Karel Mayrand writes feelingly in L’actualité about the need for Quebec not to turn its back on Montreal, and vice versa.
Updates from November, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
There seems to be a solidifying consensus that Montreal is not doing enough for French although it’s not as if the city doesn’t already have enough to do to keep things running. All official business is in French, French is the first thing mentioned in the city charter – what else can they do? This article suggests turning city libraries and cultural centres into French schools. Isn’t that pressing the city to deliver something that ought to be the province’s responsibility?
Le Devoir also reports on a series of studies by French language commissar Benoît Dubreuil that say French is in decline at work, leisure and social lives. Even worse, English is leaking out of Montreal into the countryside! Of course, M. Dubreuil’s job depends on periodically issuing scare stories like this…
JP
Ugh…I hope this isn’t the beginning of eliminating English books from libraries
Kate
They may have to, to show willing.
Uatu
Sounds good. I’ll just take the REM to the library…. Oh wait it’s down in both directions. Okay I’ll just take the Green line… Oh wait it’s down in both directions… Hey how about holding classes in the ER? Lots of time for learning there…
Kevin
Nothing will ever be good enough for the insecure mob.
Ian
Make the cops teach people French. Sure they aren’t qulaified, but It’s not like they’re qualified to do half of what they are made to do anyhow. There’s hardly any budget for anything if we keep funding the police at these grotesquely inflated rates, either.
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Kate
It’s been awhile since we’ve had news of coyotes in town, but the Journal claims they’re spotted all over – “even in the Plateau” – and they have a map.
A year and a half ago, Metro was asking whether there were still coyotes in town, and in 2020, the Gazette said that most of the sightings around that time had been of a single animal.
walkerp
Incredible creatures. I got a great sighting of one in the CDN cemetery when I snuck in there near the end of the strike; he was just loping along. I wish they had never ended the strike, the place would have become a wonderful sanctuary.
yasymbologist
Well, so my neighbouring blocks is not only a desert of communauto cars, coyotes don’t come over here either. Ste-Marie is a generally recognized boring neighbourhood, isn’t it?
Kate
Is it? I have yet to see either a coyote or a turkey, and I walk around Villeray and Petite‑Patrie daily. Mind you, this is also a generally recognized boring neighbourhood. Isn’t it?
Ian
I’ve seen turkeys in Mile End and rabbits up by the Van Horne tracks pretty regularly. Of course lots of groundhogs and skunks. I’m told there’s possums and foxes here but I haven’t seen any yet. No coyotes either, but if there’s rabbits I wouldn’t be surprised.
I saw a bald eagle in Ste-Anne flying over the McGill agricultural school fields a couple of mornings ago, first time I’ve seen one of theose in the wild in Montreal.
JP
Saw a hawk this morning for the first time ever in my neighbour’s back yard in Ahuntsic Cartierville (close to the Acadie area). Colleague in Brossard said she saw a possum there earlier in the season (I think they eat ticks and have many other positive impacts).
Apparently newer species of spiders are also making their way up here…
dhomas
There used to be a skulk of foxes living in the cemetery close to my house. Their numbers grew too much, so they didn’t have enough food (there are only so many squirrels to catch) and they started looking pretty skinny. They were eventually captured and relocated. But last weekend we saw one in Promenade Bellerive park. It was toying with a squirrel, letting it get away a little bit before capturing it again. It seemed like it was putting on a show for my kids. It didn’t seem too bothered by all the humans looking on. The cemetery foxes were much more skittish.
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Kate
A generous donation from an anonymous benefactor has allowed the Old Brewery Mission to offer homeless people semi‑private rooms instead of an open dormitory.
A new shelter for lesbians has also opened in town.
Chris
Doesn’t sound like a “shelter”, more like an apartment building.
Kate
It’s not easy to tell from the article how permanent their offer is to residents.
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Kate
Projet Montréal is holding a party congress this weekend to discuss priorities for the party considering next year’s election.
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Kate
The green line is fully open again Saturday morning.
Ian 19:17 on 2024-11-02 Permalink
For all that we are in the 21st century I don’t think Quebec ever got over the “bad” town vs “good” country trope, and all the rest of our issues arise from it right down to the ethnonationalism, distrust of education, and tendency toward turning every little stance into moralizing.
Robert H 11:40 on 2024-11-03 Permalink
The situation Mayrand describes seems like the Quebec version of the eternal urban versus hinterland conflict I’ve noticed in my native U.S. and other places around the world. The resentments and skewed perceptions sound familiar to me. For example, I can think of another vibrant, polyglot island metropolis (you can drive there, take a brief flight or a slow train) teeming with variety, an economic dynamo filled with immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, social and professional elites, a media and artistic capital that generates as many ideas as things, but plagued by a housing crisis (too expensive and not enough), subsequent homelessness, crime, terrible traffic, fractured politics and the full catalog of well-known urban ailments.
The people who live there complain bitterly about it too, just like here. It’s the biggest city in its jurisdiction (its whole country, in fact) but the seat of government lies up river in a little village that exercises more control over its metropolitan cousin than the latter would prefer. The citizens of that jurisdiction who live in the countryside and smaller cities and towns outside The Big City resent its seeming omnipresence, its indifference, and arrogance; the way it dominates and defines the whole region, as if they didn’t exist or matter. We are more than your “hinterland,” they say, not just a place for your summer home.
Less legitimately, they might also look askance upon all the “different” people in the metropolis, people who aren’t white, Christian (or Catholic), practice “alternative lifestyles,” people with weird values, if they have any. These folks outside the big town might see themselves as standard-bearers for what’s right, true and traditional, and the places they live as the true heartland.
Ian, I think you’re on to something. I’ll invoke local television as a metaphor and say that there are many who are perhaps nostalgic for the Quebec of “Les Pays d’en haut,” “Maria Chapdelaine,” or a rural idyll spun by Fred Pellerin but look at Montreal and instead see “District 31” or “Je voudrais qu’on m’efface” and recoil in horror. Montreal seems to be for too many this port-wine stain on the otherwise pristine visage of La Belle Province. But at least the city is not unique in this plight as anyone who has ever heard the adjective “Toronto-centric” or the terms “Washington-outside-the-Beltway,” “London-outside-the-Orbital,” or “Paris hors Périphérique” can attest.
Ramsay 20:16 on 2024-11-03 Permalink
A+ to Robert.
I find it interesting that Montreal is to be considered more insular than the rest of the province.
MarcG 07:53 on 2024-11-04 Permalink
Funny coincidence I’m reading David Graeber’s book ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’ and in last night’s segment he talks about the tension between countryside and city: “Patriarchy” originated, first and foremost, in a rejection of the great urban civilizations in the name of a kind of purity, a reassertion of paternal control against great cities like Uruk, Lagash, and Babylon, seen as places of bureaucrats, traders, and whores.
Kate 11:17 on 2024-11-04 Permalink
MarcG, it’s a book about a different time, but in David Mitchell’s Unruly he observes that many movements in history have been spun as revivals, as returning to a better and nobler time. It’s uncanny how often, and in how many forms, this turns up, from ancient Mesopotamian times to MAGA in ours. Or, you might say, to the ideal moment when everyone in Quebec spoke French (but wasn’t religious?!)