Quebec and Arkansas

Excerpt from a message to a friend I made during a visit to Arkansas in June 2008, who asked me how different my part of Canada (ie, Quebec) and Arkansas were.

Note that this was written with the parts of Arkansas around the university town of Fayetteville in mind, as it was the part of Arkansas I visited.

That much different? Not nearly as much as my fellow Canadians would like to think, for certain. What shocked me about Arkansas wasn't so much the differences (which I mostly expected), it was the similarities in landscape, in what the city actually looked like, and in mentality.

Which isn't to say there aren't differences.

The place religion occupies is probably the biggest; in Arkansas it is something people group around, organize, and identify to. You won't see that in Quebec; here, the Church is the place to have baptism, (if you have one) weddings (if you want one), and funerals in. That's not because Quebecers aren't religious; just that Quebec, due to its history, doesn't trust organized churches.

Other than that…peaceful depend of what you mean by peaceful. We get massive protests, we get riots (two in 2008!), but on things like murder, we are very, very quiet – one of Quebec's two big metro areas (Quebec City) actually had a murder-free year in 2007, and the other (Montreal) is headed toward under 30 murders in 2008. I don't know what Fayetteville is like there, so I can't compare.

That's for the differences. For everything else…the climate appears to be similar (it gets warm a little faster in Fayetteville, and stays warm a little longer), the landscapes are hauntingly familiar (I could actually stare out of my hotel room window and wonder whether I was actually in the US or visiting some regions of Quebec), and the mentalities…

Well, I could say people are the same the world over, but that's not true. Quebec and Ontario have very different mentalities. Quebec and what I encountered in Arkansas, on the other hand was shockingly similar: very hospitable and live-and-let-live (at least in person, although both regions have their blind spots), where family means a lot and try to remain close-knit, and both very deeply attached to their history, their traditions and their customs; there's a reason Quebec's motto means "I remember"!

Maybe it's because Quebec remained rural, agricultural, much longer than anyone else in the North East (and thus till has deep rural roots). Maybe it's because of the landscapes – both Quebec and Arkansas appears to have first formed in the lowlands of great rivers, before spreading into the neighboring mountain and hill regions. I don't know. All I can say is, Quebec and Arkansas were a lot more similar than I thought they'd be.

(Oh, and of course my region of Canada speaks French)