Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Not sure about the demographics argument. Not too many big cities on this land mass where "centuries of North American-style immigration" have produced a city with a majority population descended from French colonists who migrated in the first part of the 1600s.
It's true that Montreal's immigration patterns in the 1800s and 1900s were more in line with what you saw elsewhere on the eastern half of the continent, but contemporary immigration is again making the city's demographics diverge from what we're seeing in other big cities in Canada and the U.S.
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What I meant to say is that Quebec is a new world society, where its demographics reflect colonization. As you point out, the majority of French Quebeckers can trace their origins to a combination of original French colonists, Aboriginal ancestry and some early 19th century European immigration, notably Irish. No other part of the Americas has this combination, but most other parts of the Americas - at least the ones that got settled very early on - had this sort of practice.
In that sense, Quebec - and Montreal especially, given that it continued to be a huge magnet for immigration after the rest of Quebec ceased to be - is really an "American" (i.e. of the Americas) society and not European at all.