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. Quebec 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. 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.
I don't think we resist immigration. The French culture isn't as popular as the English one because France (and the rest of La Francophonie) isn't a juggernaut like the U.K or the U.S.A. La Francophonie promote French culture but doesn't glamour it like Hollywood, London or New York do. Another factor is the "friends and familly effect". An immigrant will go where he knows somebody to help him bootstrap his new life. Should I also add that in winter, it's damn cold!
And I don't believe that someday English will be dominant in Quebec City. You can't brush aside history.
Is it a Keeper?. If like me you tend to take several photos of the same subject, from slightly different angles and focal lengths, then you will know how difficult it can be to select the best from the rest. Alain Briot's latest article in his "Aesthetics and Photography" series is essential reading.
"Keepers. A photographer's term for photographs we like enough to keep them in our permanent files and print them.
But how do you decide which photographs are good enough to be... [PhotographyBLOG]
Good story on how to select pictures. This one is timely. Just back from holidays with 3000+ pictures to sort.
Flying up the St. Lawrence River from Quebec City to Labrador and Newfoundland I saw about 100 whales in the water. This at the same time that the newspapers were covering a debate about whether to allow renewed commercial whaling. It is so easy to find whales from a plane, especially when the water is flat like the upstream portion of the river where the whales swim to find the richest food. You just look for streaks of bubbles like a dotted line and the whale will be at the front. What chance do these animals have against modern technology? None, obviously. Yet must we ban whaling? Perhaps a compromise would be to allow whaling but only with the technology described in the book Moby Dick. The whales had more of a chance back then and not infrequently managed to kill their hunters.
But maybe as the world population becomes ever more obese people will feel a greater kinship to these multi-ton creatures. Once we're all incredibly fat and easy to spot from an airplane we will have enough sympathy for whales to leave them alone.
[If you are looking for a summer trip and wish to see a lot of whales without getting seasick, you can see Belugas, Humpbacks, Blues(!), et al., at the confluence of the Saguenay and St. Lawrence rivers (tourism site). Sadly there is no airport right near the town of Tadoussac (Charlevoix is closest) but it is only about a 2.5-hour drive from Quebec City, right along the lake shore with a beautiful cathedral and then a big casino on the way.]
