![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
You might have noticed that Lynn loves claiming to speak for all Canadians when she insists that archaic regionalisms such as 'garburator', 'bargoon' and 'biffy' are commonplace turns of Canadian English. Nothing could be further from the truth; what Lynn is is a spokeswoman for a certain subculture indigenous to Western Canada where those terms were in circulation before American television excised them from the language.
Now, I know what you're thinking; you're thinking "But I thought that Canada was divided on linguistic lines" but it's not that simple. You see, Canada's Western provinces are stocked with people who tend towards a social and economic conservatism that's more or less at odds with the more liberal inclination traditionally associated with Montreal and Toronto. In fact, a lot of the values that the Pattersons hold dear are distorted versions of traditional Western thinking; John's need to be 'practical' as opposed to allowing 'theorizing' to dominate his mind is a self-serving distortion of the positive virtue we call common sense thinking.
This, of course, means that John comes across as an example of a negative stereotype as well as a reality I despise: the man from the Prairies who thinks he's got all the answers despite knowing none of the questions. Our current Prime Minister started out looking a lot like that when he made an assholish remark about how we in Atlantic Canada have a culture of defeat; this occasioned angry op-ed pieces about his being a God-damned know-it-all from Alberta who thinks he knows how to live life in this part of the world better than we do. Harper seems to have realized that Canada does not stop as soon as you get any further East than the Saint Lawrence Seaway; John and Elly and above all Lynn haven't quite made that connection yet. They don't mean anything hurtful, it's just that as their kind of Westerner, they assume that there are only six provinces.
Now, I know what you're thinking; you're thinking "But I thought that Canada was divided on linguistic lines" but it's not that simple. You see, Canada's Western provinces are stocked with people who tend towards a social and economic conservatism that's more or less at odds with the more liberal inclination traditionally associated with Montreal and Toronto. In fact, a lot of the values that the Pattersons hold dear are distorted versions of traditional Western thinking; John's need to be 'practical' as opposed to allowing 'theorizing' to dominate his mind is a self-serving distortion of the positive virtue we call common sense thinking.
This, of course, means that John comes across as an example of a negative stereotype as well as a reality I despise: the man from the Prairies who thinks he's got all the answers despite knowing none of the questions. Our current Prime Minister started out looking a lot like that when he made an assholish remark about how we in Atlantic Canada have a culture of defeat; this occasioned angry op-ed pieces about his being a God-damned know-it-all from Alberta who thinks he knows how to live life in this part of the world better than we do. Harper seems to have realized that Canada does not stop as soon as you get any further East than the Saint Lawrence Seaway; John and Elly and above all Lynn haven't quite made that connection yet. They don't mean anything hurtful, it's just that as their kind of Westerner, they assume that there are only six provinces.
