At the risk of lowering everyone's opinion of me a tad, I have to admit the development makes perfect sense to me. You see, my boyfriend's building has a lot of residents who are relatively recent immigrants from Russia. Most of these have a standard of behaviour that is, by our standards, boorish--very pushy, demanding, and rude and eager to use the "no speak English" defence when called on it. (For instance, house rules are that residents must reserve the outdoor grills in advance, but Russians will regularly occupy them without doing this and brush you off when you complain about them taking your grill.)

So we frequently have cause to complain about "the Russians" there. At one point, I mentioned to him that the last thing we needed was for some track-suited flathead to overhear one of these gripes sometime and decided to teach us a lesson and suggested we adopt a euphemism. We opted for "Tartars" for our cryptoslur, since it both suggested barbarism and was very unlikely to be understood. I can equally well see choosing "Canadians" for its sheer humourous inappropriateness, but it didn't occur to us.