So I've lived in Canada for a while and I've noticed over the years you'll meet a lot
of people who say something about how they lived in Montreal back in the day.
They'd often say they really enjoyed living in Montreal, they loved the city and they
have all these fond memories. They say "oh yeah, I'll visit you, show you where I used to hang
out blah blah blah". But the reason that they didn't stay, boils down to them
believing that they couldn't reach their full potential in Montreal. They were
going to have to fuck off to Toronto or something. Well I thought that's not good
enough and we need to do something about this.
Surely our drastically improved economy and all these other things has changed
the equation. So I set about trying to solve this problem. How are we going to
figure out whether Montreal is a place where you can achieve your full
potential as an Anglophone. I blew the dust off my old management books from
when I was back in University and remembered Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
I never wanted to be the sort of person who invoked Maslow's hierarchy of needs
for anything ever in my life after I was introduced to it the first time. But the
honest-to-god truth is it's a pretty good measure of whether someone is
reaching their full potential and if they're not, what's stopping them. It
takes the form of a pyramid, where the things that are at the bottom need to be
dealt with and addressed before the things at the next stage. It's kind of
like building a house, you know, and you have to have the foundations in place before
you put down the floor, before you put up the walls, before you put on the roof. So
in doing these comparisons, I'm gonna be talking about other Canadian cities. So the
big six are Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and now Ottawa, which
just recently passed a million people. Welcome to the club Ottawa! Here is your
complimentary light rail line. [An apology to our customers that experienced a delay
this morning] So let's get started with the first level.
The level one takes care of physiological needs. When Maslow first came up with his hierarchy, it was
the 1940s. At this point in time, Europe was actually the place that was
producing most of the world's refugees. Fundamentals, really, were not being taken
care of anywhere. So at the first level, we're talking about air and food and
water. Montreal, as an Anglophone, has you covered for all the things that are on the
first level of the hierarchy. In fact, you're covered here even if you don't
speak English or French. The population isn't going to let you starve to death.
If you know anyone in town, they're very likely to give you a hand. So I really
wouldn't worried about the first level. If you're
a person who's watching a YouTube video on whether you'd like to live in
Montreal maybe, you're probably not a sort of person that the first level of
hierarchy of needs is concerned with.
Level 2 is the big level for people in modern society and people looking at
moving to Montreal as an Anglophone. Healthcare in Quebec for an Anglophone
is the same as a francophone, absolutely fucking god awful. You'll find
yourself having to go to the hospital for a sprain, even though you should be able
to go to a local clinic, because there's absolutely no family doctors that are
available. The healthcare system here is probably the worst of all the provinces
in Canada. But having said that, if you got in a car crash or you suddenly came
down with cancer, the healthcare system is gonna take care of you. It's actually
more of a day-to-day before you're super sick that blows in Quebec. So Montreal
is pretty middle of a road as far as safety. According to the 2018 crime
statistics, it goes Montreal, yay, and then Ottawa which because of all politicians
is tough on crime. Two sorts of employment that you can realistically
get as a monolingual Anglophone. When the colorful locals decided to start
murdering diplomats and the province deindustrialised in the seventies. [We
are going to organize ourselves intelligently, we're going to choose our
own positions, and we shall overcome!]
[But the Canadian Army is already moving into Quebec. The Montreal and Quebec
governments formally request that Ottawa take urgent action. At 4:00 a.m.
that morning, Trudeau's government invokes the War Measures Act.]
So in the ashes of that economic destruction, due to some pretty
sensible government policy, they established these new industries. So one
of the big ones is the gaming industry. There's huge studios here from almost
all of the major game makers. The largest at this point is Ubisoft which has about
3,500 people. They pay really well, they have support for moving family members
here, for teaching people French. And they employ a wide variety of creative skills.
Everything from animation and graphic design to communication, management. The
video game industry is a huge industry and Montreal's really trying to make itself
the mecca for this. The other fresh growth industries are the AI industry which
is kind of the next version of a games industry. It's another industry that's
being cultivated by the government and the universities in town. There's a whole
block of these companies near Little Italy. And I thought it was interesting
when I went to visit the other day, I found one of those little libraries on the
side of the road and had a look at all the books in it. And unlike the library
that's in my neighborhood, literally every single book in there was English.
Another category of new growth businesses, are kind of startups and growing
businesses that have started to target international and Canadian-wide markets.
So that's things like David's Tea or Aldo, the shoe company. Cirque du
Soleil would be another one, Dollarama, Datacandy...
Another industry which has become quite successful, although you seldom see
politicians at ribbon cutting ceremonies, is the pornography industry. Obviously
this industry employs almost the same people as the video game industry, plus dancers...
[What makes you want to come work for our company?] [Well...]
The second sort of job which you can get is basically immigrant jobs:
working in a kitchen or labourer or something that doesn't have a lot of
communication, maybe logistics, driving trucks, delivering packages, pest control.
There's probably like a million jobs that would fit that description in the
province. Another thing on this level is resources and property. When you look at
Montreal versus the other big six cities, we're cheap. We're a lot cheaper and have
a lower cost of living than pretty much all of them. Even with the recent
increases in rent in Montreal, we've still got a long way to go. Food in
Montreal isn't really that much cheaper than anywhere else, because you know
supermarkets are everywhere and these sorts of distribution networks are
pretty efficient. It mainly comes down to rent, rent is cheap. Even on really
shitty indexes, like the cost-of-living index that Mercer put out, you'll see
that Montreal is low. The cost of living for a family is low as well. There's lots
of government support. If you're on the fence about coming to Montreal and then
you decided "oh yeah I would like to have a kid" it suddenly makes moving here a
lot more compelling. It's not just the fact that the kid's going to learn two
languages. You've also got these big savings. So you have that job and you're
an Anglophone, what can you actually get with it. So no matter how you slice it
Montreal is a low-paid place relative to other big six cities. It's pretty much
always right at the bottom. The modifiers on that, are the job that you have.
The videogame industry here is paying really, really well and at levels that
are similar to anywhere else in the country so, awesome deal if you have one
of those jobs. A big modifier is the language that you speak. You can do a lot
to increase your salary by improving your level of French. So now we have the
income that you can expect to get and what the cost of things are, we can work
out purchasing power, which is really what this is all about. The resources, the
property that you can have with the job that you have. [Purchasing power expresses
money's value by defining the amount of goods and services it can buy.]
If there's a guy in Toronto and he earns this big salary but than he has to spend it
on these really expensive Toronto Raptors tickets, where as a business
person working in Montreal would be able to get a real bargain at an Alouettes game.
So with purchasing power with our big six cities, there's the group that have a
really high purchasing power: Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa and then there's the
rest. If you're a disciplined saver and you want to retire early,
make some money and then maybe move somewhere else, then Edmonton's a great
option for you. If you're the sort of person who's deciding between the big
cosmopolitan centers, you're going to be at about the same level as your
compatriots in Toronto or Vancouver. So in summary for safety, provided you have
the right qualifications or are prepared to spend a couple of years doing a job
that's maybe not quite your dream job but
enough to get your foot in the door, then Montreal's a great fit. However, at this
level, things start to get a little bit easier if you're willing to learn French.
Bilingualism pays. And you're going to experience a lot more employment and
property and resource safety if you are able to speak French, even a little.
For level 3, we're talking about love and belonging. Things start to get challenging. As an
Anglophone, you encounter more resistance requiring you to speak French.
And for me, I find love hard to quantify and there's not enough research on it.
I've heard that love is nice. Please show me what love is by loving this video.
Absolutely as an Anglophone you can forge friendships... [Would you like to be
my friend.] [Sure I like you a lot. I want to be your best friend and much more.][Maybe
not the much more part, but the friends part] There's something like 600,000
Anglophones in town so plenty of friends. You can live in Anglophone neighbourhoods,
where you walk and into a local shop and they might even greet you in English and
you'll feel like you belong, and you won't have awkward interactions in
French every day. But your choices are gonna be limited. When you want to do
things that are a little bit off the beaten path, you'll find that there isn't
an english-speaking option. So an example would be, it's fine for you to play
hockey, and you can probably be on an english-speaking hockey team in a
fairly english-speaking hockey league, but you're gonna have a lot of trouble
if you wanted to play underwater hockey. Yes, it exists, where there's only two
teams in town and most of the players are going to be speaking French because
most of a town speaks French. To me, it seems like you'd have a fairly
suboptimal sense of belonging if you feel like you just kind of belong here
and there and don't belong in the entire city. There's a piece of research that
shows that two-thirds of Montreal's Anglophones feel that they're primarily
Montrealers and not Quebecers. There's obvious reason for this. Look around, you
see lots of English named places. A lot of people don't realize this, but the
Anglophones were actually in a majority here back in the early days of Montreal
and it transitioned across to being a french-speaking town. So the Anglophone
community here does have deep roots and it does help to foster that sense of
being a Montrealer first. When it comes to family, obviously if you moved here in
the first place, you probably don't have your immediate
family. I'm actually kind of lucky in that regard because my brother
lives upstairs and plays the drums. If you do find yourself dating someone in
town, I found that people here are super warm and super welcoming even if they
don't speak your language as a first language. These days, it does seem like
people are kind of cool with the idea of having like one partner in French, one
partner in English, and think "oh yeah, that's a good thing, the kid's going to be
awesome at both these languages". So, of all the provinces in Canada, Quebec
actually has the highest level of happiness. When researchers try to
understand what that happiness is caused by, there's lots of different factors, but
one of them is a sense of belonging. There's this strong sense of like, Quebec
is a nation, and we're are people and we're united in this thing. To actually
experience that level of happiness and community, you want to be able to join in
on that, you know. So with love and belonging, you can do very well in the
Anglophone community and love knows no bounds. But you're going to feel a much
greater sense of belonging if you're connecting with the 75% of people who
aren't speaking English as a primary language.
Self-esteem has respect, status, recognition and strength. Honestly, I kind of think these things
are all very very much hand in hand. If you started in a job as an Anglophone, I think that
it's very very easy to prove yourself professionally as being good at what you
do, even if you have a bit of trouble communicating with people. I personally
found that it wasn't hard for me to get the respect and status that I wanted
in my job. Language starts to kind of drop away a little bit when it comes to
actually doing the work. The government is also very generous here in providing
training and money to employers to help improve your level of French. They would
provide food and a tutor that would come in twice a week and teach you French. I
used to speak French on Fridays as a way to improve it. Basically, all of my French
was learnt inside those walls. The people that you work with will almost
universally enjoy the little side project of watching you falling on your
face. Even when it's not fun for you, it's somewhat fun for them. Just a little
anecdote: a colleague asked me how my weekend went and I said "spectacle". And
they said "quel spectacle?" And I thought that "spectacle" meant spectacular but
"spectacle" means "show". So I said "my weekend went show"... We laughed about it, we still
laugh about it. So the workplace is okay, but
recognition and Montreal and Quebec, that's hard. This is a society that is
promoting French actively. They don't really want you to be speaking in
English a whole lot. You're going to find it hard to get a lot of support and
respect from entities. Even if you are running for public office in an
Anglophone neighborhood, they're still going to expect that you speak French. So
you can go represent them and not be constantly confused.
[In order to allow your loved ones and all of one us one day the right to die with dignity,
do you promise voters, yes or no]
"Spectacle"
I've noticed that a few of my friends, who are trying to work as contractors here, are also
finding it difficult because it's like you're constantly having to sell
yourself in a language which you're not very good at. When it comes to getting
your self-esteem appeased on a worldwide scale, you can live and work in Montreal
and sell your wares pretty successfully. So there's a huge art scene here that
produce content here and then sell it internationally. Look at this Wikipedia
article I've pasted into a title. They take advantage of a lower cost of living,
they're recognized and globally successful for what they do. So with
self-esteem, you can get respect and status inside a workplace, but one form
of recognition you probably want to aim for is your willingness to learn and
take in French culture. That's what's going to get you respect and status on
the actual provincial wide or citywide scale.
All right Anglos, top of the pyramid: self-actualization. You can achieve your full potential
if you have a Dr Pepper. Self-actualization is where Maslow got a little kind of mushy
with the details. [Hey, here's the deal. When life gives you lemons, just like,
fuck the lemons and bail.] [Yeah, no, you said it.] You're not worrying about where
your next meal is and if you're going to get the next promotion, but instead
thinking about achieving your full potential and doing the things that
you've always wanted to do. Start that business, change that person's life. If
you want to do it in Montreal they are going to be really really hard if you
just speak one language. So can you achieve your full potential in Montreal?
If you are a monolingual Anglophone, no. The reality is, that the first three
levels of the pyramid, you can go quite a long way speaking just one language. But
once you get to, especially the final self-actualization, full potential
achievement level, it becomes pretty obvious that you can't be all that you
can be living in a bilingual society if you only speak one language. The same
would go for the French speakers living in Montreal, to be honest. You don't even
need to speak English or French if you want to take care of level one, but by
the time you get to level five, you have to be able to communicate with most of
the people in town fairly effectively. Chances are that if you started off
climbing the hierarchy as an Anglophone, the person who arrives at that top level
and has their full potential is now bilingual.
So good luck!