Carney is the most popular politician Canada has had in decades. The opposition party is starting to fall apart (two members defected, which means Carney's party is one seat away from a majority).

Whole thing sounds like an attempt to manufacture an 'Obama beige suit' moment.

Due to my somewhat international career, I had to learn to code-switch between American and British English. My default is American but can do British as needed. Spelling, vocabulary, dialect to some extent, etc.

For a global audience, I find American is the best default. Nonetheless, actual Americans barely notice if you use British English-isms in American contexts. They may notice but no one cares. Everyone knows what you mean. Using British dialect may confuse them occasionally but even then no one cares. Canadians should do what is natural for Canadians.

It boggles my mind that someone from a Commonwealth country using British spelling would even warrant a news article. Why is anyone talking about this?

Some parts of Canada inexplicably used "gaol" for "jail" until fairly recently. For example, the "Headingley Gaol" near Winnipeg. The jail has been renamed to Headingley Correctional Center, but the road to it is still Gaol Road, preserving the linguistic curiosity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headingley_Correctional_Instit... [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gaol+Rd,+Headingley,+MB,+C...

I use American spellings wherever they make sense and don't gratuitously mess with the Latin roots.

Such as "behavior", "neighbor".

But: "centre" and not "center" (it's from Latin "centrum": the R goes after the T, and there is no need whatsoever to revise that.)

The shift to Z in the -ise Latin-derived suffix is not just in American English. European languages are split about it. For instance, let's look at "to synthesize"

German: synthetisieren

French: synthétiser

Dutch: syntetisere

But:

Polish: syntetyzować

Hungarian: szintetizálni

Italian: sintetizzare

Romanian: sintetiza

I think the sound is Z in all of them? It's partly a question of whether the orthography of the language uses S for a Z sound or not. If they don't have that feature in their orthography then they don't have the choice of retaining an S spelling with a Z sound.

Not collectively waste time on the useless debates on how to spell things.

I was a fun bit of trolling that most people didn't notice, could still stay on topic ... but man it triggered some folks.

This is more manufactured outrage. I wish the media was not incentivized to amplify nonsense all the time.

Canada was supposed to have British Culture, French Cuisine and American Technology. Instead we ended with British Cuisine, American Culture and French Technology.

A bit touchy, aren't we?

There are much better things to be proud about than using "z" instead of "s" in a few words.

But... this is just the next chapter in Canadian media (ha! it mostly belongs to the southern dictatorship) having a go at non-Trumpish politicians.

Life continues.

This is a nothing burger.

Reading this, I wonder how this became an issue to become big enough to have an article written about it.

Then hearing the justifications about why it might be, in turn, pitting a few characters in text on the canadianness of a politician, or not.

If you can imagine a word processor somewhere writing this, maybe it didn't have it's language set to English (Canada)?

Some folks here have said sometimes it can feel like there might be folks trying to grasp at straws.

Whos face is on the Canadian 20 dollar note?

Put another way, neither Carney nor Freeland has a post-high school degree of any kind from a Canadian school.

British spelling, USA spelling... just pick one and move on.

Ideally all English-speaking countries would go for something more phonetic, but economic power and inertia trumps simplicity.