Before I set foot in Montreal, I read about it in Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horsemen, which was set in the city’s Jewish community in the late 1960s. Recently, I read a harrowing, touching and funny account of growing up destitute in South central Montreal, called Mélasse de Fantaisie by Francis Ouellette.
Montrealers, like Parisians, cherish their books, food, sports and the arts. Nobody in Montreal or Paris stoops to using the typical Toronto cliché World Class, because they are secure and do not need to brag.
The first time I visited Montreal, it was with a motley crew of guys from school in the muggy middle of summer. Four of us stayed in one hotel room, downtown, to save money. I couldn’t yet speak French, Tabernac !
A highlight of the trip was watching Rolf, a friend of a friend, trying too hard to meet girls. Unfamiliar with the honour code that puts sales clerks and waitresses off limits, Rolf decided that any female employee who was polite to him in a store was a potential romantic conquest. He went into shops and spent huge amounts on whatever clothes Véronique or Sophie were pushing. Rolf ended up with a surplus of shirts, a shortage of money and zero dates.
Québec truly is a distinct society. Former Prime Minister Mulroney allegedly received $300K of Airbus bribe cash in Montreal hotel rooms and used the Costanza defense:
Had I known that this kind of thing was frowned upon, I can assure you…
Years later, the Liberal Party of Canada’s teeming anthill of parasites demonstrated during the Sponsorship Scandal that the preferred bribe payment in Montreal was still a paper bag stuffed with unmarked bills. Other methods of exchange are considered culturally insensitive. This approach might have helped Rolf, had he not exhausted his financial resources in the boutiques.
As an introvert, I have always avoided crowds and loud noise, but somehow, in Montreal those things didn’t bother me as much. I enjoyed summer weekends there in the early 1990s, especially during the comedy and jazz festivals. Great food, music and laughter in two languages.
During my working career, after learning French, I went to Montreal several times a year to see clients. We would have six or more meetings per day before heading to Toronto, New York or Boston. A now defunct restaurant called Cavalli (“horses” in Italian) was always popular with clients before the dash to the airport.
Cavalli, which specialized in expensive Italian food, was allegedly run by certain family-oriented businessmen from the Mediterranean region. This place did not hire its staff based on their hospitality industry credentials. Their dress code for servers and hostesses could be summarized as “Little black dress”, with the emphasis on “Little”. Despite booming demand, Cavalli closed years ago. A friend said this had something to with the restaurant compromising a bus zone with its valet parking.
A decade ago, the Charbonneau Commission noted that much Quebec construction was channeled through certain family oriented companies, who massively overcharged the state for their services. Nothing personal. It’s just business.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/charbonneau-corruption-inquiry-findings-released-1.3331577
Thanks to possibly dodgy, family-oriented concrete, chunks of Montreal’s 1976 Olympic Stadium eventually fell off, but today downtown Montreal is full of gleaming towers that attest, among other things, to massive government spending in the business capital of La Belle Province.
It was in Montreal’s Dorval airport, before Justin Trudeau was elected to office in 2015, that I saw the Trudeau family up close. Margaret had her arm in a sling, for some reason. I was close enough to punch Justin, but refrained, because that is not the way I was raised.
Another Montreal luminary is former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, with whom I almost collided by the elevators of a downtown office tower. I always admired Chrétien for giving a protester who accosted him a “Shawinigan Handshake”: Le P’tit gars de Shawinigan, who is actually quite tall, grabbed the offender by the throat and moved him aside before his security team could react.
More than a decade after my last business trip to Montreal, I went back this month. A friend warned me that Montreal, like Calgary, now has a thoroughly leftist mayor who has waged war on cars. This means less parking available and roads narrowed by bike lanes, in a city with many months of heavy, wet snow. I certainly noticed the volume and high speed of Montreal cyclistes, who I worried about hitting every time my rental car turned a corner.
Many of Montreal’s cars are electric, because the Québec government subsidized them until recently. Québec also has rent controls, which is counterproductive by discouraging construction. That cannot have been popular with the well dressed families who control the business.
Despite its quirks, Montreal is still a great city to visit. The weather in September is warm without being muggy, tourists are fewer than in Summer and the many picturesque neighbourhoods look fantastic. Having spent much of my working career at meetings in the more anglo downtown, I deliberately stayed in the more francophone side of the city, East of Boulevard Saint Laurent.
I walked up to the Plateau area and passed several beautiful, green parks and pedestrian streets on my way to a huge, French language bookstore, packed with novels that are on my reading list.
I do not choose to read Colleen Hoover in English, let alone in French, but I do like to read francophone authors in French. While I can order French books online or in e book format, the selection here was huge, so I bought several paperbacks, from France and Québec. Over the course of three days, I also picked up a few jazz CDs, some salmon poké, du café mocha et quelques pains au chocolat . I met old friends downtown, in Westmount and in the nearby ski town of Bromont.
One does not need to speak French to enjoy Montreal, which is a bilingual city, but it enriches the experience to try speaking French and les Montréalais appreciate the effort. Everyone should visit Montreal and experience its charm for themselves.
I always like going to Montreal. Coincidentally, I also briefly worked on a high floor of FCP in Toronto, during the mid 80s in my first job after business school.
Interesting observations about Montreal. It has changed much since Mordecai Richler was alive, one of my favourite and much-missed writers. Still pick up Barneys Version now and again, to re-read it. The place went downhill after he passed away, I'm sure of it. Recall driving along Rue St Denis in a Lincoln Town Car in the mid-80's with the Montreal street life trying to climb in through the open rear windows......that , the Festival Du'homard and the FI grand prix with the superb Gilles Villeneuve in June - great days. This country has changed, and not for the better since the Chretien years. He was the only Liberal PM I grudgingly admired. At least he seemed to genuinely work for the interests of the people - or at least, gave that impression.