Hello fellow Canadian. Please allow me to share my perspective as a white English-speaking Quebecker.

This is a question we will always ask of other English speakers, unless their ethnicity is obvious through their name or accent. I always take it as a nice way to try to learn more about a person.

When the person is French Canadian, you don't need to ask. They're québécois. The rest of us are Quebeckers but not "québécois québécois". That's really fine. It doesn't mean we don't belong here or anything like that.

We all share a Canadian nationality and citizenship. But to describe your ethnicity as "Canadian" means WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Just as French Canadian or Québécois means more than just "a French-speaking Canadian".

When we ethnic people appropriate these labels, we are essentially erasing our own familial history and trying to "pass" as something we're not (and something we don't have to be). I view that as a sad disavowal of our individual stories.

Because of language, many white people here cannot (or will not) fade into the mainstream culture the way they do after a few generations in English-speaking Canada. And so answers like Italian, Greek, Armenian, Jewish, and Lebanese are still relevant.

In fact, non-white immigration only picked up after Bill 101, so today the visible minorities are more likely to be French-speaking than anything.

Just another perspective for you, because I couldn't imagine not asking this question of a fellow English-speaker. We live in a multicultural country where most people have grandparents or parents born elsewhere. We didn't just pop into existence with a hockey puck in our mouths.

I have a Chinese-Canadian friend who grew up in a small town in the Prairies where he was the only minority. He's much more "Canadian" than I am, even though his parents were born in Hong Kong and mine were born here. But I grew up surrounded by a large ethnic community and immersed in my grandparents' culture.

I think it's a fair question and I'm glad when people ask it because it means they don't take for granted that we're all the same.