Montreal Mayor Coderre Rewrites History

Watching Montreal's mayor wax poetic over the new Montreal flag that now includes a reference to the native contribution to the establishment and development of Montreal should have citizens asking if the good mayor is completely off his rocker.

But before we get into it, let's start with his latest fantasy, the purported attempt by Montreal to lure Amazon to open it's second major office and distribution centre in Montreal, a possibility about as likely as Donald Trump opening a second White House in Montreal.
Other fantasies include the Mayor's assertion that he would impose a tax on  Netflix, something completely out of his purview.

I'm not sure if Denis Coderre is playing with a full deck or is dastardly clever in telling Montrealers that there is a chance Amazon will choose Quebec for a distribution centre when just about every national and international retailer has decided to service its Quebec retail locations from nearby Ontario.
Taxes, language and labour laws, red tape, higher salaries and militant unionism have retailers running for the hills, or in this case, the Ontario border and with good reason. What sane company would make the decision to put its distribution centre, the heart of company operations, in such an inhospitable environment.

Instead of attracting distribution and manufacturing centres, Montreal and Quebec are bleeding jobs not only to Mexico but even to the USA, as in the case of Electrolux which moved it's factory to Memphis, Tennessee, taking over a thousand jobs with them. Old Dutch closed its ageing potato chip plant in Lachine and will service Quebec through its New Brunswick plant which was, unlike the Quebec facility, recently modernized.

Walmart has long serviced it's Quebec stores from Cornwall and has acquired a second distribution centre in that city, the former Target distribution centre which also serviced its Quebec stores from there during its short run in Quebec.
Canadian Tire distributes into Quebec from its facility in Brampton Ontario, while Home Depot services Quebec through its Ontario distribution centre in Vaughn, Ontario.
Loblaws is also rumoured to be in the process of moving the Montreal distribution centre it inherited from Provigo to Cornwall as well.
Hudson's Bay has built a national state of the art ultra-modern robotized e-commerce distribution centre in Scarborough, Ontario to fulfil orders across Canada, including Quebec.
Lowe's hardware stores which recently took over the Quebec-based Rona hardware chain made the political promise to keep the Rona distribution centre in Boucherville, but like Air Canada's "Montreal' head office, it will probably take a few years for everything to migrate over to Ontario, in this case, to the state-of-the-art facility in Milton, Ontario.

At any rate, our clueless idiot mayor made another empty grand gesture in adding a Native symbol to the City of Montreal flag.

"Indigenous Peoples have made important contributions to Montréal’s history, development, economy and culture."

There are many historical myths, like the untrue fact that Nero fiddled while Rome burned or that Marie Antoinette uttered that famous first troll "let them eat cake!"
Isaac Newton was never hit in the head by a falling apple and Napoleon wasn't particularly short.
So too is the myth that Indians contributed significantly or in fact positively to the founding or development of Ville Marie which developed into the City of Montreal.
Sometimes, history is a bitch.

Throughout the latter half of the 17th century, the Iroquois tribes and their English allies fought a bloody and vicious campaign against the French and their allies, the Hurons and Algonquians.
In fact, the symbol chosen to be on the Montreal flag is the Iroquoian white pine which makes absolutely no sense because it was the Iroquois who were mortal enemies of the French and the colony that developed into Montreal. Supported by the English, they savagely attacked the fledgeling French colony for more than fifty years trying to wrest away control of the fur trade.
Perhaps the most important attack occurred in 1689 when Mohawks (part of the Iroquois Confederacy) attacked the 375 person colony of Lachine killing many.

"The Lachine massacre, part of the Beaver Wars, occurred when 1,500 Mohawk warriors attacked by surprise the small, 375-inhabitant, settlement of Lachine, New France, at the lower end of Montreal Island on the morning of August 5, 1689. The attack was precipitated by growing Iroquois dissatisfaction with the increased French incursions into their territory, and was encouraged by the settlers of New England as a way to leverage power against New France during King William's War."

"Surviving prisoners of the Lachine massacre reported that 48 of their colleagues were tortured, burned and eaten shortly after being taken captive." Wikipedia

Now I'm not choosing sides, it was a mercantile war fought over fur and both sides were particularly cruel with both sides killing civilians, including women and children, as was the bloody norm in the conduct of war at that time.
But to infer that natives had a lot of positive influence on the development of Montreal is pure unadulterated fantasy.
The natives who survive today around Montreal in Chateauguay and Two Mountains are the Mohawks, sworn historical enemies of the French and that by the way, is why they speak English and still remain hostile to the French majority.

The native presence in Montreal and its ancestral predecessor was always negligible and remains so today. Less than half of one percent of Montreal is native and this number represents a historical high.
Those surviving Mohawks who live on reservations in Oka and Chateauguay are the descendants of those natives who fought tooth and nail against New France.
I am in no way knocking the Natives, they and the white allies fought a protracted and bloody war over fur, that's all.

There's no doubt that the Natives were unfortunate victims of the colonizers and contact with the European settlers, be they English, French or Dutch was disastrous.
Not only were their numbers decimated by over 60% by disease imported from Europe, the juggernaut of European expansion left Natives on the losing end of every single treaty that they were coerced to accept. In fact, part of the Great Peace Treaty of Montreal in 1701 was the acceptance by the Natives of Jesuit priests and their forced conversion.
Nope, the treatment of Natives over the centuries hasn't been kind, and time hasn't been generous to them. Today natives find themselves embattled and embittered, stuck in poverty and indolence. Representing 4% of the Canadian population, natives represent 25% of the federal prison population. Of Canada's female federal prison population, 40% are native.
It's a sad state of affairs and one can understand the guilt most Canadians feel over a most unfortunate situation, but the answer is not in the Liberal program of throwing resources down the money pit of the reservation system. There needs to be a fresh approach, but that is for another post.

Notwithstanding, including an aboriginal symbol on the flag of Montreal out of guilt, creating the myth that Natives made a significant contribution to the city is pure fantasy that belittles the contributions of the real founding elements, the French, English, Irish and Scots.

But hey, our mayor already is in fantasy land.