The Quebec Culture Blog has, sadly, been quiescent since 2016, but in its heyday it did a terrific series of posts on Canadian French accents; here’s the first, with links to the others, and here’s a taste:
Through my growing-up years, my family had moved numerous times within the country. During this period, my education was in French wherever we lived in Canada. As a child, my parents sought to ensure that my French and English were at the same level, and that I was able to identify with Canada’s French language and Francophone culture wherever we lived.
By the time I was 20, I had already lived in four provinces. Since then, I had lived in another two provinces for a total of six provinces. Thus, from a very young age, I became quite familiar with many forms of French accents in numerous provinces. […]
It is a part of Canada which I hold very close to my heart. For me, Canada would not be the same without it’s linguistic and cultural duality (regardless of the province), or the diversity of it’s Francophone nature. I’d like to share some of my own knowledge with you regarding our different accents and realities. […]
I have done my best to provide comprehensive information, but in a manner which doesn’t require an entire book. To keep things interesting, in addition to video links of many accent samples, I will also provide anecdotes with some of my own personal stories and experiences, as well as interesting images throughout this series.
From the second post, on Ontario:
1. Northern Ontario:
This accent is found in Ontario’s far Northeast, predominantly along Highway 11. It’s an area dotted with many communities which are 80% – 90% Francophone. Some of the better known communities include Hearst, Kapuskasing, Cochrane, Timmins, Iroquois Falls, and Kirkland Lake.
It incidentally also happens to be one of the most Francophone areas in Canada — which usually comes as great surprise to people outside Canada who often have incorrect beliefs that French in Canada only equals Québec. Along the same lines, I’m not even sure that most people in Québec even realize that there are parts of Ontario which are just as francophone (and sometimes even more francophone) that most regions of Québec. This is a perfect example of how the Two Solitudes exists, even between Francophones (those inside Québec & those outside Québec). In the same vein, Anglophones elsewhere in Canada, even in other areas of Ontario, are not necessarily aware of this reality.
I was in a taxi the not long ago in Toronto. The taxi driver immigrated to Canada 20 years ago, but only recently drove the 13 hours straight North from Toronto to get to the most Francophone regions of Ontario. He told me he had no prior idea that Northeast Ontario was completely French – and he said with a smile that he tried to fill his car with gas at a rural gas station, but they couldn’t speak English. It was a big eye-opener for him.
Details, obviously, at the links; don’t expect professional-linguist accuracy, but it’s certainly enlightening. Thanks, Y!
Slightly off topic: I recently listened to an interview with a Quebecois traveler who said, “It was only in the last couple of years, as I traveled abroad, that I finally learned English. I had never used it before”. And yet his English seemed, French Canadian accent aside, absolutely perfect: perfect tense sequences, perfect syntax, command of idioms, etc. It made me curious if there has been research on how French Canadians might get some certain level of passive exposure to English (unlike French speakers in France), so even if they are monolingual in everyday life, they can rapidly jump to an advanced level of English. Anyone have literature to recommend?
A fascinating story, and a good question!
The most recent figures I could find said that a whopping 40% of the current Canadian population are either immigrants or the Canadian-born children of immigrants, which has created a much greater diversity of L1’s and/or heritage languages, leading to fascinating phenomena like Punjabi commentary on ice hockey aired by the CBC. But it also means that for good or for ill, the “two solitudes” model of Canadian identity has largely been overtaken by events. The Quebecois nationalists have tried their darndest to recruit Francophone immigrants, but my cynical outsider view is that common language != common culture, and incomers from Algeria and Haiti are not simply falling in line to reinforce the political/cultural agenda of the old “pure laine” Quebecois, which has in any event drifted over time.
I don’t begrudge those who want to enforce the historical settlement whereby even if there are only a hundred kids in some random place in Saskatchewan whose parents want a French-language-of-instruction school they ought to get one, but that model is going to be increasingly hard to sustain in a Canada that has switched from a “two-theoretically-equal-cultures” norm to a “arbitrarily-many-theoretically-equal-cultures” norm.
In any event, the “two solitudes” model shortchanged Canada’s once-numerous population of Gaelic-speakers like my great-great-grandmother, although of course she failed to personally contribute to sustaining a third solitude by moving away from Cape Breton, marrying an L1 Anglophone outsider, and ultimately spending the last two-thirds of her long life in Michigan surrounded by people who knew not a word of Gaelic. Not enough critical mass for a distinctive Ann Arbor dialectical pronunciation of Gaelic to develop.
And there were other largely monolingual communities in Canada too. My maternal grandparents grew up in rural Alberta, part of a community where the majority of the older generations were native Low German speakers. Even before my grandparents’ births, English had become their families’ main household language, but my great grandparents were all fully bilingual. However, the generation born starting around 1900 only learned the language sporadically, and those who moved away from Pincher Creek as adults tended to forget most of what they had known. My grandmother told me that, after a certain age, she stopped speaking German entirely; even though her mother spoke to her in German sometimes, Grandma took to responding only in English. She considered the use of German to be old-fashioned and declassee. In contrast, my grandfather never learned much German at all, which became a signifier of a different kind. When he was about four, Grandpa attended a family reunion and met his immigrant great grandfather Becker. As Grandpa put it, “It was not a meaningful experience,” since the old patriarch was not interested in talking to great grandchild who knew next to no German.
a whopping 40% of the current Canadian population are either immigrants or the Canadian-born children of immigrants, which has created a much greater diversity of L1’s and/or heritage languages… it means that for good or for ill, the “two solitudes” model of Canadian identity has largely been overtaken by events.
This struck an interesting chord for me. The recent Australian referendum to amend the constitution to establish a body representing indigenous peoples to give advice to the government on indigenous affairs (a proposal known as “the Voice“) was soundly defeated. One of the main arguments of the opponents of “the Voice” was that it would be divisive to give one group special treatment. Never mind that the indigenes were the original inhabitants, had all their land stolen from them by the British crown, were slaughtered, raped, forcibly moved, forcibly assimilated, systematically discriminated against, had their children stolen from them, and still suffer from high rates of incarceration and social problems, they were not entitled to a separate “Voice” because that would be “divisive”. It strikes me that this argument assumes greater force given the very large numbers of immigrants from East Asia, South Asia, the South Pacific, and Africa now living in an increasingly multiracial, multicultural society. From that perspective, any special treatment for the indigenes truly would be seen as unfair and therefore “divisive”.
Bathrobe, beyond the point you bring up, I’d be curious to see a breakdown of the Voice vote for how those immigrant communities voted. Are some of those non-Western immigrants of the opinion that this is a white-settler-versus-indigenous conflict that they aren’t party to, since it was “already over” when they arrived? And Chinese I have known in Europe – and not even supporters of the CCP – have felt that campaigns for disadvantaged minorities threaten social harmony, and social harmony is sacred, so did this attitude also play a role in the Australian context?
@Brett: i can’t remember if you’ve said in the past – were they part of the anabaptist constellation in central/western canada, or ’48ers, or from the earlier emigration? (i’m trying to think the chronology against what i know about texas/arkansas german on the one hand, and the by-way-of-ukraine anabaptists)
I don’t feel competent to opine on Australian politics, but let me note that I have a generally skeptical view of recent immigrants to places where the indigenes were forcibly dispossessed (whether that be in North America or somewhere south of the Equator) who claim that this is not their concern even as they benefit from the status quo that was perhaps brought about by brutal or otherwise unseemly actions before they turned up.
As the man said:
“Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten or ripe.
And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.
For every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence:
For sloth, for avarice, gluttony, neglect of the Word of GOD ,
For pride, for lechery, treachery, for every act of sin.
and of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance.
For good and ill deeds belong to a man alone, when he stands alone on the other side of death,
But here upon earth you have the reward of the good and ill that was done by those who have gone before you.
And all that is ill you may repair if you walk together in humble repentance, expiating the sins of your fathers;
And all that was good you must fight to keep with hearts as devoted as those of your fathers who fought to gain it.”
@rozele: The German-speaking community they came was not a religiously monolithic group. My Canadian ancestors were all Catholic, going back at least to my great-great grandparents, and many of them came from the Rhineland. Catholic Low German speakers were, I think, the largest component of the German-descended community, but there were also a not insignificant number of Lutherans. The Lutherans may have originally come from farther north and east in Germany, and I don’t know how much their dialect would have differed from the one my ancestors spoke. Moreover, there were at least a few Anabaptists as well, including a some little further back in my own family. However, I don’t think there was an active Anabaptist religious community there, and in fact, some of the Anabaptists converted to Catholicism (including that branch of my tree).
The German-speaking ranchers were also not limited to Canada. There was definitely some movement back and forth across the border, although I don’t really know how much. One of my great grandfathers was born in Nebraska around 1880, but he moved back to Alberta, where his own father had moved from, as a young man. I know very little about the status of German in the American Great Plains during that period though; it is entirely possible that my great grandfather moved north in part because he wanted to be part of a more culturally German community—even though, as I said, he was fluent in both English and Low German.
@Brett: ah! so interesting, and tastily messy!
The recent Australian referendum to amend the constitution to establish a body representing indigenous peoples to give advice …
Thank you @Bathrobe, it’s been very difficult to get a level-headed appraisal from across the Tasman. NZ’ers have been nervously listening to the shouting-match across the garden fence, as it were, because we do have a constitutional mechanism for the pre-European indigenes to “give advice”. (Contrary to what its critics claim) this is no more than “give advice”/be formally consulted. The Māori-elected MPs and consultative bodies have no more vote in the Parliament than any other MP; a voter can elect in a Māori constituency or a ‘General’ but not both.
We’ve just had a General Election in which (as ever) some of the more tub-thumpy minor parties have tried to borrow the rhetoric of ” be divisive to give one group special treatment.” (One particularly opportunistic party leader who was very happy to benefit from Māori-constituency elected MPs when it suited him.)
Of course the NZ colonial experience was very different to Aus, coming as it did after the abolition of slavery, and in a setting of a coherent indigenous culture who all spoke the same language; and were regularly war-mongering anyway.
given the very large numbers of immigrants from East Asia, South Asia, the South Pacific, and Africa now living in an increasingly multiracial, multicultural society.
Hmm? I think you’re lumping together quite different cultures/experiences of immigration. (NZ doesn’t have significant African immigration except Somalian refugees but …) The South Pacifica communities are culturally and socially very similar to the urban/dispossessed Māori, with similar negative social measures.
The Asian immigrants have got here because of economic skills and/or wealth; they’re here to get their kids decent English-language-based education. I guess they’re not much culturally attuned to the idea of a functioning democracy; so wouldn’t take the politics as “divisive”. (The PRC immigrants I talk to keep asking why we have a Parliament at all when all they do is argue, and won’t pass Laws to allow free movement to/from PRC, to the exclusion of other Asian countries or even Taiwan.)
Never mind that the indigenes were the original inhabitants […], they were not entitled to a separate “Voice” because that would be “divisive”.
That was certainly an important No argument, but not the only one. Consider this from a Torygraph article of 28 September [I know, I know, but I see no reason to think the facts are incorrect]:
Thorpe resigned from the Greens over this issue and is now an independent senator.
Similarly, although it would be absurd to say that the U.S. government treats non-citizen residents better than citizens, there was considerable Native opposition to the blanket grant of citizenship that became law in 1924. Quoth WP:
[*] At that time the more progressive of the two parties. They switched roles in the Great Depression.
They switched roles in the Great Depression.
Yes-ish. [Lincoln was a Republican — nobody knew that.] Except Southern Democrats still seem to be less progressive than Northern Republicans.
It’s very confusing, looking on from outside.
If it were any other polity, I’d say at a crux in the great sweep of history where the two-party system is ripe to break down and reform into a different two parties.
“It was only in the last couple of years, as I traveled abroad, that I finally learned English. I had never used it before”. And yet his English seemed, French Canadian accent aside, absolutely perfect:
Having met many many Quebecois whose English was not even close to perfect (including a lad I knew who was an “English teacher” in Japan), I wonder if this traveler was an exception or perhaps just not being honest about how much English experience he had previously had.
Then again if he is younger than 30 it would not be surprising that he had far more passive exposure to English than French speakers of my generation had.
Related – an article in Die Zeit about the incredible improvement in German children’s English abilities (even if the rest of the school system is supposedly in crisis): https://www.zeit.de/2023/44/englischkenntnisse-schueler-verbesserung-soziale-medien
Quite likely. It is not yet clear whether 2016 represents the beginning of the Seventh Party System (see the WP article on the American party system and its sub-articles) or the beginning of a depolarized period between the end of the Sixth and the beginning of the Seventh sometime in the near future.
Yes, the GOP is spectacularly imploding, but it’s hard to imagine what will come next (certainly not another Era of Good Feelings). Of course, it always is. And after the fact everything seems obvious.
That was certainly an important No argument, but not the only one. Consider this from a Torygraph article of 28 September [I know, I know, but I see no reason to think the facts are incorrect]
The dissident views of some Aboriginals are interesting and of course worthy of respect, but they are essentially irrelevant given the realities of population/voting percentages. The views that count in terms of the referendum are those of the majority population, and I think it’s fair to suppose that racism is overwhelmingly responsible for the rejection of the proposal.
The views that count in terms of the referendum are those of the majority population
Well, obviously, since Aboriginals are a whopping 3% of the population (2% in the U.S., 5% in Canada, 17% in New Zealand, just for comparison). There seems to be no breakdown of the Aboriginal vote, but heavily Aboriginal districts varied from 75% Yes to over 90%. I think it’s fair to say that that 10-25% thought the good was the enemy of the best, and that an essentially powerless Voice was no substitute for proper treaty rights, but would dissipate whatever momentum there may be towards them.
Again, while Aboriginal views are of interest in their own right, they are irrelevant to the issue that I’m pretty sure even the dissenting Aboriginals would agree is more important: continuing, overwhelming, institutional racism on the part of the majority.
Am I the only one who feels that Hat is operating with a contentious definition of “racism”? Would an attitude that a minority should be accorded the full protection and benefits of an ethnically neutral state, without a carved-out legal status, have been considered outright racist before the turn of the millennium or so? Twentieth-century campaigns for indigenous rights often appealed to equality under the law that European founders claimed to be rooted in Enlightenment-era universalist values, or sought outright legal separatism to some degree. The call for an indigenous advisory body to a state within the general governmental framework of the state, feels like a development popular in some circles, but never accepted to such a degree that those not in favor of it could so neatly be called racist.
Everything about racism is contentious, but I’m not calling the majority population racist because it rejects the call for an indigenous advisory, I’m saying that it rejects the call for an indigenous advisory because it’s racist. If you don’t believe the majority population of Australia (or, for that matter, the US) is racist, I don’t know what to tell you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023_Australian_Indigenous_Voice_referendum has an interesting collection of polling results generally showing that a significant initial “yes” advantage when the proposal was first floated steadily declined and then fell behind “no” as the actual referendum date approached. Part of that might be the higher earlier percentage of undecideds breaking toward no, but not all of it. Background racial attitudes are unlikely to have shifted that dramatically over that period of time, so something else affecting the willingness of someone with X level of background racism to support the proposal must have changed. (Social media disinformation associated with shadowy foreign governments, say some of the disgruntled proponents, apparently. Although they would say that, wouldn’t they?)
From the main article on the referendum:
In other words (as I would summarize it, and of course I would bow to the better-informed opinions of actual Aussies), the general public, which apparently had nothing much against the idea to begin with, was heavily swayed by the more or less openly racist No campaigning (the likes of which we in the US have been familiar with for decades now when “tough on crime” legislation comes up), and to my mind this happened because of latent racism that is easily triggered by such campaigns. Again, we in the US are intimately acquainted with this process. But I don’t want to get into any arguments about it; if anyone prefers to believe that a judicious public simply reacted to the provision of vital information, let them so believe, say I.
@JWB something else affecting the willingness of someone with X level of background racism to support the proposal must have changed.
No mystery there: Sky News. (And they know there’s no point stirring it up weeks and weeks before the actual vote: danger folk’ll have time to think for themselves.)
@Hat latent racism that is easily triggered by such campaigns.
(I hear your “I don’t want to get into any arguments about it”, so I’ll just say:) Yes.
A sober (brief) review of Aus media’s treatment of The Voice starting at 10:00. (‘Media Watch’ is a weekly review, fronted by an old-school print journalist, on a public-funded broadcast channel. IMO Paul Barry bends over backwards too far trying to be even-handed with the Murdoch channels/outlets.)
@Christopher Culver: It could that he’s misremembering his level of English from years ago. It’s hard for people to self-evaluate their own foreign language competency well. This post and comment thread from over a decade ago goes over some of those issues.
@Bathrobe: I did some searching, but it seems like no pollster breaks down the Voice referendum polling figures by ethnic origins, so it’s hard to tell how the Voice did among Australians with non-British/Irish and non-Aboriginal origins. IIRC, the urban areas and the highly educated voted YES and the suburbs, the countryside and the less educated voted NO. So I am guessing that people from immigrant backgrounds voted similarly to where they live and their level of education as the general public, unless somebody has proof otherwise.
Sorry for dipping out after raising this issue.
In my possibly biased view, much of the responsibility for the failure of the referendum must lie at the feet of the leader of the Opposition. After the Liberal-National coalition was ignominiously voted out of office in the Federal elections in May 2022, partly due to the increasing unpopularity of the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison (I won’t try to explain what an appalling Prime Minister he was), the Liberal party elected Peter Dutton as their leader. Dutton is a former police officer and appears to be a first-class bigot. When he was a policeman in Queensland he apparently adopted the practice of taking youthful indigenous delinquents way out in the bush and leaving them there to make their own way home. From my perspective, one of his most offensive actions was placing an illegal quota on the number of Partner visas (essentially spouse visas) issued each year, resulting in a huge backlog of visa applicants — whose main sin is, of course, being “foreigners” — waiting to come to Australia with their spouses or partners. (He was also involved in the whole inhumane process of parking asylum seekers in camps in offshore locations — Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Christmas Island (an Australian possession) — while their cases were dealt with, although it was Scott Morrison who was largely responsible for that one.)
Once he became leader of the Liberal party, Dutton adopted the negative blocking tactics beloved of the Liberal party for the past two decades. The Voice referendum presented the perfect opportunity to oppose the Labor government that came into power last year. And Dutton went for it with gusto, maintaining that the Voice was “divisive” and taking the line “If you’re in doubt, vote No”.
The last referendum on Aboriginal affairs in 1967, to have had them counted in national censuses (previously they were not counted!), was supported by both sides and was approved with a huge majority. If the Opposition had supported the Voice referendum this time, I have no doubt that it would have passed, even though there might have been opposing voices in the community. With Dutton’s campaign of tirelessly opposing the Yes vote, sowing doubt, and employing various essentially racist (or at least dog-whistle) arguments, what should have been a relatively peaceful bipartisan campaign turned into a highly divisive referendum. Even businesses and sports clubs that had donated to the Yes campaign came under attack. Dutton’s claim that setting up an Aboriginal “Voice” to advise Parliament would be divisive was the ultimate in divisiveness.
That is my view on the failure of the referendum. As to how other ethnic communities in Australia voted, I have no information. The ones likely to have a guilty conscience over their treatment of the indigenes are mostly white Australians of British stock. I wonder whether a referendum to give the Aborigines a special voice would have appealed to the more ethnically diverse parts of the Australian population. To be honest, I don’t know.
Thanks for that very helpful background.
I am consistently amazed by how difficult Australia makes it for the spouses of citizens to get residence visas.
how difficult Australia makes it …
Compared to … getting in to where? It’s easier for spouses of UK citizens to get visas? I doubt that under Suella. Certainly ain’t easier getting into NZ.
Most people have no idea what bastards their own immigration authorities routinely are to those who have the misfortune to have to deal with them; unless you actually know someone who has been gratuitously fucked about by them, you don’t realise just how very bad they are. And most people don’t know one of their victims.
Britain’s was pretty bad even before the lovely Conservatives* decided that making it even worse would keep that essential racist vote onside: their sole remaining plan for the election.
* “Lower than vermin”, as stuff-their-mouths-with-gold Bevan rightly said. And that was before they killed tens of thousands with gratuitous “austerity” and then turned completetly into UKIP.
unless you actually know someone who has been gratuitously fucked about by them,
Indeed. From several experiences I know of was exactly what I was talking about. And the COVID travel-restrictions became an even better pretext for about-fucking.
Spousal visas to come to America are unlimited in number and, with few exceptions, not subject to discretionary rejection. That means that if the requirements are met, the visa has to be issued, and while there are inevitably some stories of things going awry, it is generally a smooth process.
It should perhaps be noted that the Liberal Party of Australia is not liberal-US and only to some extent liberal-EUR.
Canada’s once-numerous population of Gaelic-speakers
The Ukrainian-speakers of Saskatchewan were in their day the third largest linguistic community in Canada.
@John Cowan: I have heard it joked that William Shatner’s famously odd cadences of speech are the only remaining evidence of a once-common Ukrainian-Canadian Jewish accent.
FWIW I know one married couple with one Australian spouse and one American spouse and after an experimental year or two living in Australia right after the wedding they came back to the U.S. because it was easier for the non-citizen spouse to obtain employment. Obviously that’s a n=1 dataset, so don’t extrapolate too much …
It is when you think about it sort of an interesting feature of US immigration law that on the one hand we have all sorts of elaborate centralized categories and quotas and priorities re who can get in but we also have this radical delegation/devolution of authority from the central bureaucracy whereby tens of millions of U.S. citizens (i.e. the entire adult-and-not-currently-married population) have the unilateral option to import one foreigner of their own choosing regardless of how that individual would or would not be likely to be admitted under the more centrally administered categories/quotas/priorities. (Subject of course to the processes for detecting so-called “sham” marriages motivated solely by the desire to game the immigration system.)
Speaking of William Shatner’s accent, Not One-Off Britishisms observes that when he says “seek out new life and new civilizations”, “civil-eye-zations” is a pronunciation that Canadians share with British rather than American English.
This piece backs my view of Dutton and the referendum.
With regard to immigration and the horrendous things governments are guilty of, I would like to comment on this from a personal perspective. Many years ago, when I was still young, handsome, and naïve, I worked at the Australian embassy in the country where I was living. I was locally-employed, which means that I was a “local”, even though I was a foreigner in that country. I was not privy to any state secrets. I won’t say where or when this was, although those who are familiar with my posts here can probably guess.
I had a chance to see the officers and staff who worked in this mission close up, including immigration staff. The first thing you notice is that, surprise, surprise, they are people! Like people everywhere, they were of all types. However, they shared the common feature of being a special kind of people: public servants. They worked to the government department they belonged to back home and were expected to follow the policies of that department. Many, if not most, were conscientious and hard-working. They enjoyed privileges afforded diplomatic staff, including free housing and generous salary provisions to make up for being in a “hardship posting”. They tended (again a broad generalisation) to be insulated from the countries they were posted to. Quite a few rotated from embassy to embassy during their careers. For such people, the public service and diplomatic postings were their world. A few quite clearly enjoyed their position and status.
Of the people I knew in Immigration, I remember one quite well: a young woman who was conscientiously trying to do her job. One time she told me about a particular nationality that had managed to get out of their own oppressive country and desperately wanted to move on to a Western country. These people were known for doing the rounds of different embassies in the hope they could be granted such a visa. At one time this official granted one person of this nationality an Australian visa. Word got around quickly: the next day she was inundated with visa applications from citizens of this country. It seems to me you would quickly become cynical if repeatedly faced with this kind of thing. But I never got the feeling that immigration officials were personally mean or racist. Mostly they were just living their lives and doing their job. You wouldn’t expect many of them to become heroes of the kind who stuck their necks out to issue visas to Jews prior to WWII. But why should you?
Many years later I had occasion to remember my experience when I applied for a Partner Visa for my wife. I applied online near the end of October and joined a Facebook group specifically for applicants for Partner visas. Applying for the visa was a stressful process, not helped by the rather long waiting times that the department concerned posted on their website. I don’t remember now exactly what it was but it was well over a year. And yet, I learned from the Facebook group that a British applicant who had lodged their application after ours, in early December, received it by Christmas. This struck me as sheer racial discrimination. (Fortunately, my wife got her visa 6 months later, which was a lot shorter than many people in the queue. Some had been waiting for years.)
It was only later that I learned that the long wait was partly due to the huge queue that had developed under Dutton during his time in that portfolio, thanks to his illegal cap on numbers, and was only gradually being worked through. Whatever the sins of public servants in Australian embassies abroad, they are only working according to the guidelines and policies of the home department. I suspect many have been disheartened by the de-professionalisation of the department in recent years.
In particular, in 2017 the Australian government transferred the functions of the Department of Immigration to the Department of Home Affairs, with Dutton as its minister. Home Affairs is a mega-ministry focused heavily on security. It is not interested in a constructive immigration policy for the benefit of the country; it wishes to keep control over immigration numbers including the number of asylum seekers getting in and staying. (It is telling that in order to use the Home Affairs website you have to agree to absolve the department of any responsibility for incorrect or out-of-date information on the website.)
I do not think that it is an exaggeration to say that part of the racism, discrimination, and viciousness in the implementation of Australian immigration policies is due to this mega-ministry and the government that created it. (It is also not an accident that a major labour scam took place under the watch of this department — people took advantage of huge delays in processing to work in Australia.) Recently the powerful government official who led the department was forced to step down due to political bias (specifically in his prolific contact with a Liberal party powerbroker). One can only hope that this might lead to an improvement in the running of the department.
I know very little about the fine points of Australian politics, but I do know that Mr. Dutton is the current Leader of the Opposition rather than the current Prime Minister, because the current PM and his ALP colleagues were able to persuade more voters at the 2022 general election to support (after the dust settled from Australia’s wacky instant-runoff system of voting) their candidates than supported the candidates affiliated with the Liberal-National Coalition that Mr. Dutton now heads. That the referendum question was generally supported by the ALP leadership but opposed by the Coalition leadership may help explain in a trivial sense why it was not overwhelmingly approved like the should-we-count-them-in-the-census referendum some decades ago, but it does not explain why the “yes” vote so significantly underperformed the ALP vote the prior year. That relative underperformance (subject to looking at the math on the majority-of-states angle, which I have not bothered to do) was the difference between a narrow-ish yes victory and a not-so-narrow no victory. “The Coalition was against it” is not a particularly satisfactory explanation for that, since the Coalition was likewise against losing last year’s election to the ALP and was if anything probably more intensely committed to that unsuccessful effort. To the extent the Murdoch-dominated press was predominantly against an ALP victory last year, you again need an explanation for why they failed to get the outcome they supported then but succeeded now, etc.
My feeling is that last year a lot of voters were getting significantly cheesed off with Scott Morrison. He was blatantly obnoxious and getting very unpopular.
The Labor government has been extremely cautious (for instance, they retained the Home Affairs departmental head). Albanese didn’t really capitalise on the post-victory period of grace and has been less than overwhelming in his policies.
But for the referendum, my feeling is that Dutton’s untruthful campaign had its effect in influencing people away from the Yes vote, especially as it was on an issue that didn’t affect them as much. People didn’t see it as a vote against the government as much as a vote on a “woke” issue.
But don’t trust what I say. I’ve been away too long to be able to say I have my finger on the pulse.
Sure, and I don’t know the prominent personalities much less the median voters, so I’m just reducing it to math, and the notion of elections largely being (subject to variations in turnout) zero-sum games. So if Dutton et al were for whatever reasons more effective in campaigning against the referendum this year than they were in the general election last year, it is also necessarily the case that Albanese et al. were (at least in a relative sense if not an absolute one, since relative is what matters) *less* effective in campaigning for a yes vote. Which could be because they didn’t actually care about it nearly as much as they had cared about being in Government rather than Opposition, or could be because the terrain was less favorable for the “yes” message than the “haven’t we had enough of Morrison as PM” message. Or both. Or some third thing.
Ah, so divisive has the same meaning in Australian politics as it does in US politics: “anything the extreme right predicts it isn’t going to like”.
That was the case 30 years ago. Nowadays, approximately zero are left of either. Only 18 Republicans currently represent House districts that Biden won, and the number of Democrats representing Trump districts is even lower; yesterday’s vote for Speaker was entirely along party lines without exceptions, and the new Speaker is a religious and political extremist who both doesn’t know what democracy is and is against it.
It’s easy to imagine what’ll come next: after the Republicans are gone as a national force, the Democrats will promptly split roughly along Hillary/Bernie lines into, by European measures, a conservative and a Social Democratic party and quickly become much easier to compare to much of the rest of the world that way.
But I’ve been predicting this for this entire millennium, and it still hasn’t happened, so…
Insane.
There are stil a meaningful number of Southern Democrats in Congress. What has disappeared are the white Southern Democrats; there are literally none left in the Deep South. What remain are African-American representatives from black-majority Congressional districts, and Hispanics from Texas. (Before computer-assisted gerrymandering became so efficient, a lot of the most cynical Republicans really liked the black-majority districts, because they were a good way of packing in lots of Democrats’ votes. If each black-majority district was 65% Democratic, it made it easier to construct a bunch of other 55%-Republican districts.)
Brett may be right for the Deep South strictu senso as to the House of Representatives (although Georgia has a white Democrat representing it in the Senate), but there are currently white Democrats in the House representing districts in e.g. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, which are historically Less Deep. Almost certainly Florida too although I can’t be bothered to check. And in the undeniably Very Deep Louisiana, the current governor is a white Democrat, although he is almost at the end of his second term and it is already known (due to the peculiarities of La. election procedure) that he will be replaced by a Republican. There’s a certain amount of hype surrounding this year’s white Democratic Party candidate for Governor of Mississippi (who is surnamed Presley and is a second cousin of the most famous bearer of that surname), but I would not personally bet money on him actually winning.
As a Northerner living in a Deep South state (voted for Breckenridge), I can tell you that the “Deep” part is very salient. If I drive just a hundred miles to North Carolina, the whole culture is notably different.
(And yes, I meant no white House Democrats from the Deep South. Editing on my phone, from a dark restaurant booth in Indiana, I moved the clarifying reference to Congressional districts too late into the comment.)
@Brett: Breckinridge carried some non-Deep states like Del. & Md. The good presidential-election benchmarks for pure Deepness are 1928 and 1968 (although S.C. was an unexpected outlier in the latter year, due to Strom Thurmond’s ability to finesse things).
In Australia, I don’t think simply comparing the referendum numbers with the previous election results helps gain much insight. The proposal was always going to cut across party lines (especially the traditional ones you see in the 2PP results). It also came out a long, originally bipartisan (until Dutton’s predecessors ignored it) process that seemed to involve more indigenous people and fewer typical politicians than usual. Framing it in terms of party politics was fine if you were opposing it, but not really in the spirit of supporting it.
Reducing it to maths, as you say, when you look at results district by district, this referendum looks more like the 1998 republic referendum (we haven’t had any in between), than the 2022 federal election. John Cowan mentioned some of the results in remote, largely Aboriginal booths, which are obviously of particular relevance to this proposal, but if you’re looking at the majority of the population, there’s an even bigger inner-cities/outer-suburbs-and-rural split in both referendum results than in the usual party politics.
J. W. mentioned the quirkiness of our instant runoff voting, but perhaps an even bigger quirk in terms of understanding the result is the fact that voting is compulsory. So whether the government and other supporters did enough to convince voters isn’t about getting people to vote, but convincing them away from the “no” that seems to be the default answer to any referendum question even without a no campaign putting as bluntly as “If you don’t know, vote no” (as they did this time). The default vote, the “elite”/”woke” attack, and “the proposal is too weak” arguments like Senator Thorpe’s, all worked against the yes case more than they work against the ALP in an election where we’re all effectively made to choose between them and the LNP coalition.
As for the attitude of Australia’s newer migrant communities, while I guess there’s some tension between the way concerns about minority cultures tend include Indigenous groups and the way something like this emphasises minority migrant cultures being in a similar position to the dominant culture with respect to the Indigenous peoples, I’m not sure that’s a huge factor. My local councillor from a Greek-Cypriot family made some noises like that, but he generally jumps on any “anti-woke” idea he can. My polling booth (in a suburb where 13% of people have two Australian-born parents) voted yes, and I get the impression quite a few people linked their country of origin’s experience of British colonisation with support for the Voice. I also saw a French migrant on social media appealling to the French approach as a reason to vote no…
It is telling that in order to use the Home Affairs website you have to agree to absolve the department of any responsibility for incorrect or out-of-date information on the website.
Similarly, the IRS provides advice on American tax law, but openly tells you that their advice is not authoritative.
after the Republicans are gone as a national force
The Republicans aren’t going anywhere as a national force. They will continue to remain in and out of power: it’s just that instead of making use of the fascists, which was still true as of the early Trump Administration, the fascists are now making use of them.
“I can tell you that the “Deep” part is very salient. If I drive just a hundred miles to North Carolina, the whole culture is notably different.”
Wasn’t North Carolina historically considered Deep South? The poet A.R. Ammons, who hailed from there, often described it as such and had an accent to match. Or Charles Robert Jenkins, the American defector to North Korea who was ultimately considered unsuitable for teaching English there due to his southern accent.
Has there been some shift in American culture where the state is now a grey area? Have local accents changed, too?
North Carolina could have been considered “Deep South” in the days when “the South” was seriously considered to extend all the up through Delaware. And, unlike Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee, all unquestionably “border states,” Breckenridge did (narrowly) win North Carolina in the1860 election. However, in contemporary usage (both regionally in the Southeast* and in national media), I think the Deep South is essentially never taken to include North Carolina. A quick glance at Wikipedia’s “Deep South” page shows a listing of multiple criteria according to which the term can be defined and lists some edge cases. (Is Florida included? Is Arkansas?) However, none if the criteria appear to include North Carolina.
* I actually wonder whether people in Georgia might be more willing to acknowledge North Carolina as at least potentially part of the Deep South than the folks here in South Carolina. South Carolina (“too large to be an insane asylum”) has, for a very long time, had an ill-concealed inferiority complex regarding its larger, richer, more populous northern neighbor. Vigorous denial that North Carolina could be part of the Deep South could be partly a manifestation of that.
Consider this sentence from the current online version of the Britannica: “On April 12, 1861, Confederate guns opened fire on the fort, and the Civil War began. Forced now to make a choice between the Union and the Confederacy, the states of the Upper South—Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee—voted to secede.” I think that you can make pretty good arguments for the Deepness of Arkansas, although it’s also the case that Arkansas has and had a lot of internal cultural variation by region.
That said, it may well be the case that the existence of white Democratic officeholders in current N.C. has more to do with the significant number of non-Southern whites who have moved there in recent-ish decades than with any residual Solid South partisanship among white voters whose families have been in N.C. for three-plus generations.
The Republicans aren’t going anywhere as a national force. They will continue to remain in and out of power
Goodness. It’s impressive that anyone who has lived through the last few decades can make such confident pronouncements about the future of American politics. Have you thought of becoming a Pundit™?
We may be in transition in U.S. history from the so-called “Sixth Party System” toward the “Seventh Party System.” But in each such System from the Third forward the two major parties have retained the same names even as their coalitions, geographical bases, and policy emphases shifted significantly. The future remains unwritten but there’s no obvious motivating reason why that would change any time soon.
While I’ve never been asked to vote in a referendum proposing to change Australia’s constitution, I am frequently asked to vote in referenda proposing changes to New York’s state constitution. With one subject-matter exception, my default approach is to vote no absent compelling reasons to vote yes. I just checked to see what referenda will be on the ballot next month and it’s …
1. Removal of Small City School Districts from Special Constitutional Debt Limitation; and
2. Extending Sewage Project Debt Exclusion from Debt Limit.
Still on presumptive “No” for both. Perhaps if I have a spare hour or two before election day I will investigate the merits and consider whether that presumption should be overcome.
The future remains unwritten but there’s no obvious motivating reason why that would change any time soon.
There was no obvious motivating reason why the previous president would even have a chance to run, let alone be elected. The entire course of US politics since the ’90s, with Republicans trying their best to prevent the country from paying its bills and to keep Congress from functioning at all, would have seemed like a crazy nightmare to anyone of either party in the ’70s and earlier. I repeat, it’s amazing to me that anyone who has lived through the last few decades can make such confident pronouncements about the future of American politics. The statement I was responding to was not about likelihood or motivating reasons, it was a flat “The Republicans aren’t going anywhere.”
In a reassuring confirmation that at least some things remain constant and predictable in American politics, my own current Congressman entered a guilty plea yesterday. So we’ve got that, at least.
AFAICT the main idea is that, under a FPTP system (such as the one in use in the USA), the parties are very strongly disincentivised to split, because any splits run the risk of losing even perceived-to-be-safe districts because the other side got more votes than either of the factions.
So the big parties stay un-split even as their underlying constituencies drift apart, and the only realistic options for a change in which parties rule are if either 1) one of the big parties collapses so completely that the other one can afford to split, or 2) the two big parties join together in a grand coalition and a new anti-coalition party forms from the leftovers.
…or I guess 3) if one of the big parties has such ridiculous internal disagreements that they would rather split than support the other faction. There is some evidence that the Republicans might be heading that way (and they already almost did in the Tea Party era), but the incentives against splitting are strong enough that they’re holding for now. This might change if, for whatever reason, Trump doesn’t win the primary…
I suppose there’s an extra option where a party closely aligned with a particular demographic has enough support locally to afford running their candidates against the big guys in the districts where that demographic has a plurality; this is SNP’s situation in the UK, and there are/were some local US examples but AFAIK most (all?) of them are not currently active.
the American defector to North Korea who was ultimately considered unsuitable for teaching English there due to his southern accent
A wise decision. Imagine if the North Koreans invaded and occupied New England and started ordering everyone about in southern-tinged English. They would be mocked and ridiculed, I tell you, laughed back to their homeland.
AFAICT the main idea is that, under a FPTP system (such as the one in use in the USA), the parties are very strongly disincentivised to split [etc. etc.]
Yes, of course I understand all the logical, reasonable reasons why things might continue as they are. It seems clear to me that logical, reasonable reasons no longer drive American politics. I would not be any more surprised if the GOP dissolved itself tomorrow than I was when it supported a coup attempt. I am sure that whatever weird thing happens, we will be told in hindsight that it was obvious and inevitable.
@January First-of-May: The was never any prospect of the Tea Party splitting the Republicans. The perception that there might have been was, however, the result of a very successful branding effort. The Tea Party managed to sell themselves in the media as a new, populist, grassroots phenomenon, when they were actually just the rightmost faction of the GOP that had been gaining ascendency within the party since the Gingrich “revolution.” They managed to astroturf out a few establishment Republicans in primaries, but there was never any realistic possibility in 2010 that dissatisfied teabaggers would vote Democratic or stay home if their preferred Republican candidates lost.
Goodness. It’s impressive that anyone who has lived through the last few decades can make such confident pronouncements about the future of American politics.
I said that in order to counter DM saying “after the Republicans are gone as a national force”, as if their collapse were a certainty or even a high probability.
my default approach is to vote no[,] absent compelling reasons to vote yes.
As another New Yorker, my default is the reverse.
but there was never any realistic possibility in 2010 that dissatisfied teabaggers would vote Democratic or stay home if their preferred Republican candidates lost
Likewise, I do not believe there is a realistic prospect that dissatisfied Republicans will do anything analogous in 2024.
Uh oh. Sounds like JC and I may cancel out each other’s votes on sewage project debt exclusion extension. Who will be the tie-breaker and which way will they go?
Politically? Yes, mostly due to the migration into the “Research Triangle” mentioned above.
The alleged George Santos?
The voters Trump gained in 2020 were mostly traditional non-voters. They hadn’t voted before because “both parties were the same” and/or “everything was rigged”; Trump showed them in 2016 that he could win anyway, and so they came out in 2020 by the millions. Yet, it didn’t matter; so there’s an incentive to stay home in 2024.
And then there’s demographics. The number of Republicans, dissatisfied or otherwise, has been shrinking in both relative and absolute terms – both nationwide and in Texas, which is going to have 40 electoral votes in 2024 unless the shaky census of 2020 somehow ends up being redone; Beto couldn’t tip it over, but maybe Colin Allred can.
The census cannot be redone.
Well, not “redone”, but one census every 10 years is a minimum, not a maximum; Congress could theoretically start a new one anytime.