Independent Quebec

What language cops? You mean an overblown fake controversy over a few cases which led to nothing but a slight amendment to official language laws to clarify things

I'll pass that onto my buddy Danny. He owns a bar in Quebec and he got absolutely hammered by the language cops for having an apostrophe in his sign.

Yes obviously stating you're writing bullshit means I'm repeating what an old antisemite ultranationalist wrote.

If you somehow inferred antisemitism as Groulx's defining characteristic, thats your problem. He is more generally regarded as one of the leading French revisionist historians. Leastways, when debated in academic papers written by more modern French historians, he is criticized for always portraying the French as victims and never having any kind of success.

You know for all your bullshit complaining, you've obviously never been here,

Good guess. Totally wrong, but why confuse the issues with facts now?

Also you should probably educate yourself: it took until the 80s for french majority areas in Ontario to get french public education. By comparison, we not only have english public education, but the Quebec department of education partially cofunds italian, greek and jewish private schools without blinking.

Let me get this right: The French are running both Ottawa and Quebec City, as stated clearly by the Supreme Court, but because you can find a place that didn't give the French everything they wanted, they are somehow oppressed?

Do I have to remind you regulation 17? From 1912 to the 80s French was forbidden in Ontario schools. Nothing of the sort ever happened in Quebec. So get off your horse, it's far too high for you

Loi 101. Ontario ran its schools badly, but Quebec did it on a systemic scale. That isn't even the point, however: Even if Regulation 17 was "bad", two wrongs don't make a right.

Also kindly stop calling it a british liberation. The only liberation in this period involved a starry flag

Boy, you just love picking other people's words for them, don't you? And it was a liberation: New France was ruled directly from Paris in an essentially totalitarian manner. After the British liberation, they got things like rights and self-government, things they never had before.

I suspect you're from Ontario. A vague doubt

Nope! I've lived there and Quebec too, just outside Montreal.

some of the most stable african countries were french colonies: I suspect you really have no clue what you're saying

You might want to go there some time. As well, being one of most stable countries in Africa doesn't translate into being an absolute wonderland.

The maritimes have always received equalization payments. Equalization payments were introduced to help the maritimes in the first place. The system only dates from 1957.

Sure, they have recieved them, but you need to grasp how the payments work. If a province is above average in wealth compared to the bigger provinces in the median they get nothing, but if they are below it, they get money. All of the big provinces have been recipients or at least very close to it at one time or another: The only one that hasn't is Quebec. That means that even when the times are good, Quebec is generally unable to sort itself out. That isn't because of bogus accusations like the French are inherently lazy or because of a lack of avenues for wealth creation or any other reason than Quebec insisting on creating and maintaining a socio-political model that doesn't work. This relevant to my overall point, which is that you could have an independent country called Quebec with the exact same boundaries as OTL, but for it to become independent, it would need dramatic changes to that model social structure that would render it totally unrecognizable in comparison. In varying degrees, the same would be true for any province, but due to the massive over-reliance by what we now call the modern state of Quebec on the confederation aid, it would be the most pronounced in terms of Quebec.

And yet in South Africa, the English language needs "language cops". I wonder why.

And its still a bad idea there. A group of English speaking people implementing a bad idea is just as dumb as a group of French people.

The idea of official languages is one that is pretty uniform in most of the country. You don't see the Swiss complaining about translation costs between German, French, Italian, and Romansh now, do you?

But there are lots of countries, especially in the English speaking world, that do not(eg. USA, UK and the Ozzies I believe also do not). The big reason for that is that the idea of government "approved" speech is abbhorent to the dominant legal traditions in those countries.

Another problem is that English doesn't bother with official status because of the habit of English speakers to simply appropriate vocabulary from other languages, making it sometimes hard to determine exactly if they are speaking English alone. A favorite legal argument that is punted around theoretical discussions in Canadian law schools is that there is no way to state, absolutely, that a sentence is or isn't in French or English.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Yes, of course, I totally want to hear what your friend Danny has to say about people who don't exist, for a storm in a teacup. You also are unaware of what Bill 101 says apparently. Also Quebec education has yet to forbid english in classrooms, or anything of the sort. If anything it's always done quite fine being polyglot. But of course it's not enough for you.

Finally, Manitoba, like Quebec, is one of the five provinces equalization payments are based on, and like Quebec it has almost always been a recipient.

The rest, I'll chalk up as paranoid ramblings; I forgot that it was also common among the annoyingly monolingual anglos of the city. I'll therefore just put you on ignore and be a traitorous franglais. :cool:
 
Yes, of course, I totally want to hear what your friend Danny has to say about people who don't exist, for a storm in a teacup. You also are unaware of what Bill 101 says apparently. Also Quebec education has yet to forbid english in classrooms, or anything of the sort. If anything it's always done quite fine being polyglot. But of course it's not enough for you.

Finally, Manitoba, like Quebec, is one of the five provinces equalization payments are based on, and like Quebec it has almost always been a recipient.

The rest, I'll chalk up as paranoid ramblings; I forgot that it was also common among the annoyingly monolingual anglos of the city. I'll therefore just put you on ignore and be a traitorous franglais. :cool:
Well Arcaeo he does have a point I Mean what he says sounds pretty convincing so it really just BS, or did you not read all his quotes, because from what I see you only take down certain phrases of Boyds but leave out others...???? Just would appreciate a clarification....
 
Actually, that's a pretty compelling argument, but one that falls down on closer examination.

Yet your counter which you claim beats it falls apart when you remember that said Francophone nations are mostly in Africa which is a lot further from Canada than Mexico or Cuba are from the US.:rolleyes:

And to the Bombadier thing, that seems more like the bigger corporation getting it not the Francophones getting it.
 
. Once they were freed from the oppressive and centralized rule from Paris and given self-governance, they began to thrive as a colony.

I have to point out, sir, that Quebec was not given self-government after the Treaty of Paris. One of the reasons Americans opposed the Quebec Act was because it extended the arbitrary, oppressive, and centralized rule of London into lands they hoped to settle.
 
Faaelin:
I have to point out, sir, that Quebec was not given self-government after the Treaty of Paris. One of the reasons Americans opposed the Quebec Act was because it extended the arbitrary, oppressive, and centralized rule of London into lands they hoped to settle.

OK, remember, there wasn't a "Quebec" at the time of the Treaty of Paris. The entire thing was called New France. The very revisionist history pushed by the modern Quebec state usually fails to mention that before the British liberation, there was no such thing as a state of Quebec.

The Quebec Act actually created the first government of Quebec that had any element of autonomy whatsoever. Of course, that wasn't exactly hard, because before the British came along, there was no local government whatsoever.

Was it complete self-government? No, but colonies don't do that when they are as new as Quebec was and it was also a darn sight more than Paris ever even considered.

Beedok:
Yet your counter which you claim beats it falls apart when you remember that said Francophone nations are mostly in Africa which is a lot further from Canada than Mexico or Cuba are from the US

I don't think that the proximity is as much of a factor as you're implying. First, ease of travel has been steadily growing for centuries. Second, the broad issue isn't the migration habits of latin speakers, it's that French is sliding quicker and quicker into global irrelevance and Spanish isn't. If it was merely a case of the Spanish speakers moving north, then you'd have them assimilating to English, not retaining their own language.

In reference to Bombardier and the CF18 contract, that was merely one example. It's also not like the Manitoba bid was by a tiny company, it was an established aerospace firm. I also believe that you'll find that Mulroney was quite up front about the reasons for taking it away from a western company and giving it to Bombardier.
 
I don't know Canadian history that well but could there have been a possibility of Quebec, following the 1869 example of Newfoundland, rejecting membership in the Canadian Confederation?

This rejection kept Newfoundland from being a part of Canada and led, before World War One, to Newfoundland becoming a British Dominion equal to Canada, that is being essentially self-governing, equal to and totally independent of Canada.

The Great Depression in the 1930s led to an economically hard-hit Newfoundland giving up its Dominion status and reverting to being a British colony.

It was only in 1949 that Newfoundland joined the Confederation and became a part of Canada.

Perhaps Quebec could have followed the same initial path as Newfoundland and, instead of joining or rejoining the Canadian Confederation, could have kept its own Dominion status which would have eventually led to full independence.

But I just don't think giving the mindset of the 1860s (British, Anglophone Canada as well as French-speaking Canada) that Quebec had a free choice (or would have wanted a choice at that time for that matter) in not becoming a part of the Canadian Confederation.

Well, that wouldn't/couldn't have happened at that time since Quebec and Ontario were one and the same and known as the Province of Canada. In fact, the Province of Canada's inability to govern itself led to stagnation and resulted in delegates from the Province of Canada approaching the Maritime colonies (who were about to join together in a union) asking if Canada could be a part of this union. This ultimately led to some changes which then got us started on the path to Confederation.
 
New France was growing and by the time of the American revolution, Quebec, under its pre-loyalist settlement borders, had gone up to almost 300k, well over 3/4 of it french, also Quebec is 90% French, clearly an amazing failure :rolleyes:.

Yeah, but look at how controlling Quebec is with regards to anything English; be it Law 101 or deliberately limiting funding and the number of English schools in the province.

And to the Bombadier thing, that seems more like the bigger corporation getting it not the Francophones getting it.

But his point still stands that the best bid did come from the Manitoba-based company instead of the Quebec-based Bombardier...
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Yeah, but look at how controlling Quebec is with regards to anything English; be it Law 101 or deliberately limiting funding and the number of English schools in the province.

Bill 101 was amended within 5 years (the break period), the number of english schools is, afaict, mostly limited by the fact that some areas barely have enough people to fill one class let alone a school, and there are public schools in english immersion (the same exists in reverse) for students who are fluent or good enough, something that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago (the same could be said of french education outside of Quebec and New Brunswick).

I'm trying to find data for funding, so I can't say, AFAICT per capita funding is the same, which is what you'd expect from a system where things are roughly equal. (also I found the number; so equalization payments are a whopping 2% of Quebec's GDP)
 
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