This article by Christopher DeWolf was originally published in The Montreal Gazette on May 25, 2003.
“You’re another one!” Nicole Fowler exclaimed when I revealed my Western Canadian roots. “Since I moved to Montreal, I think I’ve met more people from Calgary than I have in the rest of my life.”
Fowler, 33, is part of a new batch of younger people on the move – to Montreal instead of away from it.
Although it may be tepid for now, it is not all that surprising a trend. My own life in Calgary was populated by people from Montreal. My dad lived here for almost a decade before leaving in the late ’70s. Our across-the-street neighbours in Calgary were ex-pat NDGers and my best friend’s mother was Hong Kong-born and Hampstead-raised. Friends came from Montreal when Canadian Pacific jumped ship and relocated to the prairie town it built a century before. My mom’s boss was from Outremont.
Fed up with language politics and a stagnant economy during the 1980s and ’90s, thousands of people scurried down the 401 or schlepped themselves west to Calgary or Vancouver.
But, slowly, people are moving here. Between 1996 and 2001, the pre-merger city actually gained 23,158 people (including those from beyond Canada’s borders) its first significant increase for at least 10 years. And, according to recently released data from Statistics Canada, 365 more Canadians from other provinces moved to Quebec between October and December 2002 than moved away – the first net gain in three decades.
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Before moving from Calgary to Montreal last year, the path appeared well-worn. It seemed everyone I encountered had a brother or six friends or an old roommate who had moved to Montreal. The trend was evident upon arrival, too; a quick survey of people I’ve met reveals a lot of eastward pioneers who are bucking the trends established late in the last century.
In fact, there are a lot of new people in Montreal who come from a variety of Canadian cities, even big, booming Toronto. What makes this somewhat perplexing is that, according to the National Post, the Calgary-Edmonton corridor is the second-wealthiest region in the world. Cities like Toronto and Vancouver certainly aren’t hurting when it comes to job prospects.
So why come here?
It probably isn’t the economy, stupid – at least not entirely. Montreal has a lot to offer that other cities don’t, and people across Canada have tuned into the benefits of la belle ville.
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Fowler was born in Calgary but lived there for only six months before her family started an inexorable move eastward, job transfer to job transfer. She first arrived in Montreal at age 5. Half a decade later, her family packed their bags once again and moved to Toronto, where she spent most of the next 20 years.
After attending university and working in publishing and advertising, Fowler grew tired of Toronto. Two years ago, eager to escape a basement apartment and reconnect with her past, she decided it was time to head up the highway. It was “the pull of language” – Montreal’s bilingualism and multiculturalism – that brought her here, where she has regained her fluency in French.
Stephan Hardy, 26, found himself in a similar situation. A native of Red Deer, Alta., Hardy moved south to study at the University of Calgary and later worked at an ad agency.
Despite his love for Calgary, he eventually found himself restless. While living for a summer in Toronto, Hardy began to visit Montreal on weekends. He fell in love.
In the winter of 2001, he decided to quit his job, pack up his life and move to Montreal. After spending a few months resting and exploring his new home, Hardy signed on as the business manager of Maisonneuve, an exciting little English-language magazine with ambitions to become Montreal’s New Yorker.
Like Fowler, language played a big Part in the unilingual Hardy’s move. “I find it quite fascinating to be a minority speaker for a change,” he says. Being immersed in a city with layer upon layer of culture and language is a stark contrast to relatively monocultural Calgary.
Hardy was also attracted by a more intangible aspect of Montreal’s character: here, he feels, people appreciate their surroundings.
“I think it’s remarkable that a city of this size can shut down major streets for festivals and people don’t just tolerate it, they encourage it,” he says. “I just don’t see that happening to the same extent anywhere else in Canada.”
In his view, the old “work to live, not live to work” maxim holds true for Montreal. Hardy sees a big difference in attitude between Montrealers and Torontonians: “The general attitude is just different. It’s more callous (in Toronto), a little more cutthroat.”
Fowler also thinks Montrealers, unlike Torontonians, are more apt to value their leisure time; she loves how work is rarely discussed outside office hours.
Of course, not everyone has the nerve to leave a career, friends and family like Hardy or Fowler. Sometimes the decision to stay is just as important as the decision to come. Like a sort of benign Venus flytrap, Montreal’s universities pull thousands of unsuspecting students into Montreal.
Once fully ensconced in the heaven that is the undergraduate’s Montreal, the city’s charms become so intoxicating some find it hard to leave. Matthew Hays, associate editor of the cultural weekly Montreal Mirror, is one. “It’s hard not to fall in love with Montreal.” he says with a smile.
Hays grew up in Edmonton, but left as a teenager to study film at Concordia.
In 1991, he graduated in the midst of a nationwide recession and, to his chagrin, was compelled to return home to Edmonton. Despite being the “leftist bastion” of Alberta, Hays says he feels out of sorts in his hometown.
“People have a limited view of what you can do with your life,” he notes. When they learned of his studies in film, some of his friends’ reactions were downright hostile.
“They said, ‘What the hell are you going to do with that?’ ” Hays recalls. One year after his return to Alberta, he managed to come back to Montreal. He has lived here ever since.
Michael McKenna’s situation is similar. Born in Toronto and raised in Halifax, he came to Montreal in 1995 to study English literature at McGill. He later lived for a year is London, but found himself uncomfortable in his new role as expatriate. McKenna, 24, who now writes and studies journalism at Concordia. came back to Montreal and discovered that, of all the places he had lived, this was where he felt at home.
“Montreal is the spiritual centre of Canada,” he says, wryly. “When I moved here it just tied together all these different aspects of my Canadian childhood.”
This was Canada’s metropolis for most of its history, McKenna notes, and many, if not most, of Canada’s foundations were laid by Montreal institutions.
According to McKenna, the interplay and tension between two cultures is one of the key factors that distinguish it from other Canadian cities.
“There’s two ways of getting (cultural) tension,” he says. “You can either be an imperial power like London or New York, where it comes by nature, or you can have a duality of cultures, like Montreal.”
Hays agrees: he’s fascinated by the tension between different cultural and linguistic groups in Montreal.
“A lot of people don’t like it and I think that’s why they moved away” he says, but for him, it is one of the most unique and appealing parts of Montreal’s character.
Culture is one of Montreal’s biggest draws. Jaime Frederick, the arts and entertainment editor of Fast Forward, a Calgary alternative weekly, points out that Quebec offers many incentives for the more creatively minded, with plenty of grants offered by organizations like the Conseil des arts et des lettres. While Calgary has a vibrant cultural scene, the Alberta government “is just not committed to arts funding.”
In fact, several prominent members of Calgary’s arts scene have left for Montreal in the past year alone, including filmmakers Paul Spence, Dave Lawrence and Michael Dowse, the creators of last year’ cult hit FUBAR.
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You can talk about culture all you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that the economy does bear some importance – and Montreal’s economy is still lacklustre compared with those of Calgary and Toronto. In one year alone, Hays lost five close friends to New York and Toronto.
But the local economy is improving, and Montrealers may be more ambitious than their reputations suggest.
Fowler, who works with new media, thinks Montrealers have a very creative, even entrepreneurial spirit. Thanks in part to Quebecois cultural insularity, people in Montreal care less about how they are perceived by outsiders. Montreal is not a “wannabe city,” says Fowler, and this attitude allows for more experimentation, both in terms of art and the workplace.
As for Hardy, he thinks Quebec and Alberta are the two most exciting places in Canada, brimming with potential and energy.
Still, Montreal’s complex and dynamic atmosphere give it that extra oomph cities like Calgary lack. Frederick concedes that Calgary suffers from a suburban, corporate-minded populace.
“Many corporate Calgarians live in the suburbs while much of the cultural life of the city happens downtown and in the inner city,” he notes. “It’s a huge challenge for many arts groups to keep their audiences downtown after work.”
That’s what sets Montreal apart. Though he holds no grudge against Calgary, Hardy doesn’t think a magazine like Maisonneuve could flourish there. “I love Calgary, but I don’t think people elsewhere look to it as this beacon of multiculturalism or interesting urban dynamism,” he says.
It’s that dynamism that makes Montreal such a magnet for creative young Canadians. It also helps that Montrealers are keen supporters of the culture that gives this place is creative zest, which makes for an irresistible magnet of a city.
