It becoming socially acceptable is a really nebulous bar - if I found myself among folks who found it acceptable I wouldn’t use it as I consider it unacceptable at a personal level - but if it’s usage completely changed in the year 2270 then sure I might use it.
The n-word and r-word will never be socially acceptable in our lifetimes and anyone who says differently is just an asshole trying to cloak their behavior. I also don’t really see a need to put effort into reclaiming either term…
In general, I think it’s a bad thing that we have words that have become unacceptable to use and I wish those words had never been so associated with hate - but they were do we are where we are.
The usual path is through permanent residency. If you reside within Canada for about three years on a PR card you can apply for citizenship.
You can get PR via a spouse or skilled/point based application. One hack to gain a lot of points is to practice your French, if you can score even moderate fluency in French and apply to reside within Quebec things get significantly easier.
Another large entry opportunity is asylum seekers and LGBT+ folks can have a far easier time requesting entry though that is country of origin based and while the US has been considered as being declared dangerous for LGBT+ people it is not currently so as Canada considers interior migration (i.e. moving from Louisiana to Vermont) to be a reasonable path to safety. That may change depending on US federal laws though.
My magic eightball says, “Signs point to yes” - we’re in a global state where every winter there are pretty significant health risks to flying and outbreaks… if you don’t know someone with long COVID then you’re extremely lucky, it’s really degenerative in some people I love.
The difference is that if something like those first two COVID winters happened again it’s unlikely we’d see any sort of mass order (and government mandate to allow remote work) in America like we saw before. But up here in Vancouver most jobs that can be done remotely have now shifted to that and people avoid going to crowded places when an outbreak is happening. You’ll often just see Skytrain extremely vacant if people have heard a flu is going around.
Countries outside the US have invested independently in better staffed research teams to fight annual outbreaks and sane countries have rolling mailing lists (I got an invitation two weeks ago for my next free shot!) about when to top up your flu/covid/rsv vaccine. If the US wants to be a breeding ground for outbreaks we can’t stop them, but we’re trying to insulate Canada as well as possible and working with the EU to do so.
Flinn from the Tainted Sword - it’s an obscure old dragon lance novel about an old knight fallen into obscurity and a determined squire that still echoes the knight’s old glories. Flinn is deeply flawed but goes through extremely realistic growth during the story. If you have the opportunity to read it I’d highly recommend it.
I agree that the N-word is far worse - I didn’t mean to equate them but to use it as a point of comparison. The really fucking hateful and widespread usages of the n-word mostly date back to the 70s - it’s now used almost exclusively by badge wearing racists… so it has had about fifty years of pop culture non-hateful uses but is still clearly unacceptable.
The R-word was seeing widespread usage a mere twenty years ago - it’s still part of the active memory of millennials and older.
An interesting comparison might be gypsy (I type it out only because I can’t think of a clear way to abbreviate it) which is seen as an unacceptable slur (especially in the verb form) which had fallen out of social use in the 50s - even that word (though it is less openly hateful) is still pretty unacceptable.
It’s a similar story for other less common racial slurs - once a word becomes such a hateful slur it seems like the most common social response is to just abandon it with reclamation being a rarity and confined to the in group in every case I can think of (the n-word and the f-word both have gained some usage within their communities but it isn’t universal… I have an extremely negative memory of the f-word which makes me uncomfortable even when people I trust use it).