The Two Montreals

Charter of Ville de Montréal

CHAPTER I

CONSTITUTION OF THE MUNICIPALITY
1. A city is hereby constituted under the name “Ville de Montréal”.

Constitution.

Montréal is a French-speaking city.

Language.

Montréal is the metropolis of Québec and one of its key actors as regards to economic development.

Metropolis.

There it is, written for all to see, the declaration by the city itself that Montreal is French, a declaration which was untrue when it was written and which remains an outlandish lie today.

The uncomfortable reality for those who propagate this myth is that Montreal was conceived and built by the Scots and the English, with the Irish contributing most of the heavy lifting. Strolling down Ste. Catherine Street, it's no accident that almost all the cross streets honour those Anglos who built our metropolis.
Bishop, Crescent, Mountain, Drummond, Stanley, Peel, Metcalfe, Mansfield, McGill, University, Union, Phillips, Aylmer and City Councillors.
Fourteen streets in a row, representing the heart and soul of downtown Montreal and every one of them named for our historical Montreal Anglophone community. How come?

The great lie that Montreal is a French city rests on faulty statistics and decidedly wishful thinking, propagated by language fantasists living in unreality.

Pumped up artificially by coercive language laws meant to hide Montreal's true English face, separatists cannot stomach that the English language and its culture endures and thrives.

As these language militants they themselves admit (when they have the crying towel out), Montreal is made up by about 50% of its citizens whose mother tongue is French, with the balance split almost perfectly between English native speakers and ethnics speaking a variety of languages.
As for cultural assimilation, the 'ethnics' split their loyalty (much to the chagrin of French language militants) about 50/50 between the English community and the French community. The real language demographic has the city about ⅔ French and about ⅓ English.
This is the reality of modern Montreal.

But consider this;
Montreal is really two cities living side by side. There isn't a Berlin wall bisecting the two, but the division is as real as can be.

Running north/south is the boundary street of St Lawrence Boulevard, splitting the city rather neatly into two  halves. On the east side, you'd be hard pressed to find an anglophone. It's a part of the city that few tourists visit, because quite frankly, there isn't much to see or do over there. As I said, the population is almost completely francophone (except for the Italians in St. Leonard and Anjou.) Here francophones live with those ethnics who have assimilated into the francophone side of the language equation, the Arabs from the Mahgreb, the creole speaking Haitians and various French African immigrants, as well as a small peppering of South Americans who seem as a community to have chosen French.

Olympic Stadium-A mediocre symbol defining its neighbourhood

I won't spend time running down the east, suffice to say it is the denizen of the Mario Beaulieus and Louis  Prefontaines. It is the Plateau Mont-Royal and Amir Khadir. It's one recognizable symbol, the monstrous Olympic stadium, is a testament to hubris and incompetence and everything else that's bad about Montreal.

The western part of the Island is a completely different story. It's the Montreal that owns the downtown core, great universities and colleges, Mont Royal Park and quite frankly, anything of value that is Montreal.
It is as different from East Montreal as one can imagine.

Here the Anglos exist in numbers equal to the French speakers and it's where the ethnics are aligned with the English. The Indians, Tamils,  Pakistanis, the Jamaicans and others from the islands. From the downtown core out to the western tip of the island, its a whole other ballgame.

This is the Montreal that the world sees and understands, a cosmopolitan, bilingual and exciting urban scene that is by any standard, world class.

Our Montreal - the west

This Montreal is unaffected by dimwit language purists, it is a place of innovation and experimenters, both English French and ethnic. It is vibrant and exciting and most Canadians will admit that its the most exciting place in the country.

One Saturday night as the hockey game, at the then Molson Centre let out, the crowds surged out of the building onto the surrounding streets as per usual.
At the corner of Ste. Catherine and Metcalfe a left-turning cab cut me off as I was crossing the street and immediately got snared in a jam. As the cab sat in the middle of the intersection, the back window rolled down to reveal two fans bedecked in Maple Leafs jerseys, obviously in town for the hockey game. The one sitting by the open window looked out and sheepishly apologized for the driver's rudeness.
It bowled me over.
"Wha??..." I retorted, "Listen, friend. This is Montreal. You don't apologize!"

This Montreal has its very own rules. Pedestrians jaywalk and cars run through red lights. Crosswalks exist, but like the batters box in major league baseball which are duly painted before each game, only to be erased by the umpires, don't count on anyone respecting them. Montreal must be the only place on Earth that has signs under the traffic lights, reminding drivers to wait for the 'green.'

There's an edginess to this Montreal that is hard to describe. This Montreal, contrary to what we are told, may be the most bilingual place on earth, where locals flick between French and English depending on whom they are addressing. It isn't only a place where people can speak two languages, it is a city that actually operates in two languages. Bar conversations are bilingual, even among friends. The intermarriage (or shacking up) rate is high.
No Anglo would ever use the word 'corner store' when 'depanner' is so much easier and it's where francophones describe those whom they dislike as 'loosers' (notice the anglicized and francized spellings of both words.)

If you want perfection, go to Toronto, a city described to me once, quite appropriately by a Montreal expat as the "Kraft Dinner City" (for its originality.)
Almost everything great in Canada originated in Montreal. No doubt Toronto can do it bigger and better and I'm sure that one day they'll have a BIXI system that will outstrip ours. By then we'll be on to something else. We are the innovators.
Before you detractors out there say it, I'll admit, we can't run a hospital decently and have a dysfunctional government to boot.
Montreal isn't easy.
Detractors will remind us about  potholes, riots, the disorganization and the tension.
But the Chinese have a saying- 'In danger there is opportunity'. In Montreal, we can say that "In chaos there is creativity."
Montreal endures as the greatest place in Canada for creativity and innovation and in two languages to boot. Hip and cutting edge.

This is the Montreal that is Arcade Fire.

When French language militants say the the music group isn't representative of Montreal, they are talking about the Montreal on the other side of St. Lawrence Boulevard. In that respect I agree with them.

But Arcade Fire is exactly what our Montreal is.

When language hardliners cross the border from the East into downtown, they are outraged. While forced artificially to adopt a French face because of Bill 101, the reality that English dominates becomes self-evident rather quickly. For French language hardliners its a hard pill to swallow.

The hotels, the restaurants, the hospitals, the schools, the bars, the stores, the airport.
English, English, English ......Too bad for French language fantasists...

Next time you hear a language militant complain that Arcade Fire doesn't represent the true face of Montreal, point them to the East, kick'em in the arse and tell them to get out of our Montreal...