Why I left Montreal – part 3

Hi everyone:

This is the second sequel (part 3) to a blog entry that I started earlier today about why I chose to leave my childhood home of Montreal, Quebec during the 1970’s. But since all this was a bit too much to do in one entry, I decided to break this up into multiple ones – three to be exact. The first part was designed to set the stage and offer an introduction. Just as with part two, what follows here is based on a discussion thread earlier in November 2011 on the McGill University Alumni Group on LinkedIn. I hope you enjoy it – feel free to share these blog entries with others as appropriate. So much for an introduction, let’s carry on.

Growing up in Montreal during the 1960’s and 1970’s, it was all about language, culture and politics. Those and related issues dominated every part of Quebec society and there was no getting away from it. As noted back in part 2 of this series, all this was a major reason why I left after graduating from McGill with my BA in 1979. I just found it very draining that people kept raising these issues over and over and over again. I rarely had any problems dealing with it all. That may have been because I grew up in St. Lambert – a place where both English and French were used freely and everyone in our neighbourhood was bilingual. To this day wherever I go in Montreal I always speak French when given the choice and this has always been appreciated.

Let me offer a few comments about Quebec language and cultural issues – while fully realizing that some of you who share my heritage might take offence with these remarks or have a different interpretation. I have always found it sad to hear some people, especially the Parti Quebecois, the Societe St. Jean Baptiste and others sympathetic to them who always complain about how we need to protect the French language and culture because if we don’t it will disappear. Or that through the centuries it was always the English that kept the French in check and made them feel like foreigners in their own land. To hear them tell it, all this goes back to 1759 and a certain battle that led to the fall of New France. To me, it’s xenophobia or paranoia on steroids, with little evidence to back their claims.

As many Canadian historians will tell you, the battle of the Plains of Abraham just outside the walls of Quebec City in September 1759 and its subsequent events may have actually saved the French language and culture. And based on my knowledge of the events, I definitely agree. After all, France didn’t care about their colony. I think it was Voltaire who called New France “a few acres of snow”. The French crown and aristocracy of the day felt the same. When the Seven Years War ended in 1763, the French ceded NF to the British. They could have kept it, but when offered the choice France opted to keep Guadeloupe in the West Indies. The British, on the other hand, passed laws such as the Quebec Act of 1774 that protected the French language, the role of the Roman Catholic church and the rule of civil law that we now know as the Napoleonic Code. Even now, legal codes are different in Quebec from the rest of Canada.

When I was growing up, I kept hearing over and over from francophones that the English had been their colonial masters and had subjugated their people for centuries. Indeed, a popular book of the 1960’s was called “Les Negres Blancs d’Amerique”. Or as it was known in its English translation: “The White Negroes of America”. Written by Pierre Vallieres, a Quebecois nationalist, he argued this exact subject. The title came from his theory that the Quebecois had been subjugated and discriminated against in the same way as the black people of the American South (who we now refer to as “African-Americans”). And while I don’t know for sure, it’s an interesting historical parallel that his book was published during the 1960’s, a period of political, social and cultural upheaval in the United States that featured the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which was designed in part to help end the discrimination of African Americans. Maybe Vallieres was trying to play off on that in publishing his book.

But I have never bought this argument advanced by Vallieres and others regarding a so-called English “dominance” in Quebec. Yes, it was true that up until the 1970’s, much of Montreal’s business and culture were primarily expressed in English. Or that you didn’t see a lot of French signage in downtown Montreal. I would argue that it was really more the Catholic Church that restricted francophones until the early to mid 1960’s and the start of that part of Quebec history known as “Quiet Revolution” (or “La Revolution Tranquille” in French). Not to mention politicians such as Maurice Duplessis and the Union Nationale who in conjunction with the Church silenced opposition and ruled the province with an iron fist. People sometimes talk about “banana republics” that have existed in tropical countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Hmm – how about Quebec under Premier Duplessis’s rule in the 1950’s? Pretty close to one in reality if you ask me. I would argue that rather than the English being the oppressors, it was really their fellow Quebecois, in the persons of the Church and governments such as the Duplessis regime who ought to be held responsible. A classic case of neo-colonialism in action.

There’s another element to this issue that often gets overlooked. If you look at Montreal’s history, much of the city’s business and economic growth was really led not by the English, but by the Scots. One good example is the founder of my home university, James McGill. And many of his fellow Scottish-Canadians helped get our University started, and who named many of the buildings that are located on our Lower campus. Indeed, much of North America was opened up and explored by Scots from Montreal, especially those involved in the fur trade on behalf of the North West Company, which was headquartered in Montreal before it was eventually absorbed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. People such as Simon McTavish (for whom McTavish Street was named), David Thompson, Simon Fraser and Alexander McKenzie just to name a few. The drive to complete Canada’s first transcontinental railway was also led by Montreal’s Scottish-Canadian community. As an example, how about Donald Smith (aka Lord Strathcona) who drove home The Last Spike at Craigallachie in 1885 to complete that grand adventure? You guessed it, another Scot from Montreal. Complemented, of course, by the earlier efforts of other Montreal explorers such as Champlain, La Salle, Brule, La Verendrye and many others. American cities such as Detroit and St. Louis can owe their beginnings to explorers from Montreal who explored the continent in search of fame and fortune.

Of course, one could write for pages about the whole issue of Quebec’s language, cultural, political and other issues. But I don’t feel much like doing that. Instead, let me finish our discussion as well as this blog entry by saying that I like the way Montreal is today, in that there seems to be a “reasonable accommodation” in terms of English/French relations. The tensions that did exist back in the 1960’s, 1970’s and beyond seem to have disappeared. Or at least that was my experience when I returned for a visit this past September. Maybe they are still there, but just lying under the surface. Instead of that climate, what I saw a few weeks ago was a vital, exciting and wonderful city. The Montreal I know and love still exists, even if it’s not quite the same as what I grew up with. But to be fair, Toronto and the surrounding area is very different now from what it was when I first moved here in July 1978.

Most Montrealers, both English and French, can function in both languages and feel comfortable doing so. And in my experience, if people at least make the effort to communicate in French, they will switch to English if they see that it’s easier for all concerned. The so-called “war” between the two sides that everyone in English Canada loves to talk about really doesn’t exist, and I’m not sure it ever really did. Sure, there were tensions between us back in the day which are still there today, some 50 years after the Duplessis regime was defeated and the Quiet Revolution began. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Then as now, I think we’re all big enough to rise above that and find solutions that work for everyone. I have always seen that in Montreal and throughout the entire province. I noticed it again when I was back in September. May it always be so!

Well, that’s it. Thanks for reading these three entries about why I chose to leave Montreal for the Toronto area. I enjoyed writing all this and it certainly brought back some interesting memories. Given the nature of the subjects I talked about, it’s probable that I may write about all this again. Not sure when, but we’ll see when the Spirit moves me to do so.

As always, I wish all my readers the very best of everything and I will be back again soon. Or as they say back home: “A la prochaine fois”.