Bye Bye, Canada

Francisco Toro is a Venezuelan journalist, political scientist and blogger. Covering Venezuela as a freelance foreign correspondent from 1999 to 2003, he reported for the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Financial Times. Since 2002, he runs Caracas Chronicles, an English-language blog on all things Venezuelan. He currently writes for the Canadian edition of The Huffington Post.

The latest edition of Radio-Canada's yearly comedy special, Bye Bye 2011, inspired him a post in his New York Times blog:Living in Québec, it's often hard to shake the feeling that Canada is "somewhere else" — a different country with a different culture, a different language and different priorities. Québec has its own television personalities, its own pop icons, its own celebrity chefs — household names in the province all blissfully unknown in the rest of Canada. As a newcomer here, this strikes me as marvelous: while the rest of English-speaking North America marches inexorably toward cultural homogeneity, Québec is keeping alive a vibrant cultural life of its own.Click here to read the whole story and read American reactions to it.