Talk:French Canadians

Corrected numerous mistakes based on a fallacious interpretation of historical data. French Canadians and Acadians are separated peoples. The first Canadians were the Canadiens who renamed themselves Canadiens-français and later again québécois during the Quiet Revolution. The Acadians became inhabitants of Canada in 1867 and therefore cannot be considered Canadians before that time. -- Mathieugp

Quote from the article: "One of the motivations for the union was to limit French Canadian political power." What kind of POV unfounded rubbish is this? Angelique 23:33, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Do you prefer "One of the primary motivations for the union was the complete assimilation of French Canadians for their own good."? I thought this would pass as non-neutral, although that is what the Durham report clearly states as an objective. If you want to quote the Durham report, you are free to do it, but I garantee you that someone will eventually try to tone it down with something like "limiting French Canadian political power". -- Mathieugp 03:52, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

For me the flags all show up in a single right-aligned vertical column. I'm not an expert in wikipedia editing, but is there anyway they could be organized into multiple columns dependent on the width of the browser? I could table them into a fixed number of columns, but it would be nice if the number of columns could be window-size-dependent. Willhsmit

Semantics

Recently, someone moved this article form French-Canadian to French Canadian. This action resurrected the semantic problem that we need to fix with regards to Francophone Canadians. Here is what we need to distinguish:

Francophone Canadians: Canadian citizens who speak French. This denomination includes French Canadians (2), Acadians, Metis, or immigrants from any part of the world. This definition excludes all people who are not Canadian citizens. In French, this would be Canadiens francophone.

French Canadians (1): Canadian citizens who have some French ancestry. This denomination can include actual French (from France), French Canadians (2), Acadians, Metis, Cajuns etc. This denomination excludes Canadian citizens who may be Francophone, but are not of French descent. In French, this would be Franco-Canadien or Canadiens d'ascendance française.

French Canadians (2): People who are French Canadian by birth or adoption. This denomination includes individuals of French Canadian descent (on either side of their famility tree), or Acadians, Irish, Scots, English etc. who were brought up as French Canadians or accepted as such by their community. Such communities existed in French Canada (Quebec) and then from there some migrated to all parts of North America. This denomination excludes French, Acadians, Cajuns, Metis etc. and other distinct Francophone cultural groups. In French, this would be Canadiens from the time of New France up to the Union Act, then later on Canadiens francais when the Canadiens became a minority ethnic group inside a federal Canada with different borders. After the 1960s, the French Canadians (2) of the province of Quebec started to refer to themselves as Québécois (citizens of Quebec).

Considering the current contents of this article, I think we should move this article from the ambiguous French Canadian to Francophone Canadian. What do you all think? -- Mathieugp 00:41, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)