Thanos Thanos:
Call people who were born here, whose families have been here for generations, as "settlers" and the conversation dies right there on the spot.
What should the term for non-Native Canadians be, then? The term 'Canadian' doesn't necessarily work by itself, not when there are many Indigenous people who also consider themselves Canadians.
And 'settler', as I understand it, can refer to those whose families have been here for a long time, since our ancestors settled here. It doesn't diminish our right to live here or imply we should be shipped back to Europe, Asia or wherever.
Note that I don't wholly agree with advocates of the term 'settler' who say it shouldn't be extended to people of colour like blacks. How do you distinguish between those POC whose ancestors came over as slaves and those who came here of their own free will? The only way a guy like me could tell is to ask those black people personal questions that are none of my damn business. And what about people of mixed ancestry?
stratos stratos:
I am not trying to down play this but the article focuses on race relations. What other Deep Divisions is the next PM facing?
That's what comes with having only a 500 word limit. I write these things for my local paper, and the editors are pretty strict about those limits. I can't always touch on everything I'd like to.
If you click on Philippe Fournier's article above, you'll see an example of the division between urban and rural voters. Here's a piece by
Martin Regg Cohn in the Toronto Star about the division between supporters of less and more resource development. And of course, there's also division between people who want more and less immigration.
llama66 llama66:
There was quite the discussion of a Wexit at work today. A lot of people are concerned about the prospect of an NDP/Liberal coalition here in Calgary.
Yeah, but where would a 'Wexit' get us? We'd be even less likely to get any pipelines built, and everything people were saying the ROC should do to 'get tough' with Quebec 20+ years ago-including us Albertans-would be applied just as easily too.
Thanos Thanos:
I guess with all the old divisions still racking the country we really didn't need any of the new divisions that Trudeau has carefully cultivated in order to hold power. Maybe it was an inner need for him, to out-do his own father in sowing as much discord as he possibly could. It's certainly not coincidental that a Trudeau has been at the helm when the worse moments in national unity have happened.
But that's the Laurentian Consensus for you. I doubt they'd notice it very much but outside of that Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal axis, which now includes Vancouver, dealing with the power-brokers of the Central Canadian machine is like dealing with the Borg from Star Trek. All the really need to complete that image to most of the rest of the country is to have their very own Locutus come forth and openly state "why do you resist us? we're only trying to improve your quality of life!", even though those "improvements" that have been forced on us since the days of Saint Pierre have been belied by actual history to be a myth, if not an outright crock of bullshit.
I swear by and at Pierre Trudeau in the same sentence. I've said it to some of the Franco-Quebecois I've met over the years, and I've said it to other Albertans-if I'd ever had the chance, I would have given Pierre a military salute with one hand in appreciation of all the things he did right, and a Salmon Arm salute with the other hand for all the things he fucked up.
The thing that really sets off a lot of people in Alberta is the goddamn condescension directed at us not just by the likes of Pierre Trudeau, but by some modern leftists and environmentalists who seem to portray us as either inbred hicks too stupid to know our cowboy hats from our six-shooters, or Captain Planet villains who wake up every morning twirling our Snidely Whiplash moustaches and then gather to plot about how we're going to rape the planet while eating puppies for breakfast.
Yes, you can criticize us for not saving our oil royalty money wisely-and Albertans like bootlegga and myself have done just that-, and I hate how some of us were insufferable assholes in the good times, but apparently all the money we pay into equalization and the money that workers who come from other parts of the country send back home don't count for anything. Not to mention that we've got forward-thinking companies that are actively trying to reduce their environmental impact, or that even somebody like Preston Manning is getting grief from the likes of Ezra Levant over his concerns about oil and gas development.
I hear what the people concerned about spills and the impact on hunting or fishing say, but then I hear what the people who make their livings off the oilsands are saying too. It's one of the things I'm racking my brains over trying to figure out a solution to...
...but I hate myself for not being able to.