Quote:
More seriously I'd say that this test of how somebody would do if they parachuted in is different from another question we could ask about long-term compatibility in a place you might move to, if you were willing to adapt. As one example, if you're gay, you're not going to be very happy in parts of the US. There are many reasons I've heard why Canadians don't want to settle down much in a lot of the US, and a lot of them seem to have to do with values and social structure. I think you'd also find that more English-speaking Canadians would be more drawn to Quebec and living in French if it offered opportunities like the big American cities. There is a lot of immigration around the world, largely across language barriers. I don't have strong feelings about how language should be measured compared to other cultural factors and it's hard to even separate them, but I think a lot of cultural aspects (some of the most important ones) are forgotten most of the time, and the "Canadians can move to the US with little to no friction" idea is overrated. |
Quote:
|
Quote:
|
Quote:
In the absence of that (which is the case for 99% of the rest of Quebec) this opportunity drops off the map. Well, it exists for Gatineau too to some degree, though again this is largely due to the quirk of people being able to access a whole slew of jobs and services right across the river in Ottawa. Anyway, on SSP we tend to fetishize urbanity to the point of believing that "urbanity" is our "nation" and that a big city denizen will be plug and play in any big city in the world. That's not really true by any measure. Nations are generally made up of both big cities and other life milieus. Even if city slickers around the world may have a number of things in common, being an "urbanite" is not a national identity. |
Being an Anglo in Montreal now is not really different from being one in Berlin or Mexico City. There is a slight carve-out for the lives that surround the two English universities and perhaps the Gazette. In the 1950s and '60s, conversely, it was a place to which a working man might reasonably be expected to be transferred from Winnipeg or Halifax (I think it was SSP's Andy6 who phrased it like that).
I lived there 1995-2012, so entirely within that longer transition. |
Quote:
The reality is still that depending on one's tolerance for driving, between two thirds and three quarters of French-speaking Canadians can take in an evening Montreal Canadiens game and drive home to sleep in their own beds that night. And 95% of these people are residents of Quebec. |
Being an Anglo in Scandinavia, first Copenhagen and now Stockholm, is interestingly about as much of a displacement is being one in Montreal, but the tensions are arranged differently.
There is absolutely zero official recognizance here, of course, as this was never part of the Anglosphere. There is an incredibly high amount of English usage, though, and no cultural friction. It's probably very marginally 'lighter' to be an Anglo here vs. Greater Montreal, actually. |
Quote:
Moncton is entirely different. In my neighbourhood, we often get people from Ontario or the west moving in for five years or so as they wend their way up the corporate ladder. I wonder how this disconnect between Montreal and the ROC ends up affecting the corporate structure of larger Canadian companies??? |
The effect is that Montreal is in another country. The border is not as fraught as actually doing the paperwork might make it, it's like Denmark-Sweden, and that's the compromise. From an EU perspective at least, though... yeah, those are different countries.
|
Quote:
But just as an example I've worked for some major Canadian corporations in the past and my impression is the vast majority basically run things with Quebec as a self-contained entity with very little HR cross-pollination with the "ROC" (sorry, guys). Even in the places I knew there was very little cross-pollination between a company's locations in Ottawa and the Hull-Gatineau area even if it was the same metro. The only exceptions might be if someone working in the ROC has a high degree of bilingualism (ie Pierre Dupont from Timmins) and is looking for a challenge in Quebec, or maybe he's a rising star in Toronto and the Quebec operations are sagging so they'll send him there to shore things up. Or maybe the bilingual Jean-Claude Surprenant from Rimouski who works out of your Montreal office is a high-flyer and is interested in a stint at the head office in Toronto. But these are exceptions these days, and more often than not there is a well-paid Senior VP job in Montreal that runs the entire Quebec operation for you. |
It is not that different (on the above) from Stockholm-Copenhagen. That's a lot different from Belgrade-Zagreb or even Belgrade-Pristina, which were arguably on the table, at least rhetorically, when we last came close to actually having it out. But at least from the extremely diluted sense in which borders exist within 1) the Nordics and 2) the EU... there's a border there now.
|
Quote:
|
Quote:
Personally speaking, I loved the city and unlike many Montreal Anglos I knew, I never really thought it was tenable for it to find a line between what it is now and, say, New Orleans. Despite the city it might have been if it had continued as the "Canadian metropolis", it never seemed worth the decapitation of the French fact in North America; in a sense we might as well still speak of the Writers' Building in Calcutta. That said, and though I managed to find my way by sticking in close proximity to a few old institutions and circles, I never really squared the circle between the old, brick-and-iron, almost pre-Canadian Montreal of my visual affections and the contemporary Quebecois city it is. I liked the tension, but I never bridged it, even at peak bilingualism. And when I look back, all things considered, I probably just wanted, and should have moved to, New York. |
Quote:
|
Quote:
IMO, Montreal can’t afford to be less bilingual and Anglo-accommodating than it is right now. It doesn’t seem conceivable to me that 9 million French speakers can support a global metro of 4.5 million people. The little European countries that do support a global city concede just as much ground to English, maybe more. |
Quote:
I have heard this dozens of times, maybe over 100 times. This does not, cannot, never will happen with French. If you have any affection at all for that language and its peoples, you have to accept this. Not all animals will breed in captivity. |
Quote:
For Quebec-based companies, the high-value head office and "main operations" stuff generally happens in Montreal and environs. |
Quote:
They probably can't, and New Orleans still isn't off the table, historically. The best hope, strangely, is a future where the present-day US and Canada are broken into smaller pieces, and where Spanish has a much greater official foothold. |
Quote:
|
Quote:
It even has a higher GDP despite the far smaller population. |
All times are GMT. The time now is 5:35 AM. |
Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.