Quebec City, despite its proximity to the U.S. and confederation with Anglophone Canada, is in many ways more authentically French than France. Our global village of cheap jet transport and liberal immigration policies has resulted in many of the world’s cities drawing their inhabitants from whatever countries are most populous and/or whichever countries have the most poverty, crime, and government oppression. This results in enough similarity of one big city to another that some folks don’t bother traveling anymore.
Quebec, by contrast, has stubbornly resisted immigration for centuries. After the British took over in 1760 they tried desperately to get English speakers to move here to dilute the French language, culture, and loyalty. In the 19th-century the Quebecois themselves began leaving for various New England states in which high-paying mill jobs were to be had. Instead of the hoped-for immigration this was an outflow of roughly 1 million people. Today Canada brings in nearly 250,000 immigrants per year but most of them want to go to Toronto, Vancouver, and other English-speaking cities. Quebec, with 24 percent of Canada’s population, is the choice of only 15 percent of immigrants and most go to Montreal where it is possible to get by with only English (Montreal was where Ahmed Ressam started his life in the New World). Some combination of cold weather, a persistently moribund economy (they’ve tried everything here: big government, small government, agriculture, heavy industry, high tech, etc.), and the terror of having to learn French keeps folks from wanting to pile into Quebec City and, to an even larger extent, the small Francophone towns of Quebec.
All of the folks who work basic service jobs seem to be native-born Quebecois. Any signs in English are directed at tourists. McDonald’s has a section “reserved for smokers”. Can this island of pure French culture survive? A schoolteacher told me “I know that the day will come when I can’t speak French here anymore.” At the inception of the language wars in the 18th-century the French language was holding its own quite nicely in the worlds of literature, science, and day-to-day use. Today, however, the results of England imperialism have spread the English language far beyond what could have been foreseen 250 years ago. The huge number of countries and people that use Spanish and Chinese have further reduced the French language to obscurity.
Philip: Serious question…
In your opinion, does Quebec City offer sufficient amenities (flying excepted) to consider living there? I visited a few years back, loved it (Winter Carnival).
Quebec City is still very much French, though in the long term I believe it will most likely follow in Montreal’s footsteps and become bilingual and eventually anglophone. The disappearance of the French language in Quebec is something the goverment has been fighting against for decades. It’s has some success at this but, overall, the trend is clear: the English language is gaining ground.
The language, however, is not all there is to it. Quebec’s culture (including that of its English-speaking citizens) is very different from the rest of Canada. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is that sets it apart but it’s not just European French culture. If anything, Quebecers and the European French are even more different than Americans and the British.
It’s hard to describe what Quebecois culture is, but I can tell you what it isn’t. It’s not American. Americans joke about Canada being a ‘lite’ version of America, and there’s a lot of truth to that. But it’s not true for Quebec.
For more, see my essay on this topic:
http://con.ca/issues/7/7/1167
So very happy that since leaving Canada for the USA 11 years ago, I have not had to deal with the arrogant, whining Quebeckers I met in day to day life, nor need I read in the papers about the latest seperatist nonsense.