It’s been almost a year since we moved from Montreal to Ottawa for job-related reasons,
and while Ottawa has its charms too, we’d be lying if we said it was a case of not looking back.
Living in Montreal had a really big impact on how we see cities,
and it was basically the reason we started this channel, so in this video we want to
reflect on some of the reasons that we and lots of other people like the city so much. Of course,
no place is perfect, so towards the end we’re going to talk about some of the downsides too.
Language. We’re biased by the fact that we have a life-long interest in French
(we actually met each other at a French immersion program), but the fact that there’s a major North
American city that speaks French as its primary language is fundamentally really cool. It’s a
mistake to treat the city or the province as an offshoot of France because of the shared language,
but Montreal really is rooted in and connected to the French-speaking world in a lot of ways.
This includes architectural influences,
the collaboration with engineers from France on the Montreal Metro,
and the disproportionate amount of immigration to Montreal from French-speaking places in Europe,
Africa, and the Caribbean. The fact that Montreal has French as its primary language isn’t only a
cool feature that makes the city more interesting. Living in a place where you have a constant
opportunity to speak a second language is a huge benefit. Your brain starts making connections
in different ways and the frequent code-switching has you in a state of constant learning every day,
especially if you make somewhat of an effort to use your second language on a regular basis.
Urbanism. Back before car-centric development patterns took off, it was Montreal, not Toronto,
that was Canada’s biggest city, which gives Montreal a very solid foundation for urbanism
with older, dense, walkable neighborhoods making up most of the central city.
Rather than resting on this inheritance, Montreal today is also one of the most active
and ambitious places in North America for pedestrian, cycling, and transit
improvements. Everywhere you look there’s an urbanist project reclaiming public space,
from miscellaneous parklets to the 10 streets that were recently announced for pedestrianization
for three years. Last year we gave glowing reviews to Montreal’s REV or Express Bike
Network on Saint-Denis, and this year we were able to see the same concept of wide,
comfortable, direct bike lanes also implemented on Peel Street. In so much of North America
you are considered a weirdo or thrill-seeking show-off for biking to work, but in Montreal’s
more bike-friendly neighbourhoods cycling is just a normal and natural way to get around. Finally,
after a long period of stagnation in transit building, Montreal is literally doubling its
rapid transit network and more with an automated metro system similar to the Vancouver SkyTrain. To
be clear, Montreal is still a North American city with sprawling suburbs and car dependency baked
into most of them, but even there you can find lots of features that stand out. Quebec’s never
been as afraid of apartments and multi-family homes as English North America, for example.
Neighbourhoods. Montreal is arguably the best city for urban exploration in Canada. Not only does it
have a very different feel from cities in English North America due to the density and different
architectural influences, its neighbourhoods feel very distinct from each other with their own look,
feel, and local identity. Verdun, Griffintown, NDG, Côte-des-Neiges, Outremont,
Parc-Ex, Saint-Leonard, Villeray — all of these places feel quite different.
There are lots of reasons for this. Montreal being an older city means that its neighbourhoods span
different development eras, and Montreal has a lot of dimensions of language variation.
For example, Outremont is majority French with a big Yiddish-speaking minority,
while Saint-Leonard has a lot of trilingual Italian–Canadians.
Also, many parts of Montreal are independent cities, like Westmount, or were independent
cities until 20 years ago, like Outremont, which contributes to the distinct feeling. Finally,
physical features like the mountain, river, and canals add separation between areas too.
McGill and the University of Montreal are not that far away from each other but they
feel like different worlds in part because of the mountain and language differences separating them.
This channel actually started in part to showcase our bike trips around Montreal. By foot
or bike we’ve visited nearly all the boroughs and independent municipalities of Montreal and most of
the off-island suburbs too. It felt like we never ran out of interesting places or things to see.
We’re still waiting to visit the great city of Dorval Island, population 30.
Affordability. The place we lived most recently before Montreal was Toronto, a city that has a
lot going for it, but it’s also crumbling under the weight of a housing affordability crisis that
made living there kind of depressing. This was an emergency and it felt like easing the burden of
housing should have been the #1 priority of the city, but following city politics and planning
it never really felt like that. Many people did care, especially among the younger generation,
but a significant portion of the population was indifferent, valuing the stability of
their neighbourhoods over access to housing for younger people; or they were short-sighted,
caring more about sticking it to greedy developers than actually getting housing built;
or finally many were actually excited, seeing rising housing costs not as a burden but an
exciting investment opportunity; “get in on the profit train while you still can!”.
Montreal has a reputation as a bastion of housing affordability, and while it’s definitely
faced spikes in prices over the past few years too, especially in neighbourhoods like Verdun,
the striking difference is that people seem to actually care more. Montrealers
seem to have more of a sense of affordable housing as a positive amenity for a city.
They see rising prices not as an investment opportunity but as an added stress or burden
that takes away from the vibrancy of the city, pushing lower-income people out and making
it more difficult for middle-income people to relax or take career or business risks.
In the Toronto housing debate people would often downplay the problem by explaining that
“you aren’t entitled to a home wherever you want, you should just move”, but that’s not something
you really hear as much in Montreal. The different attitude towards rising prices might partly come
from Montreal having more renters than Toronto, so more people experience rising prices as an added
cost, but one book on Montreal housing actually identifies a deep-rooted cultural difference in
Quebec where housing is less of a speculative asset and more of a long-term stable investment.
Park culture and public spaces. Parks are popular in every city due to having playground equipment
for kids, sports facilities, or areas to hike but living in Montreal it really stood out to
us how much parks were also just a gathering place for people to meet up and spend time with others,
which makes the city feel more vibrant and alive. Parks were kind of like a shared backyard where
people would have picnics, barbecues, and beer or wine, which unlike most other Canadian cities
is legal in Montreal if you have a meal and is usually tolerated even if you don’t have food.
We’ve also encountered impromptu music events in Montreal parks.
This festive use of parks isn’t completely absent elsewhere — you could encounter something similar
at Trinity Bellwoods in Toronto — but it’s really common in Montreal, whether you’re talking about
Parc Lafontaine, Parc Jarry, or even the Lachine Canal. You have to wonder whether this culture of
parks and public spaces is one of the reasons why Montreal is faster to move on urbanist
improvements like pedestrian streets—it’s just really normal there to make space for people.
So far we’ve painted a pretty positive picture of Montreal, and it is a wonderful city,
but we’re not giving the full story if we don’t also talk about some negatives too.
Healthcare. Healthcare in Montreal is… not very good. This is partly a problem with Quebec but
it’s especially bad in Montreal. Montreal is dead last among Canada’s 28 metropolitan areas
for access to doctors, with 31% of people not having a family doctor, compared to 18%
in Vancouver and 9% in Toronto. That’s across the whole metropolitan area, too — it seems to
be worse in central Montreal because of the PREM system of region-based licensing. We signed up
for the doctor waitlist in Montreal and got an expected timeframe of two years, but we heard
from others that it often ends up taking longer unless you have a priority health condition.
Employment. From the perspective of an anglophone coming from outside of Quebec, Montreal’s language
being French is both an exciting language learning opportunity and a major challenge
for employment. People often treat learning French as something you either choose to do or not do,
but more realistic is making solid progress but still not being as strong or fast in the language
as someone who grew up in Quebec, not even actual francophones but other anglophones or allophones
who at least got more real-life practice and exposure to French from an early age.
This doesn’t mean you can’t succeed — someone in my French class from Brazil
started with little French, worked his way up through all the levels,
passed the provincial French exam, and became a teacher. Many other people in the class had
jobs in tech where language requirements aren’t as strict. But it was hard not to notice that
a big proportion of the class had a hard time finding a job, even after working through all
the levels and taking intensive French four hours a day, four days per week for a year or more.
To be clear, it’s understandable that employers in Montreal might prefer the candidate who speaks
better French, but it’s still a challenge and a barrier for people who didn’t grow up there.
Cleanliness. Montreal is a noticeably less tidy and orderly city compared to other places we’ve
lived. And often this is a mix of good and bad — a culture of street art and murals
adds a lot of colour and visual interest to the streets, but at the same time there’s a lot of
low-effort tagging that’s basically equivalent to littering, especially when it’s painted on
signs or over more effortful art. Speaking of garbage, Montreal’s plex housing typically has
2 to 6 units per building, which is dense enough to produce a lot of garbage but not enough,
at least at the time they were built, to have a centralized garbage room like a bigger apartment
building. As a result, garbage day each week means lots of bags of garbage on the sidewalk,
which sometimes get ripped open by squirrels. Using bins instead of bags would be better
but at least in the neighbourhood we lived in, those were mostly reserved for alleys,
maybe because of space. The park culture that we mentioned
can also result in lots of garbage left in the park the day after celebratory summer nights.
Winter. Montreal does a pretty good job of making the best of winter with outdoor activities like
skating and skiing but there’s no getting around the fact that winter kind of sucks. There’s a
reason Canadians like to go to places like Florida and Cuba during the cold months. Montreal doesn’t
have the worst winters in Canada but it is noticeably colder and snowier than Toronto,
Calgary, and obviously Vancouver. If you’re coming from an even warmer climate in the U.S. or Europe
where snow and ice are the exception rather than the rule in winter then you might be in for an
unpleasant surprise. With that said, it does probably make you appreciate the summer even more.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. Don’t forget to reminisce about Montreal…
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