by Nickel » Wed 13 Aug 2008, 09:23:20
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('FoxV', 'T')he elitism of the French is renowned world wide. Race has very little to do with it. The less Quebcois you are, the less you're welcomed.
Which is the true irony of Quebec politics. They alienated all English speaking Quebecers (my family being one, I was born in Montreal) and to fill the void from the exodus they enabled an open door immigration policy bring in boat loads of people that were not only not French, but not white and not even Catholic (a big deal to the Quebecois)
The future of Quebec is far from certain
Quebec's kind of between a rock and a self-imposed hard place. They're all wound up in the fact that demographically, they need to maintain their numbers relative to the sea of English-speakers in North America, or they're likely to be absorbed over time like, say, the Irish or the Welsh. But they have one of the lowest birthrates in the world. So, they need to import other francophones. But FoxV's right, there's a real streak of tribalism in Quebecois life that's largely been eroded in English Canada. For them, it's important that you have ancestors who were here for loss at the Plains of Abraham. Really, it's vital to be white and to hail from France. I don't mean that everyone in Quebec is a bigot and unaccepting of others, but I do think it's harder to belong there if you're not "pure wool", as they say there. It's kind of disappointing, because they're a lot cooler and more easy-going than us in a lot of other ways.
So this it the problem for Quebec: not enough babies, so they need to import other French-speakers, but in this modern world, they're mostly coming from former French colonies (read: they're not "white"), not France... and that still kind of matters. So we're bound to see the sons of immigrants feel alienated in Quebec in a way they probably don't elsewhere in North America, until there's a sea change in the attitude of Quebecois towards inclusiveness.