I remember the "America is a melting pot, Canada is a mosaic" thing, too. Everyone is separate-but-equal in Canada, unlike in the states where they're unified.
Yep, as I recall that was the premise of the argument. In fact I remember it this far along specifically because I thought it was so stupid - every American city has a Chinatown or a Little Italy or a whatever. Acting like America was some sort of homogenous mass of people while Canada is exceptional for keeping everyone apart.... I mean, unless they meant the pepsis having their own province to run roughshod over non-French-speaking people in. (Sorry, I know some Italian immigrants whose kids got fucked over by language police busybodies, I'm slightly bitter.)
Hey, I'm an English speaker here, I know Quebec's language laws have been... hard on non-Frenchies. Sorry. No need to apologize for bitterness over it, not like I wrote them up. I see where the laws were coming from, and I get why, but they weren't implemented in the most ideal of ways. Preserving culture and ideology are important, and preserving language is the foremost way to protect against the most obvious assault against them, just look at any postmodernist English-speaker from Gender Studies, and you can see how powerful the destruction of language is in destroying a culture, and why it's important to protect it.
Doesn't mean there wasn't people trampled in the process, though, or that their way of doing it accomplished that objective. I get the reasoning, but it doesn't eliminate the externalities.
My high school social studies book called Canada a "patchwork quilt" of ethnicities.
I have not been in high school for a long time.
I remember the "America is a melting pot, Canada is a mosaic" thing, too. Everyone is separate-but-equal in Canada, unlike in the states where they're unified.
Yep, as I recall that was the premise of the argument. In fact I remember it this far along specifically because I thought it was so stupid - every American city has a Chinatown or a Little Italy or a whatever. Acting like America was some sort of homogenous mass of people while Canada is exceptional for keeping everyone apart.... I mean, unless they meant the pepsis having their own province to run roughshod over non-French-speaking people in. (Sorry, I know some Italian immigrants whose kids got fucked over by language police busybodies, I'm slightly bitter.)
Hey, I'm an English speaker here, I know Quebec's language laws have been... hard on non-Frenchies. Sorry. No need to apologize for bitterness over it, not like I wrote them up. I see where the laws were coming from, and I get why, but they weren't implemented in the most ideal of ways. Preserving culture and ideology are important, and preserving language is the foremost way to protect against the most obvious assault against them, just look at any postmodernist English-speaker from Gender Studies, and you can see how powerful the destruction of language is in destroying a culture, and why it's important to protect it.
Doesn't mean there wasn't people trampled in the process, though, or that their way of doing it accomplished that objective. I get the reasoning, but it doesn't eliminate the externalities.