Montreal City Weblog

Kate 14:29 on 2025-09-26 Permalink Reply  

• Nicholas 15:25 on 2025-09-26 Permalink

  When I saw him with his official tour guide membership and her not, I was curious how well the current system serves this perspective. Well, it appears King did as well, after taking the ITHQ course and being part of the APGT tour guide association for two years:

  “L’ITHQ demande près de 3000 $ pour la formation de guide. Et pendant celle-ci, le contenu autochtone était très pauvre. J’ai donc interpellé l’APGT après avoir obtenu mon diplôme. J’ai aussi souligné que, pendant la formation, 98 % des enseignants et futurs guides étaient Blancs… et j’ai fini par me faire expulser”, raconte-t-il. “C’est là que j’ai décidé de monter mes propres tours guidés, en dehors du circuit officiel”

  Would it be a good idea if this Cree woman could give tours of Montreal from an indigenous perspective without either having a minder or taking a $3,000, 240-hour course taught by white people who know way less about indigenous history than she does? The city council has repeatedly said no, by taking no action on the status quo.

• Paul 16:36 on 2025-09-26 Permalink

  100%.
  The guided tour lobby is a scam.

• Kate 20:24 on 2025-09-26 Permalink

  A regular contributor to the blog has had the ITHQ training and speaks well of it, and I know he is not a scam artist. It’s all discussed in this rather long thread from 2023.

• Nicholas 21:11 on 2025-09-26 Permalink

  I remember. If the training is good, then I’m sure that even without a government-mandated monopoly, future tour guides would mostly take it, and use it to advertise their services. The public would mostly demand trained guides. But now there is no other option; I can’t go take a course from this Cree woman, or a Ukrainian-Montrealer elder, or a Jewish Montreal historian and then give tours; I need this too, another course taught by white people. A literal museum curator cannot give a tour of Montreal outside their museum grounds without taking this course. This is the only game in town.

  Well, at least in the city; that tour I took from an old woman at the Westmount Historical Association was wonderful, but she had no licence, no regulated training. I guess I got suckered. As does anyone who takes a tour anywhere in North America outside Montreal, Quebec City or New York City.

  Many US states require a licence to cut hair. It often requires over a thousand hours of institutional training, and thousands of dollars, and often ignores non-white hairstyles, coincidentally. Quebec doesn’t, surprisingly. I wonder how we as citizens are able to pick a good hairdresser without checking for proper licensing, like everyone here surely does for tour guides. And there are safety issues: hair dressers use chemicals on your skin, lawyers try to keep you out of jail, engineers build bridges. Tour guides ensure you don’t block the sidewalk.

  Let me be more plain than I was two years ago. This is a cartel. It’s a way to keep the number of people offering tours down by forcing them to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to take a single course, offered once every two years (only if enough people enroll), to learn things that could have zero relation to what they want to give a tour of. And it applies not only to paid guides, but even one-time volunteers. If you start a restaurant and someone comes to your door and says, “Oh, you need garbage pickup, I’m sure you’ll love my guy, I know you’ll make the right choice,” we wouldn’t hesitate to call this what it is: a racket, a scam, extortion. This is government-mandated extortion, propped up by the current tour guides, to make it incredibly difficult and expensive for new people to give tours, because it would create competition. We should abolish this racket, and the association and school can compete in the free market by showing how their membership is valuable, and we can see what people decide.

• Ian 10:16 on 2025-09-27 Permalink

  Intersting that the fees for ITHQ training have gone up from 2500 to 3000 in only two years.

  I’ve followed professional tours around Miel End a few times and every single time they got stuff wrong, and I don’t just mean telling them that Saint Viateur bagels are better or that Kem Coba is worth waiting in line 45 minutes for.

• Ian 10:40 on 2025-09-27 Permalink

  n.b. Miel End would be a great name for a Mile End boulangerie artisanale that replaces all refined sugar with organic honey, just sayin

• CE 10:59 on 2025-09-27 Permalink

  I’m the licensed tour guide Kate referred to. I’ve said what I have to say on the topic. I’ll note two things:

  1. We don’t just make sure people don’t block the sidewalk, we’re responsible for the safety of the people in our groups, many of whom don’t really know how to navigate busy city streets. The training taught us how to keep people safe and minimize disruption for other users of the sidewalks.

  2. Many of the guides you’ve seen in Mile End are likely not licensed. A couple American companies started doing food and walking tours around the neighbourhood and hire untrained guides. I’ve also listened to what they have to say and it can be pretty embarrassing. I’m not saying all licensed guides are amazing and all unlicensed guides are terrible, but based on what I’ve seen, the training generally makes for a better guide.

• Ian 12:18 on 2025-09-27 Permalink

  All good points. Is there any way to check if a tour guide is licensed. ie, do they need to carry it with them?

• CE 00:17 on 2025-09-28 Permalink

  We’re required to display our permit from the city while working. It’s a white and red card with a photo, usually worn on a lanyard. Some guides also display their APGT membership card as well, usually on the other side so sometimes you’ll see that card, depending on which side is visible. This year it’s blue and white with a picture of the Lachine Canal.