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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24728 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.

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?

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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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