Montreal and Toronto

Montreal in the 1960s

To understand why sovereignty emerged as a serious issue in Quebec when it did, we must look at two cities, Montreal and Toronto. They are responsible for what has been happening in Quebec since World War II. Between them, they have converted Quebec into something resembling a new nation, provincial political status notwithstanding. Nobody planned this outcome. Nobody even recognized what was happening at the time it happened. The events that worked this transformation do not go back very far. We can date them statistically as having begun in 1941, but that is because 1941 was a census year. I suspect they began in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II and the beginnings of the Canadian war economy.

Let us begin with Montreal. Between 1941 and 1971, Montreal grew enormously. In those thirty years the city more than doubled its population, increasing to more than two million. Immigrants from other countries contributed to Montreal's growth; as did people from other parts of Canada. Of course, some of the growth was natural increase, accounted for by births in the population Montreal already had. But the major influx was from rural and small-town Quebec.

Before, rural Quebecois had migrated to Montreal, just as they migrated to Quebec City and to New England, but this new migration dwarfed previous rural-to-city movements within the provinces. The rapidity with which the movement happened and the absolute numbers of people involved were unprecedented.

The French-speaking migrants to Montreal spent the 1940s and 1950s finding one another. The "Quiet Revolution" arose from their networks of new interests and relationships: from new communities of interest and interaction in the city; in the arts, in politics, working life and education. French culture in Montreal was in a quiet ferment as people built these relationships and put together ambitions and ideas they could not have developed even in a smaller city like the capital, Quebec City.

Until the late 1960s, Montreal still seemed to be what it had been for almost two centuries; an English city containing many French-speaking workers and inhabitants. But, in fact, by 1960 Montreal had become a French city with many English-speaking inhabitants. By the time people in Montreal, let alone the rest of Canada, recognized what was happening, it had already happened.

Now we need to bring Toronto into the story. Montreal used to be the chief metropolis, the national economic center of all of Canada. It is an older city than Toronto, and until about the mid-1970's, it was larger. At the beginning of the 20th century, Toronto was only two-thirds the size of Montreal, and Montreal was much the more important center of finance, publishing, wholesaling, retailing, manufacturing, and entertainment -everything that goes into making a city economy.

The first small and tentative shifts of finance from Montreal to Toronto began in the 1920s when Montreal banks, enamored of the blue-chip investments of the time, overlooked the financing of new mining opportunities which were then opening up in Ontario. That neglect created an opportunity for Toronto banks. The stock exchange which was set up in Toronto for trading mining shares merged with the old generalized Toronto stock exchange in 1934, and by the 1940s the volume of stocks traded in Toronto had come to exceed the volume traded in Montreal.

During the great growth surge of Montreal, from 1941 to 1971, Toronto grew at a rate that was even faster. In the first of those decades, when Montreal was growing by about 20 per cent, Toronto was growing by a rate closer to 25 percent. In the next decade, when Montreal was adding a bit over 35 percent to its population, Toronto was adding about 45 percent. And from 1961 to 1971, while Montreal was growing by less than 20 percent, Toronto was growing by 30 percent. The result was that Toronto finally overtook Montreal in the late 1970s.

But even these measurements do not fully suggest what was happening economically. As an economic unit or economic force, Toronto has really been larger than Montreal for many years. This is because Toronto forms the center of a collection of satellite cities and towns, in addition to its suburbs. Those satellites contain a great range of economic activities, from steel mills to art galleries. Like many of the world's large metropolises, Toronto had been spilling out enterprises into its nearby region, causing many old and formerly small towns and little cities to grow because of the increase in jobs. In addition to that, many branch plants and other enterprises that needed a metropolitan market and a reservoir of metropolitan skills and other producers to draw upon have established themselves in Toronto's orbit, but in places where costs are lower or space more easily available.

The English call a constellation of cities and towns with this kind of integration a "conurbation," a term now widely adopted. Toronto's conurbation, curving around the western end of Lake Ontario, has been nicknamed the Golden Horseshoe. Hamilton, which is in the horseshoe, is larger than Calgary, a major metropolis of western Canada. Georgetown, north of Toronto, qualifies as only a small southern Ontario town, one of many in the conurbation. In New Brunswick it would be a major economic settlement.

Montreal's economic growth, on the other hand, was not enough to create a conurbation. It was contained within the city and its suburbs. That is why it is deceptive to compare population sizes of the two cities and jump to the conclusion that not until the 1970s had they become more or less equal in economic terms. Toronto supplanted Montreal as Canada's chief economic center considerably before that, probably before 1960. Whenever it happened, it was another of those things that most of us never realized had happened until much later.

Toronto in the 1960s

Because Toronto was growing more rapidly than Montreal in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and because so many of its institutions and enterprises now served the entire country, Toronto drew people not only from many other countries but from across Canada as well. The first two weeks I lived in Toronto back in the late 1960s, it seemed to me that almost everyone I encountered was a migrant from Winnipeg or New Brunswick. Had Montreal remained Canada's pre-eminent metropolis and national center, many of these Canadians would have been migrating to Montreal instead. In that case, not only would Montreal be even larger than it is today, but -and this is important- it would have remained an English Canadian metropolis. Instead it had become more and more distinctively Quebecois.

In sum, then, these two things were occurring at once: on the one hand, Montreal was growing rapidly enough and enormously enough in the decades 1941-1971 to shake up much of rural Quebec and to transform Quebec's culture too. On the other hand, Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe were growing even more rapidly. Montreal, in spite of its growth, was losing its character as the economic center of an English speaking Canada and was simultaneously taking on its character as a regional, French-speaking metropolis.

These events, I think, are at the core of Quebec's charged and changing relationship with the rest of Canada. Things can never go back to way they were when an English-speaking Montreal was the chief economic center of all of Canadian and when life elsewhere in the province of Quebec was isolated and traditional. These changes are not merely in people's heads. They cannot be reasoned away or even voted away.

A culture can persist without its own metropolitan capital, as Quebec's did for so long. It can persist as a museum piece. But is cannot flower and thrive without a metropolis. French Quebec has its own cultural metropolis now. But to continue thriving as a culture capital, Montreal must also thrive economically. There's the rub. As a regional Canadian city, which is what Montreal has now become, its economic future is unpromising.

To understand why this is so, we must be aware of Canada's customary view of economic life and its traditional approach to economic development. Canada exploits and exports resources, to the neglect of developing industries and services based on manufacturing or inventions requiring manufacturing. This is a profoundly colonial approach to economic life, but in Canada's case economic colonialism is not something forced upon the country. Canada prefers colonialism.

The experience of Canada has been that the largest and most quickly obtained fortunes, whether public or private, come from resources: furs, timber, apples, coal, iron, nickel, gold, copper, silver, wheat, cobalt, fish, uranium, hydroelectric power, aluminum, potash, oil, natural gas -to name some of the most influential. Societies, like individuals, are shaped by their experiences. Canada's get-rich-quick experience with resources has shaped all the country's major institutions: the national government, the provincial government, the banks and all other financial establishments. It has shaped the way venture capital and subsidies are used, the types of development schemes contrived, and the assumptions of almost everyone in authority. These are not easy things to change.

When a single dominant approach to economic life and wealth has been pursued as consistently and as long as it has been here, the experience gets thoroughly built into how things work. It especially gets built into the uses of capital. Dazzling sums of money are available for resource exploitation and for vast construction projects associated with them, such as dams, pipelines, refineries, bulk storage and depots. When the attention of government does stray to manufacturing or innovation, as it does from time to time, the scale of effort does not adjust. Dazzling sums of money sunk into grandiose technological schemes. To put if figuratively, if the Canadian economy were a zoo, nothing would be purchased for it except elephants.

To be sure, Canada does not lack manufacturing altogether. But of such manufacturing as the country does have, almost half is undertaken in American-owned branch plants, and –increasingly– some of the rest in other foreign-owned branch plants.

Most branch plants have been established, however, because of Canadian tariffs on manufactured goods. Canadian tariffs are imposed not to encourage indigenous economic development, but to force foreign exporters of manufactured goods to set up branch plants within Canada. This profoundly parasitic approach to "development" was largely responsible for Toronto's and Montreal's economic growth during the 1950s and 1960s; that was largely branch-plant economic growth. 

Canada's regional cities also have their traditional role. They work primarily as service centers for the exploitation of resources from their hinterland. To be sure, all have some manufacturing, even the small ones like Halifax, Thunder Bay and Saskatoon and the larger ones like Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton, as well as the largest, Vancouver. But large or small, the regional cities of Canada do not serve as creative economic centers in their own right. They boom when the exploitation of their hinterland booms. They stagnate when the resource exploitation reaches a plateau. They decline when it declines.

This is devastating to Canadian regions where resources stop yielding more and more wealth. The passive regional cities, generating no innovations, replacing so few kinds of imports, creating so little new work, so few factories for transplanting, so few new markets themselves, cannot serve as substitute resources. Halifax, which boomed long ago when exploitation or resources in the Maritime Provinces boomed, cannot perform such services for the now impoverished Maritimes (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island). Winnipeg, although it boomed when the wheat lands of the prairies boomed and was celebrated as the locus of the largest grain exchange in the entire world, promptly stagnated when the tasks of settling the prairie wheat lands and constructing the vast grain transportation and storage facilities had been more or less completed. Probably the currently booming Alberta oil cities of Edmonton and Calgary will stagnate in their turn -for the pattern is a consequence of Canada's curiously lopsided use of capital and its profoundly colonial approach to economic life.

If Montreal had not happened to be the national economic center of Canada in the past -if Halifax, say, had occupied that role or if Toronto had fallen into it much earlier than it did- Montreal would surely have been merely a passive regional city, stagnant long since. At any rate, there is little in French Canada's experience, assumptions or expectations of economic life to suggest otherwise.

Now, however, Quebec is presented with a difficulty not only unprecedented there, but unprecedented in Canada. The country has never before had a national city which lost that position and became a regional city. As a typical Canadian regional city, Montreal cannot begin to sustain the economy or the many unusual assets it has now. As it gradually subsides into its regional role, it will decline and decay, grow poor and obsolescent. No boom in resource exploitation can save it because -as a national center- it had already surpassed what even the most prosperous Canadian regional cities are capable of supporting. None of the traditional Canadian approaches can contend with this new problem.

A third of Quebec's population is concentrated in Montreal. Not only will a declining Montreal have directly depressing effect upon that large share of the province's populations, it will have a depressing effect of the province generally. The city will become a poorer market for producers in the hinterland who now depend on it. It will be a declining source of city jobs for the population at large. Its all-important cultural function in the province's life will suffer.

Montreal needs an independent Quebec

In sum, Montreal cannot afford to behave like other Canadian regional cities without doing great damage to the economic well-being of the Quebecois. It must instead become a creative economic center in its own right. That means it must cast up streams of new enterprises which, among them, take to producing wide ranges of goods now imported from other places, including other places in Canada, and which will generate new, city-made products and services that can be marketed outside of Montreal and Quebec as well as within; and it must become the kind of place where such enterprises can find the capital they require, and in turn generate more capital.

Yet there is probably no chance of this happening if Quebec remains a province. Canadian bankers, politicians and civil servants, captivated as they are by the sirens songs of resource exploitation, ready-made branch plants, and technological grandiosities, can hardly be expected to respond to Montreal's quite different economic claims upon their attention. Beliefs and practices common to all of Canada are not apt to change simply because one city, Montreal, and one province, Quebec, so urgently need them to change.

The Quebecois themselves seem unaware of the nature of the problem which looms in their future, and given the prevailing assumptions, they may not come to understand it. But they will understand this: things are not going well.

That is why the issue of sovereignty for Quebec, now that it has been raised anew as a possibility, is not going to evaporate. Inevitably, whether or not they could do better on their own, the Quebecois are going to think they could, and many of them are going to want to try. We may expect the question of separation to be raised again and again in coming years until it is finally settled either when Canada accedes to some form of sovereignty for Quebec or when the Quebecois accept the decline of Montreal and become resigned to it and to its repercussions.

The latter seem to me unlikely. Quebec is not like the poor Maritime Provinces, which have been tied ever more tightly into Confederation by adversity and the federal government's redistribution of tax money to alleviate it. The Quebecois have a special fear: that if they themselves cannot make a success of Quebec, their long struggle will prove to have been "a sad tale told by a minority on the road to oblivion." 

While it is quite possible that Quebec would do no better on its own than as a province of Canada, there is little reason to suppose it would do worse, and there are even some practical reasons for supposing it might do better. Furthermore, as we all understand, dependence is stultifying, and sometimes the obverse is also true. That is, sometimes independence releases new kinds of effort, opens up formerly untapped funds of energy, initiative, originality and self-confidence. That has been the experience, for instance, of Norway when it broke away from Sweden at the beginning of the 20th century.

An abridged version of chapter two of The Question of Separatism by Jane Jacobs.

Canada’s feel-good racism

Recently, a chemistry professor at McGill University, Joe Schwarcz, posted a faked, denigrating photo of Pauline Marois on his Facebook page. Apparently, Marois omitted congratulating two members of the Canada’s Olympic hockey team and Prof. Schwarcz took offense at this. The posting touched off an outpouring of disrespectful, hateful and denigrating comments from supposedly "enlightened" Anglos. A torrent of “bitch”, “cow” and the obligatory references to the Nazis was unleashed on Facebook.

The good professor was dismayed by the virulence and intensity of the hatred and felt compelled to remove the post. However, Ariel Fenster, one of Schwarcz’s colleagues, said that the comments were a sign of the “social context” created by the PQ and its charter. He also assured us that Schwarcz was not a francophobe. If Schwarcz was surprised by the reaction, as opposed to ashamed or embarrassed, then he clearly wasn’t paying attention to the chronic francophobic drone in the Anglo media. As for Prof. Fenster’s assertion that his friend is not a francophobe, he meant, probably without realizing it, that he is not particularly francophobic by Anglo standards. But rest assured, among Anglos in Quebec and in Canada, francophobia is the default operating system.

Yes, I know, it’s not francophones that you hate; it’s just the evil separatists. It’s not racism, it’s just politics. After all, you voted for Chrétien, Charest and Couillard, how can you be a francophobe? You’ll often hear a similar thing from right-wing Americans like Rush Limbaugh in regards to Black people. Whenever an attack against Obama or any other Black liberal goes too far, we’re told that it’s not about race; it’s just politics. After all, Rush doesn't go after Black Republicans, does he? No, Blacks who defend the interests of privileged white guys like Rush Limbaugh do get a pass but a Black person who defends the interest of Black people, well that’s a different story.

You see, conservative race-baiters like Limbaugh set their clocks by the dog whistle. Nobody illustrated this principle better than former Reagan and Bush I strategist and Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater, in a kind of "Come to Jesus" moment shortly before his death:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Similarly, Canadians today are also very good at hiding the stench of their racism in order to give it deniability. This is what I like to call Canada’s feel-good racism because it is generally coated in a thick layer of high-mindedness... from which to look down on Quebecers, of course. Unlike regular racism, which at least openly professes its hatred by burning crosses on people’s front yards and the like, feel-good racism tries to preserve the racist’s purity and self-esteem through the generous use of hypocrisy and double standards.

Nasty Quebec!

In 2010, Maclean's magazine published an article called Quebec: The most corrupt province. In it, the author lists a series of corruption scandals, most of which implicate Liberals and those that don't, implicate other Quebec federalists. We are never presented with any evidence that there is any less corruption in other provinces. We do, however, hear about how the PQ tried to clean things up. Why is the title: "Quebec: The most corrupt province"? Why not: "Liberals: The most corrupt party"? OK, it mentions Mulroney, so why not: "Federalists: The most corrupt people in Quebec"? 

But is Quebec really Canada’s most corrupt province? Maybe it's just that Quebec is the only province where bribery, bid-rigging and other malfeasance have been most visibly and spectacularly exposed and tackled? One can make a good case that, in fact, Quebec is the Canadian jurisdiction where the crooks are most likely to be caught.

Quebec is the only province with a permanent anti-corruption task force, l’Unité permanente anti-corruption (UPAC). It is also the first to systematically target organized crime on a large scale and disrupt its activities. And its campaign financing rules are now the strictest in Canada. On a total of 13 provinces and territories, only two apart from Quebec (Manitoba and Nova Scotia) banned corporate contributions to electoral funding. In all others, frontman schemes are unnecessary: businesses can enter into agreements directly with parties to contribute generously. Perhaps the reality is that Quebec is just stricter on corruption and people get busted for things that are legal in the rest of Canada.

In any case, a quick Google search for "Canadian political scandals" and we find a page full of them. Look at that! British Columbia has got twenty different scandals listed while Quebec has only two. But of course, Quebec can't just have a corruption scandal. It has to be the most corrupt. It can't have a big debt, it has to be just like Greece. And so on, you get the point. The boundaries that would normally exists if we were talking about British Columbia or any other province disappear and any exaggeration is permitted. What the dog whistle is saying with this type of yellow journalism and with all the other exaggerations and distortions that we constantly hear about Quebec and its economy is that Quebecers are a lesser people who would starve without the benevolence of English Canadians. The articles don't say it directly but the reader understands it and they repeat it ad nauseum to people like me.

Another good example of the grotesque distortions that we find in the Canadian media is an article that appeared in Saturday Night magazine in 2000 called Colder and Whiter: In Vieux Quebec, ethnic cleansing occurs by attrition by Daniel Sanger. In it the author bemoans the fact that Quebec City is not as ethnically diverse as it once was. He imagines nefarious reasons without giving any evidence, it's always just insinuated. He talks about the Chinese community that seems to have moved on but does not mention the Vietnamese community that has replaced it. Quebec was the gateway to Canada for a long time. Most immigrants passed through Quebec before moving west. Economic centers like Toronto and now Alberta lure people from other regions including Quebec. Sanger takes these innocuous demographic shifts and calls them ethnic cleansing. It's an abuse of language, to be sure, but it is also a racist attack against Quebecers. Just the image used for this article speaks volumes. The dog whistle is saying loud and clear that Quebecers are a bunch of nasty, racist untermenschen.

And of course there was Jan Wong's utter lunacy of an article called Get under the desk. In it she claims a school shooting at Dawson College in 2006 was the result of Quebec's language laws and our "obsession with racial purity". Even federalist lap-dog André Pratte stood up for that one. Yes, even tragedies can be exploited in order to malign Quebecers. All you need is a misunderstanding of an antiquated expression and an ounce of malice. Not so much a dog whistle here, more like a bullhorn.

More recently, the PQ's proposed secularism charter has been the focus of much hysteria. This charter, which is clearly inspired by France's secularism charter, had a controversial component which would have restricted the wearing of religious symbols by employees of the state in order to affirm the state's religious neutrality. Among francophones, the debate was over the necessity of this blanket ban. Many people, including prominent sovereignists like Jacques Parizeau, argued that it went too far. Among most Anglos, however, there was no debate only shrill accusations of racism.

The whole controversy was very similar to the controversy surrounding France's ban on religious symbols in public schools in 2004. Comparisons to France or even comparing Pauline Marois to Jacques Chirac would have been justified but instead the Canadian media went straight to equating the PQ with le Front National, a party that once advocated the mass deportation of immigrants, and... yes, you guessed it, the Nazis. The irony is that only a few years earlier, when André Boisclair, Gilles Duceppe and Amir Khadir took part in a demonstration denouncing Israel's attack on Lebanon, the always hysterical Barbara Kay asked in The rise of Quebecistan if an independent Quebec would be a friend to Islamic terrorists. Do we hate Muslims or do we love them? Both... neither... it doesn't really matter when you're just throwing your feces around as Barbara does when on the topic of Quebec.

The charter debate brought out the old accusation that Quebec nationalism is an "ethnic" nationalism. Anglos are obsessed with Quebec’s allegedly “ethnic” nationalism. The truth is that it’s only Quebec’s modern, post Quiet Revolution form of nationalism that bothers Anglos because it aspires to independence. Quebec’s pre Quiet Revolution form of nationalism on the other hand, with its conservative Catholicism and its emphasis on mere survival with no other ambitions, suited Anglos much better even though it was arguably much more “ethnic”.  

The "ethnic" nationalism accusation is especially hypocritical because it is Canadians themselves who insist on seeing us as nothing more than an ethnic group, so obviously our nationalism must be "ethnic" in their eyes. It is their refusal to recognize us as anything more than that which lead to the constitutional impasse that we find ourselves in today. Certain members of the Canadian elites at the time (Bob Rae first and foremost) denounced the Meech lake accord as being “ethnic” in its concessions to Quebec, even though it applied to the province, the territory, of Quebec as a whole and not to any ethnic group. And yet they would later approve of the treaty with the Nisga'a, which contained explicitly ethnic clauses.

Canada is a prison

So why do they do it? What motivates all of this hypocrisy, these double standards and the racist slander? What fuels the need Canadians have to feel superior to Quebecers? Obviously, there are practical reasons for why Canada would want to smear Quebec's independence movement but I think there are deeper psychological reasons as well. And I believe science, or more precisely a certain psychological experiment conducted in the early 1970's, can provide us with an answer. I'm referring to the Stanford prison experiment. This experiment illustrates perfectly why Canadians behave the way the do towards Quebec and it also explains why it is so difficult to get a majority of Quebecers to support independence.

You racist Quebecers aren't going anywhere!

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. Twenty-four male students were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

You see, our involvement with English Canada stems from a military conquest and occupation that started in 1759. The decisions that we were allowed to make from that point on were quite limited. When we tried to break free in 1837, we were brutally beaten down into submission. For Quebec, Canada was very much a prison. At some point, we are told, it all became consensual and in 1867 we become a willing member of this federation. Of course, independence for Quebec was not an option in 1867 and Canada remained in many ways our prison. Just as in the Stanford experiment, our prison guards became accustomed to being the dominators, to giving orders and getting whatever they wanted. And just as in the Stanford experiment some of the prisoners passively accepted the psychological abuse and became subservient to the prison guards. Together, these two groups make up the bulk of the Quebec Liberal Party. Fortunately, there is a way out of this mindfuck which would be beneficial for all involved: an independent Quebec!

* First image borrowed from Angry French Guy