George Etienne Cartier would disagree:
Comme le dit un vieil adage:
Rien n’est si beau que son pays;
Et de le chanter, c’est l’usage;
Le mien je chante à mes amis
L’étranger voit avec un oeil d’envie
Du Saint-Laurent le majestueux cours;
À son aspect le Canadien s’écrie:
Ô Canada! mon pays! mes amours!
In English:
As the old proverb says:
Nothing is more beautiful than one’s country;
And to sing it is the tradition;
And mine I sing to my friends
The stranger looks with an envious eye
Of the St. Lawrence the majestic course;
At its aspect the Canadian sings:
O Canada! my country! my love!
His first loyalty was to Canada. And he is remembered as one of the Fathers Of Confederation alongside John Alexander MacDonald.
So true. But George Cartier lived & died long before the bomb-throwing era of the radicals of the 1960’s.
In 1963 I was in high school looking at news photos of defaced bilingual stop signs (Arretez/Stop). In 2012 I saw these for myself in Ottawa.
I’m Catholic & once lived in Green Bay WI. Quebecois were our kinsmen, denominationally speaking. Again, this was before the separatist movement broke out in Montreal around 1968.
“Francophone”? “Anglophone”? What were those, I asked, some kind of telephone instrument? What I did notice in Ontario was federally imposed bilingualism on everything from street signs to cereal boxes. This seemed to have produced more resentment than it did cross-cultural understanding.