We’re down to one lane on the Nipigon Bridge this summer. It is the only road link that connects the two halves of the country.
Speaking of language, Québec french has veered away from that spoken in France in several ways. It has invented words (dépanneur = convenience store, courriel = email), borrowed some from English (un kid = a child, frencher = to kiss) and changed pronounciation in many ways.
One “easy” way to tell a Québec french speaker from a European French speaker is the so-called 'africanization" of certain words. For example, the word for couch = “divan” will be pronounced differently. Europeans would say “Dee-van” while a Québecois would say “Dzi-van”. Likewise, the word “petit” would be “pe-tit” in Europe but “pe-tsit” in Québec.
Funny little story about the word “dépanneur”. A family friend is Ombudsman at a university, and he had a first-year Moroccan economics student come to him in distress about failing a question on an exam. He felt the question was unfair. The question asked him to compare (within the context of what he’d learned in class) a “dépanneur to a Provigo”. The student knew what a Provigo was - it’s a major grocery store in Québec - but couldn’t understand why “dépanneuse” was misspelled and why on earth he’d have to compare a grocery store to a tow truck! Once the confusion between Moroccan french and Québec french had been sorted out, the student was allowed to redo the question and get credit for it.
Somehow, that story was funnier when my friend told it!
Picking up on that point, obviously O Canada was first a song in French. Lyrics in English were created in the early 1900’s. The lyrics in English do not mirror the original French.
The official version in French:
O Canada! Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l’épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
From the government of Canada website, the English Translation of the French Version of the National Anthem
O Canada! Land of our forefathers
Thy brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers.
As in thy arm ready to wield the sword,
So also is it ready to carry the cross.
Thy history is an epic of the most brilliant exploits.
Ch.
Thy valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights
Will protect our homes and our rights.
The official version in English:
O Canada! Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North, strong and free!
From far and wide, O Canada,
We stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free !
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
Also on the subject of the English used in Canada and its closeness to American or that used in England, Canada does have its own dictionaries. I myself use the Oxford Canadian Dictionary.
I have always considered that “courriel” makes more sense than the “French from France” equivalent (borrowed from English.) It’s not that I have anything against loan-words; they’re lovely. It’s just that “émail” already means “enamel” in French.
As it happens, France’s culture ministry would like French folk to follow the Québécois lead with regard to terminology for electronic correspondence.
I am sorry, off course your are correct in letting me know it was not your original post. I have to be more careful in future replies. I do have a tendency to read between the lines too often, thus leading to misunderstanding. If I ever figure out the smilie examples on the right side I would place the one with the happy face whacking him/her self in the head.
I thank you for the compliment.
I do want to amend one of my comments and will do so in a minute, so if you want to, you can look for that.
Fubsy
I have made a few small errors, for which I hope this post will rectify.
Canada’s flag was indeed adopted in 1965, becoming our nations national flag on February 15th of that year.
The Charter of Rights is actually called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and was passed into law on April 17, 1982 under the Canada Act.
I alluded to the fact that our anthem (O Canada) and the adoption of the flag happened at the same time. They did not.
As above the flag (Maple Leaf) was approved by Royal proclamation in 1964, and began being used in 1965.
The anthem, O Canada, was approved by Parliament in 1967 but was not official until it was adopted under the National Anthem Act on June 27, 1980.
Fubsy.
Winnie The Pooh was named after Winnipeg the city. 
And ‘email spam’ is ‘polurriel’ (m), a word which is simply brilliant IMHO.
I’ve always heard it as “pourriel”- basically, “rotten e-mail”.
Same same, basically. It’s from “pollution” + “courriel.”
I live in Detroit. It’s part of a small area in which you must travel south in the contiguous United States to hit Canada.
Clunky sentence, but you should get the drift.
And he was from White River, Ontario.
The Canadian national sport is lacrosse (or so the tour guide told me when I was in Toronto). I’d never even heard of lacrosse until that moment.
I am pretty sure there’s an apartment building here in Victoria named after Amor de Cosmos.
The Labrador Retriever is a Canadian.
I thought of another one, kinda: the Queen’s Buckingham palace guards wear large black bearskin hats, and those hats are from Canadian bears.
Whether or not that’s laudable is debatable.
Canada has three main kinds of bear that I can think of: brown, polar and grizzly.
Do not feed the bears.
Didn’t she lead her party to the worst defeat suffered in the Western world?
I remember the reports of the 1993 Canadian election. It was said to be the worst defeat ever suffered by a federal government in Canada. Campbell lost her own seat, which is always pretty embarrassing for a PM.
Well, yeah. But.
I’m not a Conservative.
Kim Campbell wasn’t elected as PM – her predecessor essentially ducked out of office because he was able to read the writing on the wall.
Weird facts? I was 16 before I realized the word dépanneur wasn’t an English word! That kind of cross-over happens all the time in Montreal.
William Shatner has a building unofficially named after him on the campus of McGill university. (A bunch of Star Trek fans noticed a loophole in the constitution of the McGill Student Society Union and flooded a meeting, demanded their question be put to an open vote, and renamed the building.)
By the same token, according to CRTC rules of the time, Star Trek is officially considered a Canadian show (Shatner and James Doohan come from the Great White North).
Canada has a migrant worker program that flies people in from Mexico to work in farmers’ fields.
Arguably, yes; probably no sitting government in Western democracy has ever suffered as dramatic a turnaround in terms of how much of the legislature it lost. The Conservatives won 170 out of 295 seats in the 1988 election, and still held 151 at the time Parliament was dissolved; in the 1993 election, they won…
… two.