part with unconditional Social Transfers, that can be spent on other programs, but they are intended to benefit all Canadians equally. Quebec differs from the other provinces in that it funds about three quarters of the cost for Quebec residents and half for French citizens and Canadians from other provinces.

In my view, this is just the latest in the government's attempt to ethnically cleanse Quebec of anglophones. What is not well understood outside Quebec is that it has long had a large anglophone minority which has been shrinking for almost two hundred years (since the Great Migration from the British Isles). Places like the Ottawa valley and the Eastern Townships were originally settled by anglophones. Quebec City, Montreal (which was a majority English speaking city for a good part of the 19th century), and the Gaspé have long had very large anglophone minorities.

This history is attested to by placenames like Hull, Sherbrooke, Granby, and Drummondville, and by street names like Saint James Street and Dorchester Boulevard (renamed to René-Levesque). The three English language universities are located in these originally English speaking areas: two are in Montreal's traditionally anglophone western downtown and one is in Lennoxville, the last remaining predominantly English speaking community in the Eastern Townships.

At the time of the British conquest, French Canadians were concentrated in a narrow strip along the Saint Lawrence River. Other areas were immediately settled by an influx of immigrants from the US and Great Britain, but would later be swamped by the rapidly expanding French Canadians, who would eventually win enough political power to enforce its culture on the anglophones who didn't leave.

Since the 60s, the government has enforced the use of French and suppressed the use of English in almost all areas of public life, but recently, some misleading statistics have been used to stir up fear among francophones that their language is on the decline. It's been noticed that the number of people who speak French at home has very slightly declined in recent years. This is obviously because of the large number of immigrants who are making up a larger and larger share of the population every year. The number speaking English at home has declined even more. It is therefore absurd to suggest that French is in any meaningful sense on the decline, unless you're suggesting that Quebec is going to become a primarily Arabic speaking province. If you know anything about Quebec, you know what is implied by such claims is that English is displacing French. But the very thing producing this statistic of declining use of French at home is actually making the province more French.

In reality, partly because of a law that prevents immigrant children from attending English public schools, 90% of immigrant children grow up to be francophones, which is a larger share than the native population. Even a majority of anglophone children attend French schools and the vast majority of young anglophone Quebeckers are bilingual.

Quebec also has a large degree of independent control over its immigration, allowing it to prioritize immigration from French speaking countries, particulary France, Africa, and Haiti. The anglophone communities are thus largely prevented from replenishing their naturally declining populations with immigrants.

Earlier, this fear was used to justify limiting the number of places in English speaking CEGEPs (two year colleges that are attended between high school and university) and requiring almost all immigrants to speak French, including students, temporary workers, and those sponsored by family members.

The government is justifying these latest policies by saying they are needed to protect the French language (which is not under threat), while complaining that it costs them money to pay for students who leave after graduation (in large part because of their oppressive language laws). But if they leave, they're not much a threat. Canadian citizens are the only people who are allowed (because of a constitutional right) to put their children in English public schools.

They don't want them to stay. A small but stable anglophone minority is not a threat. These policies seem clearly calculated to slowly strangle the anglophone community until it disappears. The real fear is not that French will disappear, but that Quebec will fail to become purely French.

There was an episode from a few years that I think illustrates well the insanity that has taken over public discourse in Quebec and Ottawa. In 2020, Liberal Member of Parliament Emmanuella Lambropoulos, a trilingual millennial representing the Montreal borough of Saint-Laurent, told the official languages commissioner she would need evidence to believe that French was on the 'decline' (with air quotes). This provoked such outrage in Quebec, where she was lambasted for 'disrespecting' French Canadians and asked by other committee members to leave the committee, that she felt the need to offer her 'deepest apologies' and resignation from the committee the next day. You'd have thought she said something racist given the level of indignation expressed, with anglophone politicians falling over themselves trying to distance themselves from her remarks while Quebec nationalists accused them of secretly agreeing with her.

The justification being that these students are a threat to the French language and that they leave after graduation (if you see a contradiction there, you're not alone).

I don't see the contradiction. In my country the natives are now forced to study in English, at least in part because the universities want the money from foreign students, resulting in them changing to English for most fields. This is even true for those studying the native language.

As a result, the graduated students have difficulty applying their learnings in the native language.

I'm not following the point of you're making, but the contradiction is that they can't be much of a threat if they leave after graduation. The fact is, they don't want them to stay, so it's just an excuse. Most Canadians really like Montreal, but the language laws make it very difficult for people to work there and for businesses to operate there, especially if they need to draw on a talent pool that doesn't speak French or if they need to do business with non-French speakers.

My own province massively subsidizes students who come here just go to university, much more than Quebec, and we're poorer. But charging them higher tuition than locals is not on the table, because there isn't much of a cultural issue and we actually want them to stay.

The point is that they are a threat to French-language education while they are there.

I don't think that's the point. Why would they be a threat to that?

In 2020, Liberal Member of Parliament Emmanuella Lambropoulos, a trilingual millennial representing the Montreal borough of Saint-Laurent, told the official languages commissioner she would need evidence to believe that French was on the 'decline' (with air quotes).

Thus earning an enduring place in my heart, and also sounding like a cool lady to hang out with.

I can see why Saint-Laurent so inspired filmmaker Frank Oz that he set a thriller there which included many shots of Edward Norton outside the city's customs house and a scene of DeNiro saying "you always told me ... live in Montreal" to Marlon Brando himself!

The film was clearly a love letter to the city—although since a movie called "The Score" about the a heist of said customs house directed by the puppeteer who played Miss Piggy can, accurately, be described as "a Muppet says criminals should live here," I suppose Francophones could mistake it for an insult, if they didn't all love cinema so much.

Does choosing not to accommodate anglophones count as ethnic cleansing?

My intuition is no, we’re not an ethnicity. The textbook examples of ethnic cleansing involve specific heritage, not a skill which can be learned by anyone. But there are examples of culture specific to Quebecois Anglophones, and children can obviously be born into one or another language. So I can see it counting on those grounds.

The point ought to be moot. Language is specifically called out in the Quebec declaration of human rights, and ought to prevent any “juridical acts” discriminating accordingly. Clearly, that hasn’t held any sway for some time.

It's ethnicity in a cultural sense, not a racial sense.

Which is something I've never quite been comfortable with.

It's easy for me to say rounding up all the, I don't know, Americans would count as ethnic cleansing. Nationality is an obvious cultural cluster in a way which English-speaking...isn't? At least not within America. I can see how that would be different in other countries, especially ones with very different colonial histories, but it's not intuitive in the same way that racial or religious or national clusters form an ethnicity.

Perks of being a lingua franca, I suppose.

If the US decided to remove all Hispanics from the US, that wouldn't be called ethnic cleansing? I don't see how nationality can be culturally more important than language. Language is the single most important aspect of your culture. You speak your language every day, whereas you don't often think about what country you live in. People tend to have more affinity towards foreigners who speak their language than people in their own country who speak a different language. That's why separatism almost always happens on lingustic lines. Quebec even calls itself a separate "nation" within Canada.

It feels more intuitive if your country has a history of persecuting regional patois to create such lingua franca.

When you're rounding up children, sending them to specific schools and beating them if they speak a language, it starts to look a lot more similar to other forms of ethnic persecution.

Of course this isn't what's happening here, but I just want to assert that using language to draw ethnic boundary isn't bizarre. It's a very common group signifier along with religion.

"Ethnic cleansing" generally means that someone actually, concretely is forced out of their home without being permitted to come back. As such, the language policies by Quebec are obviously not ethnic cleansing.

Religion and culture can also change just like language, they just happen to be a bit more sticky than language. It's a difference in magnitude, not of kind.

They would prioritize a French speaking Haitian (one of the poorest and lest educated countries) over an educated software engineer or doctor? Am I understanding that correctly?

Is there a reason they shouldn't?

There's not a lot of human capital in Haiti since it's literally the poorest and least developed country in the Western Hemisphere, so I wouldn't prioritize them just because they speak French. If I'm going to take in immigrants, I'm going to prioritize young, educated people that have skills my country needs.

I wouldn't prioritize them just because they speak French.

Why not? "Already speaks the language" strikes me as a perfectly reasonable thing to prioritize when considering potential immigrants.

I feel like you're expecting me to give you some kind of answer you can pounce on. What I said above is how I feel and if you disagree that's on you.

The hypothetical choices are (doctor/ software engineer/ young educated person with needed skills) vs (native speaker of the primary language). I'd bet more social good come from the former over the latter. One virtually guarantees paying more than their fair share of tax, and their offspring are almost certain to be native speakers, and likely successful as well.

If I understand the new rules correctly, yes, because a software engineer or doctor would presumably be immigrating under the economic stream which now requires that you speak French, whereas before, it would simply have resulted in more points being awarded in the points system that determines who can get permanent residency. You already had to speak French to be a doctor or engineer, but you could have been a software developer without being a professional engineer and in that case you would not have had to speak French to work in Quebec.

That said, you can still immigrate to another part of Canada and then move to Quebec. Permanent residents and Canadian citizens are free to live wherever they want in the country.

sorta related but I was just in Montreal, some obervations:

  • definitely seems like if you are a twenty something there you need to speak French. Communities / friendships seem largely segregated by francophone or anglophone groups, and there are more francophone ones

  • Downtown Montreal is full of taller buildings, but definitely seem like they stopped building after 1970s. Seemed to coincide with the first French language laws? My local friend said Montreal was the natural economic engine for Canada, not Toronto, since the former is on the coast, benefited from trade since 1600s, etc.

  • Seems like the first french language laws in 1970s are partly a reason for the switch to Toronto. Apparently those laws stipulated that companies headquartered in Montreal needed to have a CEO who has a certain leve of French skills (don’t quote me on this). Seemed to motivate companies and rich Anglos to move HQs to Toronto, spurring Toronto’s growth to now be the premier Canadian city.

  • the arguments for the laws were cultural, but seemed that people also think it was economically redistributive from the Anglophone to the Francophone. As my friend said, “yes Montreal lost companies, but it largely worker on the Quebec context, as there was really a trend that the Anglos increasingly economically dominant over Francophones here”. Not sure if that was an explicit reason for these policies, tho.

  • You mentioned the schooling language thing. Seemed like you either have to prove you already got anglo schooling or go private school to avoid French schooling. Seemed like more choice before.

  • Quebec gives free French classes to anyone, apparently. Plan to take advantage when I am between jobs if I have the living costs

It at least appears to me that Quebec has been able to solidify its status as a Francophone region. I was impressed by how French they are, despite not being part of New France for hundreds of years. Honestly maybe it was confirmation bias, but even the construction workers look French; I swear this older man looked like a second cousin of Charles De Gaul, but like, working class.

From a self preservation aspect for their Francophone culture, language, and identity, these policies all seemed to work. And Im impressed they work so well!

I’m not an expert on Louisiana, but other than their legal system, New Orleans and Louisiana in general does not seem French / Cajun to me anymore. Quebec is the largest province and most or second most populous, so LA and Quebec do not have similar situations. Nevertheless, LA’s current state seems like a possibility for Quebec had Quebec not enacted these policies (and taken the economic penalty for the cultural win. Montreal seems to have the lowest rents of the bigger Canadian cities)

Overall: impressed by the choices made there and the results. Seems like something other places that wanna strengthen their cultural identity can learn from. It would probably work if they have the will to enforce similar cultural / language rules and the unity to endure the economic costs. Maybe more impressed cuz these policies seem driven by the people, not some random Politician making choices thay the people have to endure (though that probably happened too, in the beginning)

oh and fun fact: Canada does border a tiny French territory still.

most or second most populous

Second, behind Ontario, and it's not remotely close.

St Pierre and Miquelon are islands off the coast of Newfoundland. It seems misleading to call that a border.

There is some segregation of social circles by language, but there is a lot of mixing. The young native Montrealers tend to be much more bilingual than anglophones from outside Quebec or French immigrants. They're also much more bilingual than the older generation.

Many people do live in Montreal without speaking French though. You can get by without it, especially if you know it well enough to read the signs, even if you can't speak or understand it. The hardest thing would be getting a job where you don't have to speak French. They do exist though.

Montreal was the largest city in and commercial capital of Canada until the 1970s. There are multiple reasons why Toronto took over. Montreal is not on the coast, but it is at sea level on the Saint Lawrence River, making it easily accessible in the summer when the river isn't frozen. It's strategically located just as far as you can go up the river before you hit rapids. This made it an important port until the Saint Lawrence Seaway, a system of canals that connected the Saint Lawrence River to the great lakes, made Toronto the more important port city.

In Montreal, business had always been conducted in English, with French being more spoken by the French Canadian working class that had immigrated later from the countryside. Forcing these mostly unilingual anglophones to do business in French was of course, highly disruptive. Today's anglophones are much more likely to speak French, and so they integrate more easily into French society, but it still makes it difficult to attract outside talent.

I've heard of accusations that the English oppressed the French, but I don't find them convincing. There may have been some discrimination, but it seems more likely that there was a selection effect, with Montreal specifically attracting anglophone businessmen and French Canadian workers. There were lots of successful French Canadians in Montreal, but there were fewer of them than anglophones, so they spoke English. This was much less the case in Quebec City, where French dominated and which had been the largest city in the country before the British conquest.

French Canadians blame the English for holding them back, but there are many other things they could blame, such as the very conservative Catholic Church which controlled French Canadian society until the 60s or possibly the seigneural system. The French way of life was very different and the British did not interfere with it when they took over, much to the annoyance of British Americans at the time. This was one of the Intolerable Acts that led to the American Revolution.

It's plausible that these policies saved the French language from decline, but I can't be sure. Quebec is very different than Louisiana in the size of its French speaking population, in both relative and absolute senses. Francophones have been increasing in number relative to anglophones since the early 19th century when the influx of English speakers peaked. So it was increasing in dominance for one hundred years before there were any policies that encouraged the use of French over English.

However, it is true that this was in large part (but not entirely) because of the higher French Canadian birth rate, and what precipated the controversy over language was the fact that Quebeckers of Italian descent were starting to enrol their children in English schools instead of French schools.

But my point is not that these laws were not necessary to protect French, but that French is today very well protected and does not need further protection. These policies have been in place for 50 years and they have worked in forcing immigrant children to attend French schools. They now do so overwhelmingly. English is on the decline, and there is a new barrage of policies clearly aimed at finishing off the anglophone community. The goal is not to protect the French language but to abolish the English language. This is why I call it ethnic cleansing.

I'll go further though and say that even if the language laws are needed to protect French, that isn't enough to justify their existence. In a free society, people should be allowed to speak whatever language they want, and if French dies in that environment, it's because French speakers choose not to keep speaking it. Since they clearly do want to keep speaking it, I am highly skeptical that any of these laws are actually necessary. I do think that French would lose a bit of relative importance in a linguistically free Quebec, but I do not think it would come close to disappearing or to become in any sense threatened.

I've heard of accusations that the English oppressed the French, but I don't find them convincing.

Are you talking Quebec-only, or does moving east a little change anything? I think by most standards people have for 'ethnic cleansing', this would be that.

I am talking specifically about French Canadians in Quebec after the French and Indian War.

I’m not an expert on Louisiana, but other than their legal system, New Orleans and Louisiana in general does not seem French / Cajun to me anymore. Quebec is the largest province and most or second most populous, so LA and Quebec do not have similar situations. Nevertheless, LA’s current state seems like a possibility for Quebec had Quebec not enacted these policies (and taken the economic penalty for the cultural win. Montreal seems to have the lowest rents of the bigger Canadian cities)

Maybe, maybe not, but it seems worth noting that Louisiana is only about 20-30% Cajun, although granted outmigration drove that down some(it seems like Cajuns migrate to Texas at very high rates compared to other Louisianans). Now granted some percentage of the black population is also descended from Francophones, but still- Louisiana simply does not have the numbers, and probably never did have the numbers since the civil war, to maintain itself as a francophone region. Tdlr Louisiana is a diverse state whose francophone population hasn’t been a majority since the 19th century.

In addition there’s a minor culture war in Louisiana over whether Cajun French should be treated as a separate language. As a partial speaker is seems very close indeed to quebecois french, but referring to it as french, unmodified, seems bound up in standardization attempts that actual Cajuns- particularly the ones most likely to be interested in language revitalization- sometimes object to. Just in general- I am not particularly close to revitalization efforts but have relatives who are quite closely involved- it seems like revitalization is mostly aimed at college kids and teachers, rather than even attempting to appeal to the median Cajun(who is a poorer-than-average red triber, likely does not take advantage of all the educational opportunities available to him, and lives in a rural area by preference).

Can't speak to much of this, but my French Canadian grandpa (though to be fair he was born in Massachusetts, my great grandparents immigrated from Quebec and raised him speaking French and English though) said any of the times he went to visit France he was treated better when he spoke English than when he spoke French with a Quebecois accent. So that's a datapoint in favor of your argument that there's real friction between a French that's true to how Quebecois (and Cajuns) speak it as opposed to Europhile French.

My grandpa never seemed to have any strong opinions one way or the other about Quebec separatism though.

Anglophones when they meet other anglophones with a different accent: "Cool accent bro!"

Francophones when they meet other francophones with a different accent: "Your mockery of our beautiful language is a disgrace to all that is holy."

French Canadians always say that, when they go to France, the French often cannot understand them. But there's a continuum. There are French Canadians with accents so thick other French Canadians can't understand them. The vocabulary is quite different, and the pronunciation can be quite different too. Acadian French (from which Cajun French comes) is even more different and also quite varied. It even retains some archaic grammar in addition to a number of unique words and expressions.

said any of the times he went to visit France he was treated better when he spoke English than when he spoke French with a Quebecois accent.

The reverse is at least sometimes true as well. I've had a French-as-in-from-France friend-of-friends complain that when she visited Quebec, people kept telling her, obviously meaning it as an insult, that she didn't speak French.

It's been described to me as similar but not the same to speaking English with a heavy hillbilly accent in NYC or something -- of course if you went to actual England they probably wouldn't mind as they are mostly into classifying people based on their (English) regional accent. The French are fussy in a different way though. My (Western Canada) high school french class had no francophones of any kind involved, resulting in an altogether terrible accent -- going to France they seemed happy enough with any ability to communicate, but I guess to whatever extent we were taught pronounciation it would have been French-style vs Quebecois. (plus communication is always easier in dive bars)

There are definitely English people who will discriminate against anyone with a recognisably American accent (and we can't tell Anglo-Canadian accents from American ones). This is part of the normal anti-Americanism that exists close to the surface among substantial minorities of the population basically everywhere. But we can't recognise different American regional accents and, even if we could, we wouldn't be able to map them to social class, which is what Brits are really trying to read from people's accents.

My (French-born and native French-speaking) secondary school French speaker said that PMC French people look down on Quebec French as an uncultured dialect for uncultured people in the same way posh British people used to look down on American English. I have no idea if this is a good analogy or not.

Most Canadians sound similar to most Americans, but there are Newfoundlanders who sound like they're from Ireland.

Can you really not recognize a strong New York accent or southern US accent? These are very distinct.

My impression is that there is a larger average difference between the French spoken in Canada and the French spoken France than there is between the English spoken in North America and the English spoken in England.

Mapping accents to class in North America is easy. The higher class you are, the closer your accent is to a general North American accent that you hear in movies and on TV. The lower class you are, the closer it is to the strongest version of your regional accent.

Can you really not recognize a strong New York accent or southern US accent? These are very distinct.

I can recognise a New York accent because I have been to New York on business a lot. Most Brits couldn't. I could recognise that a sufficiently strong southern accent is a regional accent, but I wouldn't know which one unless the context gave it away.

I think most Brits could recognize an extremely strong stereotypical ‘New York’ accent (“cawfee”) or a Southern drawl. Maybe they know the stereotype of the Canadian “aboot” too. Not much beyond that, though.

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I think you’re downplaying how familiar people are becoming with American accents from consuming American media.

(plus communication is always easier in dive bars)

That's why shinjuku ni-chome was my favorite neighborhood in Tokyo. Well, one reason.

any of the times he went to visit France he was treated better when he spoke English than when he spoke French with a Quebecois accent.

Many places are like that. In Germanic Switzerland you’re better off speaking English than German with a German accent, because they dislike Germans over there.

We love them though. Silly mountain Germans, denying our obvious brotherhood.

Swiss German (or Alemannic in general) should probably be classified as its own language, it's as different from Standard German as Ukrainian is from Russian, if not more.

And if you speak Swiss German in Berlin you might as well be speaking Choctaw, for all the ability the locals will have to understand you.

Swiss language politics is weird and incomprehensible to outsiders. When I worked at Credit Suisse, the investment bank was basically American Anglophone (in London they had taken the First Boston signs down by then, but this apparently provoked resistance in New York), but when we had to interact with "head office" it was noticeable that there were French-speaking and German-speaking teams (all of which would talk to us in fluent English). I remember visiting Geneva and noticing that the second language on signs (after French, of course) was always English, and that German and Italian were supported to the bare minimum required by Swiss federal law.

As someone living there … I think the Swiss -> German attitude is not that bad. But maybe the Swiss are just too polite to show their contempt :P

Austria though … they are certainly more open about their attitude towards Germans (though again it’s mostly just harmless ribbing, nothing that would actually get in the way of living there).

Austrians, at least cultured Viennese, have an actual air of intellectual superiority versus most Germans (especially north of Bavaria, which they somewhat identify with, and Baden, which was iirc Austrian territory for a while anyway). The Swiss don’t think they’re intellectually superior to the Germans, they have the kind of attitude that like a wealthy Texan who ‘identifies’ as a salt of the earth good ol boy has to a Yankee intellectual, even if the latter is poorer. That’s my experience.

Urban Swiss tend to be less prejudiced toward Germans since a lot of valuable jobs like doctors are done by Germans and the Swiss are usually find with them. The Swiss who dislike Germans tend to be the more rural ones in the mountains because 80% of tourists and many retirees are German, push up prices and consider themselves ‘equal’ to Swiss-Germans because they speak the same language. That equal thing is important, I was in Flims over the summer and it was funny because I got the impression (again) that Swiss Germans don’t necessarily mind ubiquitous Italians in the service (and every other besides) industry in Germanic Switzerland because the Italians have an attitude of conscious or subconscious deference to them. Even Brits and Americans usually have a certain ‘respect’ for the ‘superior’ Swiss way of life, praise the cleanliness, order etc even as they struggle with it.

Germans, on the other hand, don’t consider themselves inferior to Swiss despite coming from (in Swiss eyes) a much poorer and worse country. They consider themselves equals and will walk into a Migros and make small talk with the cashier or try to joke around with the local hiking club while waiting for the cable car to reopen after lunch as if they’re “one of them”. To the German, the Swiss is just a rich hick who can be conversed with as usual and is expected to understand them, and is still fundamentally a German. Why show deference?

Why does being different mean you should show deferrence?

Germans (especially north of Bavaria, which they somewhat identify with, and Baden, which was iirc Austrian territory for a while anyway). The Swiss don’t think they’re intellectually superior to the Germans, they have the kind of attitude that like a wealthy Texan who ‘identifies’ as a salt of the earth good ol boy has to a Yankee intellectual, even if the latter is poorer. That’s my experience.

In my experience, the swiss are a materialistic bunch. Austrians, on the other hand, are a depressive bunch. I still remember when I went to Viena and everyone seemed so miserable. It was real downer tbh.

Damn, I really need to visit Vienna.

they have the kind of attitude that like a wealthy Texan who ‘identifies’ as a salt of the earth good ol boy has to a Yankee intellectual

This certainly can be quite hostile.

a wealthy Texan who ‘identifies’ as a salt of the earth good ol boy

Lol. If the Bushes were still active in national politics, would we be calling them transTexan?

They're the Mother Fucking Swiss, what did you expect?

I love them so much. I’d live there if I could, at least half the year after I have kids. Undoubtedly the world’s most civilized society.

It is difficult to understand normal-speed spoken swiss as a german and quebecois when you’re french. But the reverse is not true. So the clean, formal, hegemonic version of the language forces itself into the conversation, and people resent that, especially if they’re at home.

As a partial speaker is seems very close indeed to quebecois french, but referring to it as french, unmodified, seems bound up in standardization attempts that actual Cajuns- particularly the ones most likely to be interested in language revitalization- sometimes object to.

Unlike English, which is functionally linguistic anarchy because descriptivists control the Anglosphere (not passing judgement, only observing in this context), French has the Académie Française, which claims to be the arbiter of "proper" French. In tech circles I've run into this because they dislike adopting loanwords (especially from those dastardly Anglophones) like email, instead demanding courriel and similar.

I can imagine why someone descended from an isolated group of French speakers long ago might identify with the local dialect rather than what some snooty academics in Paris have to say.

L’academie francais is a thing, obviously, and that Cajun revival efforts are led by europhiles who insist on saying ‘l’ordinateur’ instead of ‘le computer’(as actual first language speakers would) is only part of the problem. A bigger part is that the academics in charge of these efforts simply have no desire to reach out to icky red triber texaphiles who would be willing to learn- and use- the language if these people came their way a bit instead of insisting on special preschools for the children of teachers and summer abroad programs for europhile college kids.

I think part of the issue is that America never gave Francophone status any recognition and because our schools are more or less run out of large mega cities (basically because of school district sizes, almost all American textbooks must meet CA, TX, and NY standards to be viable) makes preserving language a lot harder. There’s no status for Cajuns allowing them to require things printed in French or Cajun alongside English. They can’t just declare that instruction happen in French. We’re much more integrated than that.

If you live in Louisiana, the odds are that you can get French language instruction in schools if you’d like. You have to opt in, though, the CODOFIL doesn’t go to a lot of effort to make it appealing to people who actually have a recent family history of speaking French at home(there are probably a few Cajun children being raised bilingual by their grandparents, but realistically anyone under 30 who speaks Cajun does so as a second language. A much larger number have some relative- a grandparent perhaps- who is a partial speaker or Cajun French from growing up around it but never being formally taught. This group- or rather their parents- are mostly ignored by French language schools because they’re pretty deep red tribe).

I won't able to comment on most of your post objectively for obvious reasons, but I'll at least try to answer some of your questions.

Downtown Montreal is full of taller buildings, but definitely seem like they stopped building after 1970s. Seemed to coincide with the first French language laws?

It coincides with with language laws as you note. It also coincides with a terrorist group kidnapping and murdering government officials and a couple dozen incidents of bombs in mailboxes in Montreal. Then the two independence referenda in 1980 and 1995 really drove the nail in the coffin, with the second referendum to separate from Canada failing by 1% of the vote (50.58% remain versus 49.42% leave). The voter turnout was a shocking 93.5%. It's pretty wild to imagine how different history may have been if that vote had swung another half percent in the other direction. The premier went on television after losing the referendum to say the following:

"It's true we've been defeated, but basically by what?" Mr. Parizeau asked in his concession speech. "By money and the ethnic vote."

But I suppose I'm veering into dangerous territory. Back to the story.

The 60s and 70s were a boomtime for Montreal, when they had the world expo as well as the olympics resulting in a lot of new major infrastructure like bridges, the metro system and an artificial island/amusement park. Probably other things I'm ignorant of.

The factors mentioned above also led to a steady bleeding of educated anglo professionals. It's difficult to get exact numbers, but about 250,000-500,000 seems in the ballpark]. This isn't insubstantial in a province with a population of 8.5 million, and the impact is again probably heightened by the fact that these were many of the wealthier residents.

Which brings us to the next point...French people were probably right that Anglos fucked them over economically for decades if not centuries. Some of my family members in my parents generation would casually make comments about how they were too stupid/uneducated to perform the better-paying jobs anyways. They were dismayed that my school was teaching me that the French had been subjugated, but as far as I can tell, it was true.

Which brings me to my last point, it absolutely has been a rather gentle ethnic cleansing. Most of my family and friends have left, myself included. Those that remain speak french professionally. The laws that were passed would 100% be unconstitutional in the US, hell, they're unconstitutional in Canada too but when the Supreme Court struck them down Quebec basically said fuck you and nothing happened. I guess they didn't want to [deploy the army again] and/or spark another referendum. Francophones scoff and say anglos are just whining about having to learn French, when after all, they need to learn English. But it's more than that - it's feeling distinctly unwelcome at every level of government and society, it's an inability to integrate into social groups as you point out, it's the French Karens who report you to the language police for speaking English in the workplace (if you have a public facing job).

All that said, if this was the cost of national unity, I'll still take it. It seems to have worked; desire for independence is much lower in the younger generation.

You mentioned the schooling language thing. Seemed like you either have to prove you already got anglo schooling or go private school to avoid French schooling. Seemed like more choice before.

You can only go to an English school if your parents went to an English school in Canada. There used to be a loophole where private schools were exempt so that all the French elites could send their children to English prep schools, but it was closed relatively recently. The Anglo school boards are bleeding students hard and downsizing, closing or giving half their classrooms to French school boards. In other 2-3 generations I expect they won't exist assuming nothing else comes along to kick over the game board. McGill could have been a great college if they hadn't been repeatedly kneecapped by the French government trying to promote UDM and UQAM.

From a self preservation aspect for their Francophone culture, language, and identity, these policies all seemed to work. And Im impressed they work so well...Overall: impressed by the choices made there and the results. Seems like something other places that wanna strengthen their cultural identity can learn from. It would probably work if they have the will to enforce similar cultural / language rules and the unity to endure the economic costs.

Quebec is propping up their population with immigration. Back-of-the-envelope math seems like it's 2-3 times the rate of immigration in the United States, although not sure how illegal immigrants change that picture. You're conflating culture with language, however. Quebec seems worse at assimilating immigrants than the US - they may speak the language, but I don't think most of them share values and they largely stay within their ethnic groups.

It's pretty wild to imagine how different history may have been if that vote had swung another half percent in the other direction.

The result would not have been Québec leaving Canada, but there probably would have been a marked increase in French/English antagonization, as well as presumably French/indigenous strife. The 1995 referendum question was much too vague; while the PQ fully intended that a 50+1 Yes vote would allow them to proceed with a negotiated or unilateral secession, how it would have played out in reality is doubtful. Subsequently the Supreme Court adjudged that provinces do have the right to secede, but it requires "a clear question and a clear answer" (neither of which the 1995 vote had), and that would oblige the federal government to negotiate an exit for whichever party was seceding.

But one could certainly imagine a lot more social strife and culture war if the vote totals had been reversed. For reference here is the referendum question:

Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership, within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?

I imagine that for many it was very much less than clear what this entailed. This was of course, by design.

Thank you for that clarification, wasn't aware of the context.

I didn't know that. What do you think would have actually happened if they had won the referendum?

In the short run: Jacques Parizeau, leader of the Parti Québecois (the provincial separatist party) and premier of Québec announces victory in the referendum means secession from Canada. He probably immediately starts a tug of war between himself, the federal government, and Lucien Bouchard (head of the Bloc Québecois, the federal separatist party). The PQ leaders were "hard" secessionists in favour of quick and if necessary, unilateral secession; the BQ leaders were largely "soft" secessionists who wanted a negotiated exit with specific details determined by further referendums, and envisioned a Québec that was still largely within Canada's economic sphere.

This would've presumably created a three-way media battle, with each side claiming the referendum results as validation of their own perspective. Indigenous groups and anglo-dominated neighbourhoods/cities would announce their own secessions. The Canadian military would've likely secured important federal property but not be required to take any aggressive position. The western-based Reform party and the out-of-power Progressive Conservatives would likely demand a new federal election if PM Chrétien did not form a unity government.

In short it probably would've been a mess with no one side having a clear advantage in popular support. Any slow-moving legal proceedings would've doubtlessly favoured the government of Canada. I think there was little chance of serious violence; very high chance of a kind of political gridlock between the various factions. Antagonism and generally shit-slinging between anglo and French-Canadians would've reached a zenith and maybe pushed the needle towards more support for secession. On the other hand, political uncertainty and economic chaos might push support back towards federalism instead. Hard to say.

Interesting, thanks for the added detail.

A competent US President would intensify the divisions within Canada so the US could get Alberta to become a state.

The big difference with Alberta is that it is a much younger province where no one has any deep local roots. Everyone is from somewhere else. Albertans have strong connections to other provinces, whereas the average French Canadian in Quebec, even if he doesn't want Quebec to be independent, doesn't really think of himself as Canadian. They don't really care much or think much about the rest of the country.

What? How? More importantly, why? We haven’t wanted to upset the apple cart with a new state since the 50s, and I don’t see what Alberta has to make that change. Oil sands?

To get bigger to better compete with China.

I still don’t understand what Alberta offers that other places don’t. Given that we haven’t vacuumed up our various resource-rich territories or capital-rich allies, Alberta would have to be awfully special to change the calculus.

It doesn't need to offer anything that the US doesn't already have. We should be trying to get other rich English speaking places to join the US for reasons of economies of scale in defense.

Join us, say, in mutual defense organizations?

We’re already on excellent terms with occupied north Montana, as far as I know. I don’t see what you expect to get from adding states rather than mere allies. One of these things is much more expensive, economically and politically, than the other.

Or, to put it another way. If this is such a good idea, why didn’t we do it through most of the Cold War? Instead, we used proxy wars, supplied our allies, and provided the backbone to any strategic moves by the rival superpower. It worked out pretty well for us.

"Or, to put it another way. If this is such a good idea, why didn’t we do it through most of the Cold War?" We lacked the capacity. A huge reason the North didn't let the South leave and fought a civil war to keep them in the union is because everyone knew the US was much militarily stronger as one nation

So in the 1860s we had the capacity to fight half the country, presumably because "everyone knew" that it was for military solidarity. We clearly maintained said capacity up until WWI, since we were playing Manifest Destiny, closing the frontier, and forming new states. After a nice little break in which we snowballed to superpower status, we closed out the set with two final territories.

At which point did we lose the capacity to annex another state or five?

More comments

There really is a lot of oil up there -- if it comes to resource-wars this would be a logical target. (mind you the oil in Alberta is not much closer to Montana than Texas is)

Coal too! It's really a Mad-Max paradise. (although if you want water you probably should go to BC)

There's a good chance Alberta would be a Blue state in the American context, if that makes you any more supportive?

(It will never happen, but there's factions of Alberta that are mad enough at the Canadian feds to talk separatism from time to time -- since it would be landlocked they sometimes float statehood as a solution. But you're right that I see no reason the US would want them -- it's sort of like Texas-lite, and you already have the real thing!)

A lot of the "blueness" of it is due to Canada's baseline level of anti-americanism. By that I mean that there's one thing Canadians have in common from one coast to the next, is that feeling of inferiority with regards to americans, the idea that they are so close but not quite living in a Country That Actually Matters, that drive them to protectively act like they wouldn't want to be americans anyway, Canada is so much smarter you guys. Especially with regards to politics; if a move is seen as being uniquely american, the Canadian population will virtue-signal that they want their politicians to do the opposite. (Whether politicians actually will is not necessarily guaranteed since "opposite whatever the americans do, whaterver it is" is not a smart thoughtful heuristic for politics).

If that barrier is overcome and Alberta was an american state already, opinions would probably quite different.

There was a poll that ranked every province, state, and Washington D.C. by their level of support for Trump. Alberta, which had the highest support for Trump in Canada, had a lower level than Washington, D.C., which had the lowest level in the U.S. Every U.S. state is more pro-Trump than every Canadian province.

If this is the poll you're thinking of then not quite - Biden wins Alberta over Trump 68-32, which is comparable to the 66-31 2020 result in Vermont, but well short of the 92-5 margin in DC.

That is probably the one. Maybe I misremembered the D.C. result. I thought it was much more balanced. But I thought I compared the Canadian poll to an American poll at the time, but I doubt the poll for D.C. would have been off by that much. I guess it was that only D.C. was more pro-Biden and I remembered it as even D.C. was less pro-Biden.

Not particularly, haha.

At least they’re rat-free. I can say with confidence that’s not true here in Texas.

A competent US President would prefer to keep Canada stable, there is enough of instability on Souther border.

Economies of scale in military protection means the US benefits from adding rich, stable, culturally compatible states.

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