When I was in high school, we (teachers included) would laugh at the arrogance of southern Ontarians calling where they lived "Central Canada." These are words that would never pass the lips of someone from BC, and my time in Nova Scotia also suggests that the place people there refer to as "Upper Canada" would never be called "central" anything.
Nobody is asking anybody to be politically correct. Political correctness is a term for what used to be called lip service. The words themselves are only the sentiment made manifest, and it is the sentiment that offends people. Southern Ontario is many things, but is not central Canada in any way of imagining the term. Why not call the region "Southern Ontario?" That still shows all the privilege of having a region named after part of a province, without implying that the rest of the country revolves around this self-perceived fulcrum.
Should we not be calling the regions of Canada "the North", "BC" (or "the West," aka the Pacific Cordillera), "the Prairies," "the Canadian Shield," "Southern Ontario" ("the Industrial Heartland," or "Upper Canada"), "Québec," "the Maritimes," and "Newfoundland Labrador" (or, the latter two combined into "Atlantic Canada")? Though the Upper Canadians of the Southern Ontario industrial heartland bear no malice when they say "Central Canada," how could they not know it would be taken that way?
The term should disappear, along with its implications. We in BC welcome people from all over the country to live here, but please leave the eastern centrism behind.
Cross Section
- Mad Hack
- Coquitlam (Vancouver), BC, Canada
- I was born in Vancouver and have spent my life in the rain on different sides of the Pacific and on the Westside of the Atlantic. At various stages in my life I have been a teacher, a scholar, a writer, an editor, a narrator, an announcer, a printer, a musician, a waiter, a bartender and a monorail system controller. I hold a master's degree in English Literature from Dalhousie University in Halifax, and spent some years ruminating over poetics and politics in the PhD programme of the English department at Simon Fraser University. I have always enjoyed the combination of speed and control available in gravity sports, and in energy transfer sports like disc golf and snooker.I am now in the fifteenth year of a love affair with a mountain and negotiate it regularly with golf discs. My musical attentions have been long focussed on releasing the "Party Clearers" box set (or, barring that, one cd for limited distribution), and I devoted ten years of my life to creating and maintaining the good standing of Aka Toe Jam in Hiroshima, Japan, and to developing my own musical signature and stage persona.
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