Some people love Friday chat, and it is a pleasure to find it open for business. Good morning Alan ad all...

My friends have got to stop having crisis at 7:30 on a Friday morning. Especially the morning after I dreamt of Flea.

You can stop that right now.

Right. I've always identified as Canadian. When I was teaching high school, I remember a class once asking what I "was" and being puzzled at my response of "Canadian". At the time I didn't think to ask if they thought one could be "American".

1. Yes, its time to retire the term visible minorities, especially as some kind of demographic block. Harper is also now talking about making electoral inroads with "ethnocultural communities". Hey, don't we all live in ethnocultural communities of various composition. Wajid Khan and Charlie the Indian (R.I.P.) never had much in common, in my opinion.
2. Alan, maybe you could make a post sometime outlining the Red Sox starting pitching line-up for the '07 season and their stats from last year?
3. As I see it, Dion is trying to do what you suggest. Incorporating environmentally sensible planning into the overall agenda. Some of the best environmentalists I know are the people in my parents generation who, through frugality learned in the '30s and WWII, live very lightly on the earth yet have built alot of wealth.

I've always identified as Canadian. I grew up in Ontario, but I don't think the concept of being "Ontarian" has ever crossed my mind.

Alan, there's a group that I'm involved with, Civic Access, that would be overjoyed if our Canadian information resources could be wrested away from private interests like the British law database. As taxpayers, we've already paid once for the data to be collected and stored, why should we have to pay for access to it as well?

Son of a gun, after three decades of policies encouraging making people not feel "Canadian" but "XYZ-Canadian", we discover that the younger generation feels less integrated than their parents.

I am shocked, shocked.

Tell people for long enough that they don't belong and sure enough, they'll start feeling it.

(I'm saying that Queen's saying it had a "culture of whiteness" was profoundly stupid. You know why? Sure, there's a culture of whiteness in North America -- all over the place. It's that 'culture' that presumably drew my brown and yellow relatives -- because our ancestral lands were undemocratic, illiberal shitholes. You want to know how to treat "visible minorities" right? Treat them like white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. /rant)

Why should we treat them that poorly, Ben? We all deserve better.

LOL.

Touché.

The dirty littel secret here at Queen's is that the "visible minorities" are the ones giving each other the hardest time. knowing what I do about instructor evaluations, the profs who get the worst marks from the kiddies are the ones with thick accents. The foreign students can't be bothered to make the effort to understand them and rate them very poorly. An East Indian prof in my department is one of the best instructors we have and he gets terrible evaluations from his, primarily, oriental students. You want to talk abotu a culture of entitlement? Yow.

My family has been in this area since 1778 and it has been drilled into my head since I was a kid that I as a resident of the Dominion of Canada but personally, I am a little more New World Orderish in that I feel Ontarian 75% of the time, and Canadian the Balance.

On the otehr hand I am a fickle little man and were the money right and the situation acceptable, I'd move the whole fam-damily back over to Manchester UK in a heartbeat. I like it here, but because of my TV watching and reading habits, I know I would feel most at home there (and my wife who is only second Generation Canadian would be happy to move back to the City of her ancestors as well).

"Son of a gun, after three decades of policies encouraging making people not feel "Canadian" but "XYZ-Canadian", we discover that the younger generation feels less integrated than their parents."

I agree with Ben. We shouldn't be surprised. Sad but true.

Hans, once we start inhabiting the moon and other planets and planetoids, the ancestral draw will be to Earth, not a sector of the planet. I like Canada, it's a free and nicely wild outdoorsy place, but seriously, that day and age of blind patroiotism is gone in the eyes of the younger ones, me included (and I'm almost 40), well ,maybe not south of the border..

I also don't support the home-town hockey team just because its the home town team.

Good for you, Gorthos. Blind patriotism is less than useless.

One needn't be blindly patriotic to feel Canadian (in fact, some might say the two concepts are mutually exclusive) or to feel integrated in whole or in part into Canadian society. I would hope that most citizens of Canada feel integrated into Canadian society but the study Alan links to suggests otherwise.

I was mostly referring to supporting the local team <i>because</i> it's the hometown team. Mostly. :-)

Okay Hans, in the most plaid shirt and maple sugar candy general stereotypical way I feel Canadian, but when i was in the Dominican Republic lazing about the pool drinking rum on the beach I felt very stereotypically Carribean if that makes any sense. I don't feel tied to the nation and see lots of places I would like to live at least for a few years each, not necessarily returing.

Being the kid of immigrants whose family emigrated in the 50s to not only Canada but the US, Australia, NZ and S. Africa as well as cousins in Dubai, France, Turkey and who knows where else I must admit that Canada is a nice place and a place I am glad to contribute but the emotional ties are likely weaker than if I were third or fourth generation.

Sounds cosmopolitan. And I don't mean the drink. Or the magazine.

Ahh. Mayhap Alan has hit the nail on the head. I have NO emotional ties except to people. Perhaps that is my reasoning as well as that of the others in the same boat as myself. We do not have the same emotional ties to inanimate things like land

Whereas I envy the rest of my immediate family's sense of place, as my parents now reside in (and my sister grew up in) the home my grandfather built in '24 for his father.

Looking out my window at, well, snow I am feeling distinctly Canadian. The sheer rarity of snow in Victoria (or Vancouver) is just one of the many reasons why my primary identification is British Columbian. I like being Caandian in that faintly administrative sense; but there is virtually nothing in my day to day experience which creates any direct attachment to an emotional Canadianess. (It is pretty hard to work up much passion for the daily task of paying GST which is really the only manifestation of Ottawa which we experience with any consistency.)

I suspect that all of the lefty parties - NDP, Libs, Greens - are going to discover that if they are honest about the costs associated with the more extreme end of Green they are going to bleed votes. While Canadians seem willing to sort their waste in the delightfully bogus curbside re-cycling scam, they are not going to be happy with political parties which promise a two buck a liter carbon tax, whether imposed directly at the pump or indirectly by demanding carbon reductions in Fort McMurray. Nor are they going to be thrilled at multi-billion dollar wind farms or personal carbon allotments. Especially when it dawns on them that their noble sacrifice is being just a tad overwhelmed by the Chinese building 450 coal fired electrical generating plants.

My own sense is that green principles are easy to embrace so long as their efficacy and costs are keep well hidden. As soon as people realize that any thing which is actually efficient costs a substantial percentage of GDP the green bubble will burst.

At the moment the CPC has to pay lip service to greenery simply to avoid appearing insensitive; but, with luck, Mr. Baird will start putting out hard numbers (and stop quoting Suzuki Foundation fiction) in which case the great middle will suddenly lose its taste for "all green all the time" and switch over to a gradualist, cost efficient approach. I suspect they will also demand to have the science verified a little more throughly than it has been to date and a real analysis of the costs and benefits of any green plan.

The thought of a group of ESL Chinese struggling to understand a tutorial overseen by an ESL Indian grad student (or vice versa, or any other conflicting arrangement) kicks me back over into the "There might be a God overseeing justice in the universe" column.

Interesting question. I feel American easily enough, and proud, but the kind of patriotism I see on TV makes me nervous, waving flags, acting like we are tippity top. Having lived in New England many years, I never felt like it was a home, didn't feel settled, didn't understand the people. Having now settled among my tribe of likeminded vegetarian socialist artists, I am at home. I wonder if gorthos would feel the same if he lived in a neighborhood of people he felt he had more in common with.

"I wonder if gorthos would feel the same if he lived in a neighborhood of people he felt he had more in common with."

Egad Gary.. One of us would snap and everyone would die in the neighborhood.

I just don't get patriotism. People are born in a country which they didn't create or take part in the creation of, they are really just residents, yet they revel in the actions of others in their country's past with some sort of insecure person's vicarious dreamy glory. Dunno. I say, enjoy life, call a spade a spade and be nice generally.

Patriotism is a piece of cake when you belong to the dead ancestor cult of the highland Scots. They are in the room right now, they want me to have a beer and put my feet up. I have the greatest dead ancestors to hang out with.

Now Alan, you know my last name.. Those be-kilted yelling and carousing fellows hang out in my room too. I just don't have that Canadian patriotism thing, regardless of how long my family hasbeen here. I like it here, but I just identify with olde Scotland and Ireland more.

That is what I mean, too. Raise a regiment of McLeods and I am there...in the administrative offices perhaps but I am so <i>there</i>.

Excellent. And even though the fellow we may meet with for breaking of the bread in the near future is of a clan my forbearers didn't necessarily get along with all that much, mayhap we shall all at that time work on a new plan to liberate the Stone of Scone from Edinburgh Castle. Just for fun..

3-1 for Manchester BTW.. 35 min to go.

"Interesting question. I feel American easily enough, and proud, but the kind of patriotism I see on TV makes me nervous, waving flags, acting like we are tippity top. Having lived in New England many years, I never felt like it was a home, didn't feel settled, didn't understand the people. Having now settled among my tribe of likeminded vegetarian socialist artists, I am at home. I wonder if gorthos would feel the same if he lived in a neighborhood of people he felt he had more in common with"

A relative of mine is married to an American. I'm not sure how it came up but they had a flag outside which was old and torn, and there was some question about what to do with it. Anyway, the upshot was that my US in-law insisted on burying it as though it were a person.

I think I probably am a patriot in that dingbat way that nobody says they are. But it's a funny sort of grounded civic patriotism. I don't have an obsession with flags. I just like Canada for the things it offers and a part of me feels very connected to its history. But Canada is a young country, so I'm not surprised to see people who aren't particularly patriotic. I think there is such a thing as going too far with patriotism, obviously. The flag waving/burying thing is worrying.

How Canadian are you?

I'm a proud Canadian tax payer. Does that count?

Ha!

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/britain_scotland