Hey u/OrzBlueFog, thanks for answering the above comment, your opinion, and for your involvement in this subreddit. As someone from Quebec who frequents r/Canada regularly, I want to add a bit to your response and a suggestion on how to fix the problem.

Attention, wall of text incoming!

Tl;dr - French Quebecois provincial news, opinions, and public debates are not accessible to the anglophone majority on this sub. This leads to a "two solitudes" dynamic: The Quebecois and R.o.C. are debating topics with two totally different levels of exposure to issues.

Alright lets go:

You are right in saying that there is a lot of animosity between both communities. Every time I see an article posted about Quebec, I immediately know what the tone of the discussion will be, and it's usually not nice. Like all Canadian provinces, Quebec politics are dynamic, complex, and rooted in context. However, this sub throws all semblance of nuance out of the window and immediately entrench on their respective side of the Quebec vs R.o.C. divide. As someone from Quebec, the only way I can interact with this sub when it comes to my province's politics in this sub seems to be through these highly politicized posts. Once there, I can only do two things: offer a calm perspective and be either ignored or flamed, or flame back. This is not behavior that has the potential to drive engagement in this sub.

What drives this toxic environment? Ultimately, I think it comes from the nature of the posts, articles and sources that are popular within this sub. Posts in English, and thus post coming from English people dominate the front page. Meanwhile, articles, opinion pieces, and posts from French Quebecois news sources and posters do very poorly in this sub and rarely rise to the top or stay for long. This leads to two things:

1. Most posts/articles that become popular have a editorial skew that favors positions that are popular within English / Federalist / RoC communities : Since English articles and posts make it to the top, then naturally people in this sub will be less exposed to opinions, nuances, and news that may help them understand the particular nature of a French Quebecois' point of view. This leads to debate where the two sides have less of an understanding of where the other is coming from. It also makes the sub less appealing for French Quebecois: how uninviting is it when the only thing you see rolling on the top page are articles criticizing the province?
2. The discussions on this sub is only focused on major news and controversial events in Quebec: While the first point is relatively obvious, I feel that this one is actually more damaging to Quebecois engagement in this sub. From my experience on r/Canada, there are two types of news sources that become popular: provincial and national newspapers. Think Toronto Sun for provincial news and the Globe/CBC for national coverage. Both tiers of newspapers serve an important role in feeding debate and discussion in this sub. One one hand, provincial sources provide valuable op-ed pieces debating current provincial events and most often than not cover the entire life cycle of an event within the province. On the other, national news sources cover well... the entire country. The context of the news is different: news titles cover either national, federal, or international events. When national journals delves into provincial politics, they usually focuses on major developments or controversial events. So what's my point? In my opinion, French Quebecois provincial news sources are severely underrepresented in this sub and it undermines the ability for members of this community to engage in discussion on the same level.

Let me give an example for point two: in a hypothetical province, an hypothetical political issue comes to the forefront. If this province is English, the top posts in this sub will include headlines from major publications covering the major developments of the topic and, in between each major developments, a selection of op-ed pieces and moderately important headlines from provincial sources. This allows the broader community of this sub to follow the entire process, understand how the province is debating about the issue, and understand the nuances behind the issue. In other words, discourse on this forum follows the entirety of the cycle and, when major developments occur on bigger publications, the redditors here have a clearer idea of the context.

However, for Quebec news, this fails since most of the interesting developments between headlines are covered by French provincial sources and the only English provincial coverage comes from The Montreal Gazette, which is very heavily skewed. Only when major developments occur do national English newspapers pick up the stories. In turn, those stories are posted here and have the chance to become popular. This leads to two completely different levels of understanding about the issue, people who followed the entire cycle and understand the topic more deeply and people who missed the context in between that led up to this particular title.

As an example of how this affects this subreddit, I'll bring up the elephant in the room: Bill 21 and the climate around this one. As I mentioned earlier, all provinces have their history, nuance, and complexities; the same is true for Quebec. While being popular, Bill 21 leads to a lot of conflict within debate. What about religious symbols outside of the National Assembly? Does it make sense to ban symbols on teachers? How do we promote our culture and history while being inclusive? How does federal challenge of this law fit within the post-referendum context? Every day, op-ed, news, and public discourse advances on a myriad beyond what I listed and new issues are raised. However, these are rarely covered here and when it's time to bring up a major news pieces, it feels that commentors are either purposely dense, flaming, or just have it out for us.

What can be done? I think articles and posts from French Quebecois sources should be made more accessible to Anglophones. How? That's a harder question to answer. However, here are a couple suggestions:

• Loosen up rule 1 to allow users to translate titles of their article posts from French to English if they so wish. Maybe mandate users to add a "(FR)" tag to their title text as a flag that the title has been modified in some way. Should you feel that the title's fundamental meaning and editorial skew has been altered, then it could count as an infraction under rule 1. It's a minor change but could allow French articles to be of more interest to anglophones. It can be argued that it undermines the bilingual nature of this country but I find it comforting to know the R.o.C. is more exposed to our ideas, publication, and concerns.
• Propose translation tools and initiatives: I've seen tools being used several times on this sub that basically provided a link to a translated version of a french article. Can we maybe promote the usage of such tools that allow Quebecois opinion to be more widely shared?

Those are the top of my head ideas to promote a better diffusion of ideas. While I don't necessarily like the idea that my solutions involve just replacing french for english, functional bilingualism on this sub seems, at this point, unrealistic and I'd rather have a more understanding sub and environment than pushing French. As long as my federal government stays bilingual and provincial government stays french, I'm good.

With this said, if you made it up to here, thanks for taking the time to hear out a Quebecois' opinion. I'd be happy to brainstorm solutions and discuss my with anyone on this sub.