New Canadian Citizenship Law

[Tanis]

No, just that they're better than the rest of Canada as they're located in the supposed 'center of the universe.'

[Nakor]

OK, so I get that the rest of Canada regards all Ontarians (is that right? ) as self-centered and arrogant, kinda like the New Yorker stereotype I mentioned before. So what do Ontarians think of the rest of Canada? That they're a bunch of backwoods hicks?

That's Alberta mainly. Northern BC is pretty similar, but tends to go unnoticed.

[Frong]

I guess northern BC is kinda like, say... Kentucky, then. The people in the area look at them like rednecks (I know a lot of Ohioans do ), but on a more national scale, they tend to be overshadowed in terms of redneck quotient by states that are further south, like Alabama and Mississippi.

So Ontario has a China complex, then - thinks it's the official center of the universe. Silly Ontario. The official center of the universe is wherever my cats are sitting right now.

[whistledog]

For me, the rest of Canada outside of Ontario is like foreign land. Where I live, you wouldn't even know it was Canada .. no one speaks the infamous "eh" language. My relatives in North Ontario all have Canadian accents, i still find it quite bizarre.

[Nakor]

.. no one speaks the infamous "eh" language.

Well, to be fair, not many Canadians use "eh" at all. Where it is used, it's just an alternative to "huh" for asking for an opinion. For example, "That's a great show, huh?" becomes "That's a great show, eh?".

For fellow Japanese linguists, it's near identical to that usage of the sentence ending particle "ne."

[Tanis]

For me, the rest of Canada outside of Ontario is like foreign land. Where I live, you wouldn't even know it was Canada .. no one speaks the infamous "eh" language. My relatives in North Ontario all have Canadian accents, i still find it quite bizarre.

And for the rest of Canada, we wish that Ontario (and anything east thereof) WAS actually a foreign land.

[Frong]

So how many people from Ontario do you actually know in person, anyway? Gotta wonder about that.

As for the 'eh', even I use it at the end of sentences at times, just for the hell of it. It really is kind of the English equivalent of Japanese 'ne'.

[Nakor]

Most of the attitude toward Ontario comes from the fact that they get a huge number of seats in the House of Commons, leaving the West and Pacific with little voting power. Federal political parties therefore see little need to cater to Western needs, and leads to problems like the government ****ing up the softwood lumber agreement. The federal gov't doesn't really give a damn, because the West traditionally can't affect the vote anyway. It's changing some though; with minority governments in power, every seat counts.

[Frong]

Hmm... based on what I found in Wiki, it looks like the House of Commons is the equivalent of the US House of Representatives, which assigns seats on the basis of population. States like Texas and California have 32 and 53 seats in the House, respectively, while barely populated states like Montana and Vermont have just one apiece. Hence, the vast majority of the delegates in the House come from a handful of heavily populated states. That seems to be the case with Ontario, and to some degree, Quebec. The US Senate, on the other hand, appears not to be quite so similar to the Canadian Senate. Seats in the Canadian Senate are still skewed in numbers towards the more populated provinces, whereas seats in the US Senate are assigned on an equal basis, with each state getting two. It serves as a counterbalance of sorts to the House that way (which is the whole point of the thing).

So yeah, if both branches of the Canadian legislature automatically lean towards Ontario due to it having the most people in it, I can see how the government can pretty easily blow off the needs of the rest of the country and fook things up that way. Maybe you guys oughta change the Senate so it's like ours. BC would at least have equal standing in one house, that way.

[Diabolique]

But then, there is one thing all Canadians agree about - the awesomeness of pure maple syrup!

[Nakor]

Which is why we all have to laugh at the PETA morons boycotting it.

[Frong]

PETA is boycotting maple syrup? Buh... wha? What, are they now also People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants, too? Personally, I think much of PETA's actions are those that only fanatical nutjobs would do. They also make mountains out of molehills on a regular basis. I think if they really wanna try and prevent animal cruelty, they should go to other countries where some people EAT animals that we keep here in North America as pets.

[Nakor]

They're boycotting maple syrup to protest the hunting of seals. Please don't ask me to explain the logic, as I can't, and it's very painful to try. Anyway, apparently PETA missed the memo on the seal hunt being necessary for population control (or the fish would be wiped out, and the seals after), and (though this point doesn't apply to commercial hunters) the fact that the Inuit must eat seal and caribou to survive basically -- shipping costs make anything fruit/vegetable based atrociously expensive (1L box of orange juice: $20).

[Frong]

So not only are they protesting in a completely unrelated fashion, but they're not even protesting the hunting of something endangered. That's gotta be a new low.

[Lagoon Bug]

Well the continued existence of PETA is one of the reasons why I still eat meat