French Canada

[Diogeneticist]

A very small thing, a French colonial nation in the Canada area (at least in my latest game) gets the name French Canada. Should this not be replaced with Quebec? I just very much prefer seeing more unique names for each colonial region. Perhaps just giving each of the five major colonising nations (UK, Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal) unique names for each region would be super cool.

 

[Y. D. Dandy]

The thing is, the French just called their colony "Canada," in the same way as the Portuguese just called theirs "Brasil."

Quebec became the name for Lower Canada after the formation of the Canadian Confederation. Thus Quebecois-descended population in New England, who started settling here in the 1840s, generally uses "French Canadian" for an English autonym. (Acadians might use the term also also, but the ones I've met usually call themselves "Acadians," and there's far fewer of them than Quebecois.)

 

[AmbroStoics]

What I thought, is that it should be called New France. I always thought French Canada was just meant to distinguish it from British Canada (which was Newfoundland, New Brunswick, etc).

 

[Y. D. Dandy]

Good point, you're right. The colony was New France. Canada was the name given to the colony by the British, based on the St. Lawrence Iroquoian settlement on the site of modern Quebec.

After the Revolution, loyalists fled to modern Ontario, and the British started distinguishing Upper an Lower Canada, which were English and French speaking. But Newfoundland and New Brunswick were not part of Upper Canada. New Brunswick--which is bilingual--became part of the Canadian confederation, along with Upper Canada, Lower Canada, and Nova Scotia. Newfoundland resisted joining Canada until after WWII, when the British basically told them: "join Canada or go it alone, because you're much too old to still be a colony."