ON A chilly spring evening about 40 French immigrants gathered in the ornate bar of L’Union Française, a social club in downtown Montreal, for what amounted to a group-therapy session. Their dreams of starting a new life in Canada were not working out the way they had imagined. Employers did not welcome them, locals were at once friendly and aloof, the winters were awful. Cécile Lazartigues-Chartier, the group leader, counselled immersion in the culture, networking and winter sports. “Remember,” she advised, “you are immigrants.”

That is not as obvious as it sounds. France ceded most of its North American possessions, including Quebec, to the British in 1763. But French people who settle in the French-speaking province regard it as a rough outpost of empire, or so some Quebeckers grumble. “We are cultured and educated, and they don’t see that,” complains one. Fred Fresh, a French singer who moved to Montreal’s trendy Le Plateau district in 2011, listed his neighbours’ grievances in a song, Y’a trop de Français sur le Plateau (There are too many French in Le Plateau): pushing up rents, smoking smelly cigarettes and seducing women. “My neighbourhood feels like it’s occupied by all these snobs,” he sings, channelling what he takes to be the attitude of native-born Quebeckers.

Despite such laments, more French folk are coming. Jobs are scarce and politics is fraught in France; Quebec promises opportunity and stability. In 2015 France sent more migrants than any other country; in 2016 only Syrian refugees outnumbered them. Nearly 70,000 French citizens are registered at the consulate in Montreal, double the number of a decade ago.

Surprisingly, some stumble on the language. Quebeckers have retained more ancient French, and adopted more English sentence structure, than have their European cousins. The local expression “chauffer le char” (“to drive the car”) means “heat up the chariot” to the French.

A bigger shock is the Canadians’ promiscuous use of “tu”, the familiar form of “you”, which French people reserve for intimates (vous is for acquaintances and people on higher rungs of hierarchy). French people who stick to vous appear haughty to Quebeckers. The Europeans are in turn confused by tutoyer-ing Canadians, who seem to be signalling openness to a friendship or business relationship, which then often does not happen. “Some people never get used to it,” says Jonathan Chodjaï, a French consultant who has lived in Montreal for 18 years.

While European business relationships start cold and then warm up, in Quebec the sequence is reversed, he says. He tells clients to think of the French as coconuts, with hard shells and soft insides, and Quebeckers as soft peaches with hard cores.

Some French migrants seek to synthesise the two cultures. Jérôme Ferrer, a restaurateur, has added foie gras, lobster and mushroom cream sauce to poutine, a local confection of chips, cheese curds and gravy. Mamie Clafoutis, a chain of bakeries owned by two Frenchmen, marks the start of the maple-tree tapping season in early spring by baking cake in a syrup tin.

It takes time for newcomers to accept that they have swapped not just countries but cultures. “If you go to Australia or the States, you know it’s a different culture,” said a recent immigrant in the therapy group. It took him a while to recognise that Quebeckers are North Americans, not Europeans. Once French people understand that, things get easier, says Marie-Claude Ducas, a Montrealer who has worked with them in the media industry, a profession that attracts many. “They can be very good employees—the ones who realise they are immigrants,” she says.