when america purchased louisiana, the french in the area really assimilated remarkably well. i don't know how much emigration occurred, but i know the french are still there - i meet some of them in detroit.

on the other hand, the british conquered the french settlements in canada, which at the time included a chunk of the american upper midwest, with the final battle happening in 1763. i suspect the difference between conquest and purchase is the reason our french remain french - just as your spanish remain spanish.

so, the proper way to convert what american textbooks say about hispanics is to replace them with references to the french. and, the french are indeed the second largest ethnic group in canada, by a good distance. while there was some early spanish exploration up the coast, the british and spanish did not come into anything resembling a conflict in the areas we now call canada. besides the conquered french settlements, the only other european power we found ourselves in competition with was the russians - a competition that of course continues to this day over the arctic. well, i guess we've had some skirmishes with the danes over greenland, too.

but, we didn't have this tapestry of european colonies. delaware was a swedish colony. new york was a dutch colony. pennsylvania was a german colony. there's nothing like that, here - it's just the british and the french, with the russians to the north and the far west. it's true that we settled large amounts of northern and eastern europeans on the plains, but that was directed - there weren't ukrainian or finish or norwegian colonies, just large amounts of migration.

the scots and welsh came with the brits, as elsewhere in the empire. and we took in a lot of irish in the nineteenth century, as the americans did, too - as well as italians in the early 20th. but, up until 1970, we really didn't have the kind of diversity that the united states had, with all of these conquered territories being organized into semi-autonomous states. we had the british and the french. and the natives...

so, there's the comparison between the french in canada and the hispanics in the united states. there is also a comparison between blacks in the united states and indigenous groups in canada, although it is much weaker. and, where immigration is shared (irish, italians) you can draw those comparisons. beyond that, much of the demographic analysis really breaks down as incoherent.

our largest visible minority group is "south asians". american demographics don't generally - from what i've seen - separate between south and east and west asians, but just put "asian" on the survey and leave it at that, which is kind of useless if you want any meaningful analysis. if you add it up, canada is nearly 15% "asian" - meaning asians are numerically as important in canada as blacks are in the united states, although they don't tend to vote as a block. in fact, south asians tend to vote liberal while east asians tend to vote conservative, which i might argue ought to be the other way around, but is based on weird historicisms that are hard to explain in this space. it's not hard to understand why chinese immigrants may have an attachment to free market economics, but they tend to be less social conservative; on the other hand, south asian immigrants tend to be very traditional and kind of ideal conservative voters, but often end up voting liberal (or ndp) due to the left being a little more inviting. i would hazard a guess that this might flip over in the second or third generation. it might have already happened in toronto.

the point is that, behind the french, which occupy the role in canada that hispanics do in the united states, the next largest voting bloc is recent immigrants from asia - mostly middle or upper class, highly educated and generally relatively pro-market, a stark contrast with the bloc of black voters in the united states.

you'd think the liberals would know this, right? it's increasingly unclear.

i'm going to hope that it's just one prominent advisor that can get axed, and not systemic. but, it might be.