Describing the eastern part of Canada, with the provinces of Québec and Ontario, is about the St Lawrence River, the region's natural backbone, and about the magnificent Niagara Falls, but also about the complexity of colonial history. Particularly here in the east, Canada is a country generated from the tenacious clash between the colonial ambitions of two European powers, France and Britain. Samuel de Champlain was first to plant the fleurs-de-lis flag on the shores of the St Lawrence River, on account of his king in Paris, in 1608. That coincided, 1607, with the first English settlement in the Americas, far more to the south, in Jamestown Virginia, the cradle of the British Thirteen Colonies, later the USA. Meanwhile, though, in the north French fur traders settled in increasing numbers and laid the base for 'la Nouvelle France' and a French-Acadian and French-speaking Québec, largely true to its historical origins until today. It did of course not last all that long for the British to challenge their next-to-eternal French rivals in the contest of colonial greed. By 1763, the end of the Seven Years War in Europe, spread across the Atlantic into the 'French and Indian War', the 'fleurs-de-lis' had been replaced by the Union Jack on all flagpoles in Québec. British control had also penetrated far inland, to Ontario and beyond. When George Washington and his American 'Founding Fathers' bitterly fought for independence from Britain, the northernmost British colonies of Québec and 'Upper Canada' did not go along in the revolt: too thinly populated, too prosperous to revolt, too severely submitted to British authority? Who knows. But fact is that Québec and 'Upper Canada' remained British, even later, when freshly independent America militarily challenged the intact British colonies in the war of 1812-1814. Canada eventually did become independent from Britain too, although nominally still governed in the royal name of the UK until now. The country has also expanded enormously since, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But the Canadian East is and remains very much impregnated by the scent of the fleurs-de-lis! And whereas 'Upper Canada', nowadays known as Ontario, is clearly Anglo-Saxon in its DNA, Québec mainly speaks French in the bistros and in the boutiques, organises society rather according to Napoleonic than Common Law, and breathes France all over the place, from the cobblestone streets of 'le vieux Montréal' to the coastal villages on the shores of the wide oceanbound Rivière Saint-Laurent. Welcome to whirl around in the melting pot of both the past and today, Québec and Ontario.

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* partly scanned slides