Montreal City Weblog

Kate 12:04 on 2020-05-19 Permalink Reply  

• Ian 19:04 on 2020-05-19 Permalink

  They were struggling even 5 years ago, having trouble maintaining relevance as the vertically integrated schmata strategy they built their business on became less and less relevant over the years with the finsihed goods quota being lifted.

  Guys like Legault talk about how we need to move back to “made in Quebec” but the fact is the factories we lost over the last 25 years of globalism were not only shut down but their machines were sold off for scrap and the factories and their supporting warehouses were turned into condos. This is a path we can’t simply retrace, the hungry birds have eaten the breadcrumbs.

• JaneyB 10:58 on 2020-05-20 Permalink

  @Ian Then there will be new jobs here building new machines and new factories as well. We will make new paths and look back on the past 30 years of offshoring and super-tight global supply chains as the folly that it was.

• Ian 12:05 on 2020-05-20 Permalink

  I love that idea, and hope you are right – but those factories didn’t just spring into being overnight, the kind of overhead required to build a new factory from scratch is way higher than moving into an existing space and upgrading equipment.

  15 years ago there were still over a dozen sweater knitting mills in Montreal including all the support businesses – places that printed off hangtags, places that did buttons, places that did labels and notions, even dyers… they are all gone. I worked at one knitter on de Gaspé – before the artists took over – now even the artist lofts are mostly gone. Many of the old buildings on places like Beaumont, de Louvain, etc have been torn down. Where will the new factories go? Certainly nowhere in Central Montreal.

• JaneyB 12:32 on 2020-05-20 Permalink

  Indeed. The rag trade was the number one employer for decades in Mtl, Wpg, and after autos, Toronto. Almost overnight it disappeared with one of the new WTO deals. All those condo conversions are so often right near the rail lines because they used to load merchandise into the trains.

  I think the new factories might be headed for the dead and dying malls of the suburbs (where the Reitman stores used to be!). There are increasingly great ethnic restos migrating to soulless suburban strip malls in the GTA because the overhead is way less than in the condo-ized core. We live in strange times lol.

• Ian 16:46 on 2020-05-20 Permalink

  Indeed, this is how dreary little Markham became a Chinese suburb of Toronto with, by extension, some of the best Chinese food in Canada. It’s still a suburban wasteland in many ways but downtown got too expensive.

  I can’t see this happening in Beaconsfield, but you never know. There is lots of light manufacturing west of Dorval now, and it’s still adjacent to the train lines & highways.