Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:27 on 2020-11-30 Permalink Reply  

• qatzelok 11:16 on 2020-11-30 Permalink

  This is looking more and more like “the Irish Potato” resets of a few centuries ago – the ones that gave us all our canals so we could be connected.

• Kate 13:14 on 2020-11-30 Permalink

  What the hell are you on about, qatzelok?

• qatzelok 13:16 on 2020-11-30 Permalink

  The way that the Potato Famines were used as a “reset” for commerce.

• Kate 13:31 on 2020-11-30 Permalink

  I’ve read that the Black Death killed so many people in Europe that the resulting lack of labourers meant the remaining able-bodied workers were able to get a better deal, at least for a time.

  The only other circumstance I can think of is the very local one, when Mayor Houde, faced with Depression-era unemployment in the city, created jobs by devising public projects in parks and elsewhere. I believe it’s one of the reasons he was so popular for so long (we’re still benefiting from some of the things built or improved during those years).

  But are you alleging that the Irish potato famine meant a lot of workers came here and worked on canals and so on for cheap? It wasn’t always so simple. The men working on the Beauharnois canal revolted after a point. Cheap labour doesn’t stay cheap forever.

• Kevin 14:42 on 2020-11-30 Permalink

  I don’t think it’s a reset as much as it is an acceleration of the suburbanization that’s been going on for several decades – at least in the Montreal area.

  I think it was in the Globe’s Cities series, two weeks ago, that said that proportionally more Montrealers commute in from outer ‘burbs to the city’s core than in Vancouver or Toronto. That’s affected the stores we have in various areas, why people don’t hear French when walking around the downtown core, yada yada.

  But if downtown office work is dead and buried (and I believe it is) those office workers are never coming back en masse, and that means downtown is also going to have to shift dramatically. The service jobs that relied to office workers are gone or displaced.

  If the provincial government and the suburbs jump on it, we could end up with a ring of 15-minute villages surrounding Montreal. The downtown core could end up being nothing but a university town, or office tower owners could push to build family friendly condos and put some elementary/high schools in the core (and the decision not to build a school at the old Children’s Hospital is looking worse and worse).

• ant6n 18:38 on 2020-11-30 Permalink

  Montreal could become more polycentric.

• Kate 21:26 on 2020-11-30 Permalink

  ant6n, it’s going to have to eventually, as bigger cities do. I don’t know whether the process was as painful for London or Paris, Rome or Tokyo. Big cities get polycentric by bringing in villages around them, as Montreal has done with all the West Island towns (some of them quite old, like Pointe Claire and Ste-Geneviève), but we have this thing about being circumscribed as an island that makes it impossible, psychologically, to feel that places like Vieux-Longueuil or Ste-Rose have truly become part of the city.

  Of course the four big cities I mention went through most of this process long before the car.