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Comment by gerbilly | Hacker News Reader

> You definitely don't speak for us all, whatever the case.

Yeah OP doesn't speak for me either. While this might not be implemented in the best way, Canadian culture is a real thing, but only because we are active in trying to protect it.

And it goes double for French Canadian culture! I don't want my province to become another Louisiana, i.e.: a once French speaking region that is now nearly 100% anglophone, but hey there's this great French influence!

Also FB puts news orgs in a bind because in order to compete, they need to give their content away for free on Facebook.

This has put the squeeze on an industry that was already bleeding money from all the ads moving online.

Because we are a small news market, this has been especially damaging to our journalism industry. If we lose it then it will be foreigners telling us what the 'facts' are in our own country, no thanks.

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Aren’t the French Canadians notorious for buying and consuming their own culture?

Friend of mine here in the bay area is French Canadian and his teenagers (both full Americans born here) both watch and follow French Canadians on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. He explained to me that under Canadian law, absolutely none of that is Canadian Content or Culture. No subsidies, no quotas. Even a Denis Villeneuve movie isn't either.

Apparently, to watch original content in French he has to VPN in Canada to be allowed to watch content that's only produced in Canada for French Canadians by CBC; they won't even make the smallest attempt at exporting it.

Honestly the whole concept, to me, is bizarre.

Quebec is basically a confederate state that periodically holds a brexit referendum to threaten the rest of the country, and we all kiss their ass for a while and (so far) the secession No votes win out, for twenty years or so, rinse, repeat.

The cancon rules play out in absurd ways on a regular basis; there was a case where a Bryan Adams album didn't qualify but an Aerosmith album did due to where it was recorded, and while I never looked too closely at either case I'm sure there was some bureaucratic discretion exercised somewhere along the way.

That said, Cancon will always get my vote, I think we do have a distinct set of musical conventions from other places and it's got a lot to do with the government assistance.

> confederate state > secession

I don't know if these words have the same connotation in Canada as in the US, but these are two pretty loaded terms out here.

Well, they have racist laws aimed mainly at a specific group, and they literally have voted twice in my life about leaving Canada and shortly before I was born they had an IRA style terrorist group called the FLQ.

It's a pretty loaded situation.

Cause we're neither French nor English Parle Anglais ou Francis We hate each other like the plague And we hope it stays that way

> they have racist laws

Like, against black people?

> voted twice in my life about leaving Canada

That's not at all like the US Confederation or Civil War.

> they had an IRA style terrorist group called the FLQ.

Did they actually get convicted under terrorism laws? From my understanding, it was a series of mailbox bombing, some of them by the feds themselves. [0] Nothing remotely looking like 9/11.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...

The laws in question are framed as secularist, but aimed at Muslims who dress differently. I daresay nobody who wears a crucifix in that highly catholic province is going to get much hassle, but wear a hijab, on the other hand...

I'm not particularly interested in a contest of anti-wit where you try to convince me the government of Quebec are actually superduper committed anti-religionists and I get increasingly frustrated, but I definitely consider it a law based in racist motivation and which is playing out in a highly racist way, just like the crack laws down there in the 90s were targeted at black people. Superpredators and all that.

Anyways I'm not sure what you're after here - is it that, the Confederate South was the pinnacle of racism? And nothing should ever be compared to it, because that's insulting to the pride of the generations of Southern Racists who have worked very hard to successfully maintain an aura of abject Hun-like barbarism against a tide of woke PCism that grows ever more powerful?

Am I making you feel like maybe, as an American, your racism is maybe not as remarkable as you think it is, and in fact, is just another case of US exceptionalist ego tripping? I mean, let's face it, Jefferson Davis was no Hitler, and neither is whoever is running Quebec right now, they're all just boring assholes throwing red meat to their boring fans.

And lest you think I'm some sort of Anglo nationalist, no, I live on Treaty One Territory and I despise my own government just as much for the exact same reasons. It's the same everywhere, dude - you people just have more guns and less self-control about it.

Didn't they removed the cross too?

The law specifically bans the wearing of religious symbols or garb, is my understanding, for gov employees.

But the question is not what the law says, but how it is applied, and to whom, which gets lost in the transition to the paper trail.

edit: A good way to think about it, IMO, is to remember for a moment that everything a politician does is performative - whether they believe it or don't, every public action is actually a pantomime which is intended to please or appease. With that in mind, who is Quebec pleasing or appeasing with this law? Atheists? Please.

Another comparison one could draw, and perhaps a more apt one than the confederacy, would be to Utah, where it's known that if you try to do business there, it is not a secular government and you need to either bribe or work around the church. Quebec enjoys a similar license to pass shit laws/policies that do not pass the Charter, and the feds do nothing because they'll just have another referendum about it.

Notably, Bob and Doug mckenzie weren't Canadian enough to be Canadian content either

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