The first Trudeau administration. I'm honestly not sure how far-sighted he was or what his intentions were. The simplest narrative i can construct about it is that PET was charged with governing a country made up of two dissimilar nations that didn't really like each other, to the point where a parting of ways seemed like not the worst outcome. His solution to the two-nation dilemma was to denature both; render down Anglo-Canadian culture and Habitant culture into a homogeneous, textureless post-national Canadian consumer at which point separatism would be a moot point. As solutions go, it might even have worked, except he also had no particular love or concern for the Canadian people over and above all the rest of the world. A culture may be re-asserted following a genereration of suppression and degradation, but when a gene pool is debased, there's very little that can be done to restore the ancestral stock of the nation.
The Habitants were a nation in a much stronger sense than anglo-Canadians were, as we were never truly cut off from the UK. Look at them now. All that matters is that you speak French. There is no nationality in them. The bottom 10% of the HDI is a fine pool of immigrants to draw from, so long as they speak French!
The first Trudeau administration. I'm honestly not sure how far-sighted he was or what his intentions were. The simplest narrative i can construct about it is that PET was charged with governing a country made up of two dissimilar nations that didn't really like each other, to the point where a parting of ways seemed like not the worst outcome. His solution to the two-nation dilemma was to denature both; render down Anglo-Canadian culture and Habitant culture into a homogeneous, textureless post-national Canadian consumer at which point separatism would be a moot point. As solutions go, it might even have worked, except he also had no particular love or concern for the Canadian people over and above all the rest of the world. A culture may be re-asserted following a genereration of suppression and degradation, but when a gene pool is debased, there's very little that can be done to restore the ancestral stock of the nation.
The Habitants were a nation in a much stronger sense than anglo-Canadians were, as we were never truly cut off from the UK. Look at them now. All that matters is that you speak French. There is no nationality in them. The bottom 10% of the HDI is a fine pool of immigrants to draw from, so long as they speak French!