Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to I expected and I am pleased by that answer of yours.

Canadian Woman, mama let me be-eeee....
ER — (archived)

One of my old college chums is an Ontario native and for years she was constantly slamming the US for our racist attitudes (she was from Toronto and didn't know any Aboriginal Canadians so that subject never came up). After graduation she moved back to Canada and worked as a career Canadian Immigration employee. She will be retiring shortly from that job, in fact.

About the time she started in that work, a great wave of immigration started coming into Canada from the West Indies, South Asia, the far and middle east and southern and eastern Europe, and her attitudes became more and more racist as time passed, so much so that her old friends in Florida started giving HER a hard time about her prejudice when she came down to visit. She was down on everybody, even though her grandmother was Ukrainian!

And it wasn't just the new immigrants she was down on, she was also constantly slamming the Quebecois, who if my history does not fail me, were the original European settlers of Canada, which the Brits displaced by force of arms (sound familiar?). She was really ticked off to have to learn French just to get ahead in her job. She also has tough words for the denizens of the Prairie Provinces and the Maritimes, too; particularly the Newfies.

Although her racism is mostly verbal and does not particularly imply any need to deny her immigration clients their rights, or condones criminal treatment of them, or even any lack of courtesy in public, it manifests itself by some privately felt but very bitter feelings against "foreigners" in her country, even though she got along just fine with Arabs, blacks, Italians, and Latins while she was a student in Florida.

As they say in the Great White North, she's a real hoot.

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