Racial ways of thinking by Canadian public figures

I was struck recently by the similarities between utterances of Andre Boisclair, leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois, and Carol Off, a host of the noted CBC radio news show As It Happens.

During the recent Quebec election, Boisclair talked about the competition from Asia and the Asian students he saw while he himself studied at Harvard. The translated quote from the National Post, March 15, 2007, was,

"The reality is these countries are not just working to create jobs in sweatshops,” he said Wednesday to students in Trois Rivières. "When I was in Boston, where I spent a year, I was surprised to see that on campus about one-third of the students doing their bachelor's degrees had slanting eyes.

"These are not people going to work in sweatshops. They are people who will later become engineers and managers who create richness. There is a ferocious competition happening in the world today. What I would like to do it equip you and equip Quebec to face [the challenge]."

The sad thing is not the "slanting eyes" language, which apparently is not a big deal in French, but the fact that probably a majority of those undergraduates he was talking about were Americans (and Canadians!). He simply assumed that they were not.

CBC broadcaster and veteran journalist Carol Off on As It Happens, April 10, while talking to a student in Georgia organizing a first black/white integrated high school prom, said, "There's more than just black students and white students. There's other nationalities at this school are there not?". (taken from CBC online audio archives)