Next CMA to reach 1 million

[koops65]

Originally Posted by lio45

60m SLR is a serious forecast "made by competent scientists"? I'm curious to see your sources...

I didn't mean to get into a climate discussion. My original point was that IF the global weather gets worse in the future, that could cause an increase in immigration to Canada...

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Acajack

As Beedok mentioned, education levels are increasing and in francophone Africa that means people are learning in French.

There are millions of people in Congo or Senegal who only speak Lingala or Wolof but those aren't candidates for immigration to Canada. There are already plenty of educated people who can speak French there and anecdotally speaking, I've never met anyone here from a francophone African country who even *struggled* with French. They've all had high levels of fluency.

It even seems like most of them have transitioned to French as their main family language, as it's extremely rare to hear people speaking African languages in Quebec. If I hear a black family speaking to each other in anything other than French (or English) it's almost always Haitian Creole - which is easily recognizable.

I agree it's rare, but I have as one of my commercial tenants in Sherbrooke a Congolese businessman who runs a store; I believe he thinks he speaks good French, but my manager and myself have a reeeeeeally hard time understanding him. And he speaks to his family in an African language... and to plenty of friends as well.

Every time I enter that store, there's one or two African customers in there, and they're all speaking African. That's in downtown Sherbrooke.....

I haven't seen him for 2+ months now, so I'm expecting that his French might have at least slightly improved by the time I come back to Quebec. He gets Québécois customers once in a while, so it would be in his own interest! (And mine, as well - the better he does, the more likely he is to afford rent.)

[lio45]

Originally Posted by koops65

I didn't mean to get into a climate discussion. My original point was that IF the global weather gets worse in the future, that could cause an increase in immigration to Canada...

And my only point was that you guys don't need to liquidate all your downtown Montreal properties ASAP due to the fact some totally nutty forecasts (+60m!!!) say it's all going to be under water, i.e. worthless, eventually.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by lio45

I agree it's rare, but I have as one of my commercial tenants in Sherbrooke a Congolese businessman who runs a store; I believe he thinks he speaks good French, but my manager and myself have a reeeeeeally hard time understanding him. And he speaks to his family in an African language... and to plenty of friends as well.

Every time I enter that store, there's one or two African customers in there, and they're all speaking African. That's in downtown Sherbrooke.....

I haven't seen him for 2+ months now, so I'm expecting that his French might have at least slightly improved by the time I come back to Quebec. He gets Québécois customers once in a while, so it would be in his own interest! (And mine, as well - the better he does, the more likely he is to afford rent.)

Is it a question of accent, though? People often have thick accents but the words and grammar they use are fine...

Another interesting thing about the Congolese is that they often use Belgian terms like septante (soixante-dix) or nonante (quatre-vingt-dix) because the French language arrived with the Belgians in their country, and it's stuck. The first time I heard what I thought were Belgian (and to some degree Swiss) *only* expressions from people obviously born in Africa, I thought that was pretty funny.

These things tend to naturally phase themselves out after people have been living here for a while.

[Acajack]

Interesting...

The mayor of Kinshasa is a "bourgmestre". The usual French word for mayor is "maire".

In Belgium it is also a "bourgmestre" which comes from the Flemish "burgmeester". Also close to the German "burgermeister".

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Another interesting thing about the Congolese is that they often use Belgian terms like septante (soixante-dix) or nonante (quatre-vingt-dix) because the French language arrived with the Belgians in their country, and it's stuck.

This is a bit of a tangent but I thought this article was interesting (linguistique): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_(nombre)

I've never heard the likes of huitante or octante before, but supposedly they were sometimes used by Acadians. Some Acadians were Swiss descendants. Most Quebec settlers came from Northern France, the land of quatre-vingts.

A lot of English speakers mention how silly these French words are, but then again there is a famous Abraham Lincoln speech that contains "four-score and seven years ago..."

[kwoldtimer]

[QUOTE=someone123;7804402]This is a bit of a tangent but I thought this article was interesting (linguistique): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_(nombre)

I've never heard the likes of huitante or octante before, but supposedly they were sometimes used by Acadians. Some Acadians were Swiss descendants. Most Quebec settlers came from Northern France, the land of quatre-vingts.

A lot of English speakers mention how silly these French words are, but then again there is a famous Abraham Lincoln speech that contains "four-score and seven years ago..."[/QUOTE]

Well it's two words and no hyphen, but you find that silly? To me it's elegant. I was quoted in the press once, years ago, using the word "score" (I could just as easily said "about twenty", but how mundane would that have been?). A person who heard me told me they had to go look it up!

Edit: Way off topic. Again.

[wave46]

Originally Posted by someone123

This is a bit of a tangent but I thought this article was interesting (linguistique): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_(nombre)

I've never heard the likes of huitante or octante before, but supposedly they were sometimes used by Acadians. Some Acadians were Swiss descendants. Most Quebec settlers came from Northern France, the land of quatre-vingts.

A lot of English speakers mention how silly these French words are, but then again there is a famous Abraham Lincoln speech that contains "four-score and seven years ago..."

IMO English speakers don't have much of a defense as to criticizing another language. About the most redeeming value of the English language is that it is probably the closest thing to a global language that exists in the world today.

Otherwise, it's an unholy mess of bits from other European languages (Latin, French, etc.) without much of a sense of standardization - funky conjugation, weird pluralization and words that sound nothing like how they are spelled.

I'm fortunate in the sense that I am a native English speaker and I feel a great sympathy for those who have to learn it as a second language. What a gawdawful learning experience it must be. Truly English is the duck-billed platypus of languages.

French, on the other hand, seemed fairly standardized with fewer quirks when I was learning it in school.

/tangent

[wave46]

Back to the original topic, I could see the cities around the GTA (Kitchener-Waterloo and Oshawa) hitting 1 million mark after the usual suspects (Winnipeg, Quebec City and Hamilton) do.

Aside from a dark horse city (Abbotsford?) I can't see any other places in Canada having such an increase. The growth in the past few decades has been concentrated in the world's largest cities and I don't see that changing in the future. So, the best chance for a city to increase to 1 million+ population would be for it to have ample space to grow and be close to a major metropolitan area.

As for large scale immigration to Canada in the future, I can't envision this country taking in more as a percentage of population than it already does. Forcing extra immigration above what a society will reasonably accept always leads to political blowback. Given the logistical difficulties of getting to Canada from most of the world, a mass refugee inflow is unlikely. We might nominally bring a few in (and then proceed to pat ourselves on the back), but the population of Canada is unlikely to repeat the massive growth it has had in the past, making the formation of new 1 million+ population areas relatively unlikely.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

Essentially, of the top 10 cities in the 1921 census, 9 are the largest metros today. They traded places, and no city is in the same spot that it was then (except maybe Ottawa), but they're all there, even Calgary.

This is quite a bit different than the US, where people would have thought you were crazy in 1920 if you said that Phoenix, Arizona or Miami, Florida would be among the largest metros, while places like St. Louis or Cleveland would be third tier cities.

I think there is definitely some truth to this. Canadian cities have been relatively stable and there is no real analog to the Sun Belt here. The normal reason given for the explosion of growth in the Sun Belt is that air conditioning made the southern areas more desirable. It is hard to see a similar potential in any region in Canada. Another difference is that there were earlier population pressures in areas like California.

One problem with looking at top 10 lists in Canada vs. the US is that the Canadian list is much more comprehensive. We only have 33 metropolitan areas today, and that goes all the way down to places with an urban core of 50,000 people.

For what it's worth, I agree that we probably won't see a smaller Canadian city turn into a large metropolitan area over the next 50 years. However, I don't think it's that far-fetched to imagine a smaller city hitting 1 million due to some combination of changing factors (mainly rising costs in some cities and immigration; we are currently in the middle of a shift in immigration from the largest Canadian cities to smaller cities spread around the country). It's worth pointing out that 1 million may not qualify as a large metropolitan area in Canada in 2067. Windsor or London hitting 1 million people in 50 years is not a Phoenix 1950-2000 type growth scenario.

As an aside, I think there is or was a window of opportunity for the better-connected parts of the Maritimes to turn into something like what North Carolina is in the US. They've largely failed to capitalize on their advantages though, through a series of bad economic development decisions and bad PR. They could have a much better reputation as a place to live and establish a business. If they manage to achieve that I think the region could have some of the faster-growing cities in Canada.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by someone123

This is a bit of a tangent but I thought this article was interesting (linguistique): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_(nombre)

I've never heard the likes of huitante or octante before, but supposedly they were sometimes used by Acadians. Some Acadians were Swiss descendants. Most Quebec settlers came from Northern France, the land of quatre-vingts.

A lot of English speakers mention how silly these French words are, but then again there is a famous Abraham Lincoln speech that contains "four-score and seven years ago..."

I don't know if it's octante or huitante but I know that the septante, octante-huitante and nonante thing only exists in the Pubnico region of SW Nova Scotia. On the other side of Yarmouth in Baie Ste-Marie they don't say that.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by wave46

IMO English speakers don't have much of a defense as to criticizing another language. About the most redeeming value of the English language is that it is probably the closest thing to a global language that exists in the world today.

Otherwise, it's an unholy mess of bits from other European languages (Latin, French, etc.) without much of a sense of standardization - funky conjugation, weird pluralization and words that sound nothing like how they are spelled.

I'm fortunate in the sense that I am a native English speaker and I feel a great sympathy for those who have to learn it as a second language. What a gawdawful learning experience it must be. Truly English is the duck-billed platypus of languages.

French, on the other hand, seemed fairly standardized with fewer quirks when I was learning it in school.

/tangent

I thought you were Franco-Ontarian.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by wave46

IMO English speakers don't have much of a defense as to criticizing another language. About the most redeeming value of the English language is that it is probably the closest thing to a global language that exists in the world today.

Otherwise, it's an unholy mess of bits from other European languages (Latin, French, etc.) without much of a sense of standardization - funky conjugation, weird pluralization and words that sound nothing like how they are spelled.

I'm fortunate in the sense that I am a native English speaker and I feel a great sympathy for those who have to learn it as a second language. What a gawdawful learning experience it must be. Truly English is the duck-billed platypus of languages.

French, on the other hand, seemed fairly standardized with fewer quirks when I was learning it in school.

/tangent

Couldn't disagree more! I always found myself fortunate to have French as my native language, given that English is easier to pick up.

French is highly irregular, probably as bad as English or worse, it's rife with exceptions, plus Anglos have - on top of everything else they already have to learn - to permanently get the correct gender for every single word in their heads (many can't manage that - from many personal observations).

[lio45]

BTW, when I was in Germany it seemed nearly everyone was decent at ESL - for them, it's a cakewalk... no declination anymore, no genders anymore. Even German is merely moderately difficult as far as languages go... English, however, I'd be hard-pressed to find an easier language to learn.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I don't know if it's octante or huitante but I know that the septante, octante-huitante and nonante thing only exists in the Pubnico region of SW Nova Scotia. On the other side of Yarmouth in Baie Ste-Marie they don't say that.

Interesting coincidence, a few days ago I was having this exact conversation with a bunch of Belgian friends (some of them who are living here permanently, others who vacation here a couple times a year) ... everyone in the room agreed that their system was more logical than ours, and everyone in the room also agreed that the Swiss' was even more logical ("quatre-vingt" is nonsense too...) Including myself of course

[wave46]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I thought you were Franco-Ontarian.

Nope, Anglo-Ontarian. Have spent most of my life in Northeastern and Eastern Ontario.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by lio45

Couldn't disagree more! I always found myself fortunate to have French as my native language, given that English is easier to pick up.

It's so complicated and dependent on baked-in knowledge on the part of the learners that it's hard to imagine an objective way to determine which language is "harder". How would you measure success in learning a language? Different languages are better or worse for expressing different concepts, so I'm not even sure how you could come up with a fair test.

Grammarians like to come up with a bunch of post hoc rules and those maybe seem objective but they aren't either. We don't fully understand how human language works, either in terms of structure or acquisition.

A lot of universities have a language requirement and a lot of English speakers will take Spanish because they find it easier than French. Some of them have argued with me that Spanish is an inherently easier language to learn and has simpler pronunciation than French. But really it is just closer to English in some ways. I grew up with English and French, and I try to speak Spanish when I go to Latin America. It seems easy to pick up bits and pieces, I'm sure much easier than, say, Mandarin, but it's much harder for me than French. If I grew up speaking Mandarin I'd find Cantonese easier than English, etc.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by someone123

It's so complicated and dependent on baked-in knowledge on the part of the learners that it's hard to imagine an objective way to determine which language is "harder". How would you measure success in learning a language? Different languages are better or worse for expressing different concepts, so I'm not even sure how you could come up with a fair test.

Grammarians like to come up with a bunch of post hoc rules and those maybe seem objective but they aren't either. We don't fully understand how human language works, either in terms of structure or acquisition.

A lot of universities have a language requirement and a lot of English speakers will take Spanish because they find it easier than French. Some of them have argued with me that Spanish is an inherently easier language to learn and has simpler pronunciation than French. But really it is just closer to English in some ways. I grew up with English and French, and I try to speak Spanish when I go to Latin America. It seems easy to pick up bits and pieces, I'm sure much easier than, say, Mandarin, but it's much harder for me than French.

There are some cases that are basically unarguable, for example that English is easier than German, and that Italian is easier than French.

Spanish is unarguably easier than French. I have witnessed firsthand over the course of more than a decade how difficult it is for Latinos in Sherbrooke to become good at French, while on the other hand Francophones who regularly go south for sun become decently good very quickly. Collecting that sort of data should eventually tell you something, when you're starting to reach a statistically significant sample's mass; if nearly all Germans (average IQ, 100) manage to easily speak good English, while very few Brits (average IQ, 100) ever master acceptable German, even controlling for other factors (German not being as useful as English, etc.) you could probably reach a valid-ish conclusion on difficulty...

[lio45]

Also, irregularity versus regularity, the complexity or simplicity of conjugations and tenses, and the amount of exceptions, are all things that can be measured.

If a sound is always pronounced the same, that also should score the language "points" for being easy.

For example, bille, ville, fille, mille, how can you logically justify to one of your learning Latino tenants that the latter part of the sound is not always pronounced the same? It's unfortunate, but it's got to be learned, and that's it. (For the record: that's "marble", "city", "girl/daughter", and "one thousand".)

[mousquet]

I say Quebec City will hit the million before any other, because we retarded Gauls still speaking French are now ready to move way forward, while I see none other in the world to be so.
For example, we're now psychologically conditioned for environmentally friendly development that will make billions of billions of your dollars in the future. We have no easy oil nor anything stinky like that in our subsoil, which certainly helps. Granted. And shale gas is still forbidden here, cause it's ruining North America's soil.

Most of us can speak some English of sorts anyhow now. We're pretty familiar with your business principles. It's not like the economy would be strict science like math, huh. We got it now. It's only something human relying on subjective, impressionistic so-called trust and confidence, like taxes as lower as possible to be sexy to the rich. Okay, fine. Let us play just a little bit of that easy game for while. It could be funny.

We still have those intrinsic values in the language anyway. That's like much of the economy, somewhat irrational but still should make a difference in the end.