Tabarnus

I’m done pretending. I’m done smiling politely while some Quebecker opens their mouth and sprays out that nasally, swallowed, half-English, half-gibberish noise they insist on calling “français.” It is not French.

Real French is the language of France, Belgium, Switzerland, West Africa, the Caribbean It is mutually intelligible. You can go from Paris to Dakar to Brussels and still understand the conversation. You cannot do that with Quebec. Put a Parisian, a Lyonnais, a Congolese, or a Haitian in a room with a pure-laine Québécois talking at full speed and watch the blank stares. The other French speakers will look at each other like someone just started speaking Elvish.

The accent alone i

Let’s get this straight once and for all so the soft-spoken “maître chez nous” crowd can finally put the flags away and get on with paying their hydro bills like the rest of us.

Quebec has never, at any point in its existence, been a sovereign country. Not once. Not for a single day. New France was a French colonial project run out of Versailles. Then it was conquered. Then it was Lower Canada. Then it was a province in a British dominion. Then it was a province in Canada. That is the entire political history. There is no secret independent Quebec hiding in the archives that the rest of the country “stole.” There is only a continuous line of colonial administration that eventually got folde

Soggy fries drowning in beige gravy with squeaky, rubbery cheese curds that taste like nothing and feel like chewing on wet erasers. It’s a texture nightmare. Everything that should be crispy is soft and greasy. Everything that should have flavor is bland and heavy.

I tried it multiple times thinking maybe I was missing something. Nope. Still gross. Still looks and smells like something that should be served in a prison.

I was born in war-torn Croatia in the 1990s. My family got out and immigrated to Quebec in the late 90s. I have spent my entire life, every school year, every job, every social circle attempt, in this province. I am not a tourist, not a temporary worker, not someone who “doesn’t get it.” I was raised here. And I can say with complete certainty that Quebecers are the most uncultured, incurious, and proudly ignorant people I have ever had to deal with on a daily basis.

They simply do not know anything. The most basic things. Their entire conversational universe is hockey, how much money or stuff they have or want, endless complaining about the “French language” and the evil anglos, getting wa