Even in the Frenchest Quebec-nationalist parts of Canada you have to work pretty hard at being a belligerent jerk to not get served at a restaurant for not speaking French. People tell stories all the time about this sort of stuff, you hear it second and third hand.. you go visit yourself, viola! Folks are just pretty decent and eager to engage in commerce with visitors!
Complaining about being forced to learn French in school is some classic "western alienation" Canadian politics stuff, the Canadian equivalent of Americans being angry about having to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish on the IVR.. one can only sigh at the triviality of these matters..
100% agree. I grew up in Alberta but in the last few years have spent a lot of tourist time in Quebec. Hands down what the average person in Alberta seems to think about Quebec is almost complete nonsense. FWIW I don't speak French (altho my wife and daughter can, but not great). I just spend a lot of money there on skiing and culinary tourism.
That's not to say Quebecois nationalism isn't real -- but frankly it's legitimate. They are effectively a nation.
There are people who are building their political careers out of balkanizing Canada. Some of them in QC, but more and more in western Canada. They profit by telling outright lies ("Quebec using Saudi oil" or such nonsense when in fact Quebec gets the vast majority of its oil from domestic sources, mostly Albertan but some American).
Racism in Canada against our indigenous people, however, is deep and strong and disgusting. Most urban people don't encounter it as strongly because the native population is not dense in most urban areas. But just stroll through message boards, sometime... it's pretty shocking.
And there's a long history of ugly relations between the RCMP (and other police departments) and first nations in this country... Really bad stuff.
no, not really i think. It's not perfect with some glaring incidents, but overall I'd say much better. There is an order of magnitude less forces, less guns to go around, less focus on drug use and some of the forces (RCMP OPP) are very large. We had some protests basically shut down large sections of the country earlier in the year and it never got violent like in america.
