I thought it was the other way around, look at the love for the Tragically Hip & hate for Celine Dion. Once someone becomes famous state side - it is almost as if they are traitors to the country.
But perhaps that is part of the left & right debate of us Canadians - I heard it once that left wing Canadians love CBC for its diverse range of programming & its Canadian content, and think Don Cherry is a joke. Right wing Canadians, hate the CBC and think all its cultural programming is a joke and love Don Cherry. Both watch Hockey Night in Canada though.
There’s the answer. What makes Canada great? Wayne Gretzky!
I live in Montreal, and I have to say that I think Québec contributes to making Canada great. Some would say that it also causes a heck of a lot of trouble, but having a large amount of the population speak a completely different language and identify with a very different culture, and yet have it (mostly) work within the framework of the rest of the country…that’s pretty cool. It just adds another level of diversity to the country and forces us to face the challenges of cooperation, tolerance, patience, and rhetoric! I think it’s a large part of why Canadians are, as some people have already said, less extreme in their views or perhaps more willing to compromise…because that’s been a part of how the country came about.
I have no idea if I’m expressing what I’m trying to say in that paragraph. :dubious:
I hear the “aboot” in the accents of Westerners…the couple of Albertans I know seem to do this Canadian Raising thing, at least to my ear. But then again, I am tone deaf.
The difference between the Canadian and “middle American” accents starts to become apparent if you spend a lot of time in both places. I never noticed it before that, but eventually it became pretty obvious.
Nancy Grace is a Southerner, but if you toned her drawl down a bit you’d have a Kansan or someone from upstate Indiana. It’s very striking once you’re used to listening for it. To me, as a Canadian, it sounds as if our accent is very clipped, shortening dipthongs to single vowels (I actually had the parents of an American girlfriend tell me “you’re not speaking English correctly, you’re not sounding your dipthongs”) while the mid-American accent sounds as if the vowels are being exaggerrated and added to.
I like listening to U.S. weather reporters in the winter; they keep telling me about how we’ll be expecting “sneaow.” That’s how “snow” sounds to me when someone from St. Louis says it. It’s fun to listen for the differences once you’re used to it.
I dunno, I think Switzerland’s doing that much better, and they’ve got three cantonal-level majority languages plus an indigenous language. Maybe it’s because they’ve got more of a common culture with shared national myths, or maybe it’s because the country is more decentralized with language being solely a cantonal responsibility. Clearly they’re doing something right anyway.
What I’d like is for my English-speaking (or English-integrated) compatriots to tell me once and for all what it is that they expect from us. Because what I get from them is a mix of your current attitude (praising this language duality as one of the things that supposedly makes Canada such a great diverse country, despite the fact that the French-speaking and English-speaking sides do not know and mostly do not care what the other side is doing, which isn’t exactly what I’d call diversity) and the attitude that French-speakers in Quebec are responsible for all of Canada’s woes and are racist, ethnocentric, incompetent and, it almost seems, all-around evil. As far as I’m concerned, English Canada is a beast with two heads: one who wants to claim me for its purposes and fit me into a mold without even knowing anything about me, and one who wants to blame me for all of our defects. So I want to know: what it is that you want me to do?
Maybe this isn’t appropriate for a thread about what makes Canada great.
Here I will confess that I am unsure if my perspective is more representative of Canada as a whole, or more typical of French Canadians / Quebecers, since I grew up in French in Montreal. For example, Celine Dion was only one of a bunch of former child pop-stars (think Rene Simard and his little sister Natalie - I never got this fascination with kid pop stars to begin with). It was only when Celine made it big in the states, particularly after her first appearance on the Tonight Show, that she became Quebec Royalty. Because, despite what the arbiters of good taste in Toronto (hey, I’m in Calgary; I have to take a friendly shot at T.O. now and then ) may think of her, she is indeed loved and revered by the French in Quebec.
And if it’s any consolation, lexi, I’m pretty right wing for a Canuck, and I still think CBC has the best news coverage of any electronic media in North America, (just don’t make me listen to “The Current”) and that Don Cherry is a boor. In fact, I would submit that CBC Radio is one of the great things about Canada.
I’m sure there’s something we can learn from them. I’m sure there are things they do or have done that we’d like to avoid. I’m not very familiar with Switzerland (though I did visit a couple of times when I was young!) so I can’t really comment on this. Sorry, because it could be an interesting topic (for another thread)!
And they are waiting for Québec to tell them once and for all what Québec expects from them. Funny, isn’t it? It’s like an old married couple…
You’ve just put most of English Canada into the same type of mould you are trying to break out of. We can take this paragraph and line of discussion back to your identity thread, or a new one, if you’d like, because I agree that this isn’t the proper thread for it. I warn you, though…I don’t have a lot of time to post lately (at least not detailed, coherent sentences!), and that doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon. If you’re willing to drag it out, I am too!
One of these days, I’ll end up in Sherbrooke for more than a day or two with some free time and you and I can meet for a beer and we can resolve these drive-by Quebecker discussions once and for all!
Canadians are proud of their country and athletes and artist’s achievements. But they don’t get all lathered up about it, like they had a hand in it. The same with their Patriotism, a lighter touch.
Remember when the Canadian embassy in Tehran smuggled out a group of American’s who’d gotten caught up in the overthrow? Yeah it was a great thing to do, and it was nice to see the American’s treating us like heroes, but it was all just a little over done for most Canadian’s, I think.
Our US cousin’s were way, way more pumped than we really were. I mean, honestly, what were our choices? Toss them back out into the streets? Canadians, though proud, weren’t all worked up about it. Happy, none-the-less, to have our cousins buying us drinks in bars, of course.
I happened to interact with a recent immigrant from Columbia, not long ago. We got to talking, she was telling me about Canadian culture as she was finding it. I asked her why she’d chosen Canada for her family, especially over America. I figured the sense of America as the centre of the universe would loom large in South America, as opposed to Canada, with such a small image in the world.
She told me that coming from Columbia the amount of gun culture in America frightened her, and she said that it seemed to her that largely, Canada did no harm in the world. It was an interesting perspective to get a glimpse into.
Sometimes I love my country for what it’s not, more than what it is.
It was the same way with 9/11, when Canadian communities hosted thousands of American (and world) flyers that couldn’t get home. Of course we did - how could we not? It did get up my snoot a little when an American general (I think it was) was criticizing Canada’s efforts in Afghanistan, though.
you sure it was an american general that criticized the Canadian effort in Afghanistan? I thought we were one of the only few nations that have an active support there. Perhaps they were criticizing that we want out of there soon. Our commitment for troops is ending soon and they probably want us to step up to a bigger and longer commitment to the effort of aiding the Afghan nation.
Fair enough, but what Torontonians have to realize is that they are not representative of Canada as a whole. I well recall my days in Toronto, where it was automatically assumed that what Toronto wanted, the rest of the country should have. Those idiots in Alberta, those French folks in Quebec, those stupid Maritimers, those perpetually-stoned BCers; they didn’t know what they wanted. Torontonians had the answer!
This is why Toronto is disliked–because it often presumes to speak for the country as a whole. I submit that it cannot. How can the Torontonian know what’s best for the prairie wheat farmer; for the BC businessperson who deals with the markets in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Sydney; for the Quebec French-speaker who hates English-speakers; for the Maritime fisherfolk who are prevented from fishing; for the northern Dene and for the European-descended people who have made the North their home? Never having experienced the challenges these people face, it seems to me that Toronto cannot make rational, reasoned decisions concerning them, but puzzlingly, it seems to have the attitude that it can.
I have long argued that the best way to cement Canadian unity is for the people of the various regions to talk to each other. We do that, to a degree, on the SDMB. But we need better communication among those who are not Dopers. I do not believe that such communication could come from something like the central-Canada centered CBC; but I do believe that it can come at the grass-roots level. We need to go beyond the dialogue that we can do at the SDMB, and beyond what can be done on the Ontario/Quebec-centric CBC, and move towards something more widespread nationally.
Nope. Would have liked to have been. It helps counter the problem of Toronto being the centre of the universe due to its people not looking outside of Toronto.
) may think of her, she is indeed loved and revered by the French in Quebec.