Montreal and its suburbs hold just over 4.6 million people.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
Pop quiz: What is Canada’s second largest city?
Montreal, of course. According to Statistics Canada, the city and its suburbs hold just over 4.6 million people. That’s as big as 1½ Greater Vancouvers, or 2½ Calgarys.
The numbers don’t lie, but their context comes with an asterisk. Within the province, Montreal is imagined as Quebec’s metropolis, not Canada’s second city. In the rest of Canada, a similar outlook holds; news coverage tends to present the place and its people as a “them” rather than an “us.” It’s only a half-hour drive from Ontario to the outskirts of Montreal, but Calgary and Vancouver are psychologically closer.
Thirty years ago last week, a bare majority of Quebeckers voted No, and the federalist forces eked out the narrowest referendum victory. The near-death experience is partly why, 30 years later, talk of independence is less popular than ever.
A recent Léger poll found that only 28 per cent of the province’s voters want another referendum. If one were held, two-thirds would vote No. Asked how the possibility of an independent Quebec made them feel, just 29 per cent answered that it made them joyful, while 11 per cent said it left them indifferent – and 53 per cent said it filled them with worry.
Opinion: How did Quebec get cultural nationalism mostly right?
The Parti Québécois, which is likely to win next year’s provincial election, has promised to hold another vote on independence (or sovereignty, or sovereignty association, or whatever new term may be required to overcome opposition to a hard break with Canada). I wouldn’t bet on the PQ following through.
The Coalition Avenir Québec came to power in 2018 in part because it pledged to be a nationalist party that would not bid for independence, and would end talk of referendums. The government’s popularity is today plumbing new depths, but not because of the no-more-referendums policy. Its commitment to break with the counterproductive past is one of the few areas where it remains aligned with a strong majority of voters.
The result of the 1995 referendum was that Quebec stayed part of Canada, and our national fever finally dissipated. This is no small thing.
But as part of a series of movements that started long before 1995, and continue to this day, a relationship of perpetually irritated proximity has settled into one of calm disinterest. There is good in that, but also sadness.
You can see both in Montreal’s evolving place in Canada and Quebec – in hard economic facts, and even more in the collective imagination.
From long before Confederation until the 1970s, Montreal was not only Canada’s biggest and most important city, it was the centre of both Canadas – English Canada and French Canada. The railway that tied the country to the Pacific was headquartered there, as was the money that backed it. St. James Street was the Wall Street of Canada; The Montreal Star was the country’s top newspaper. French Canada’s intellectual life emanated from Montreal, but so did much of English Canada’s – from Stephen Leacock and Hugh MacLennan to Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen.
And the constitutional wars of the 1960s to the 1990s caused Montreal to remain the magnetic North Pole of Canadian politics, long after it had been eclipsed economically. From Pierre Trudeau versus René Levesque to Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien versus Lucien Bouchard and Jacques Parizeau, these were intramural fights.
The two solitudes had psychological distance, but geographic intimacy. The lines were drawn block by block on the streets of Montreal, but they also intertwined there.
All of that is now a very long time ago.
On the evening of Oct. 29, 1995, I got in my car in Toronto, and started driving to Montreal. In the early hours of Oct. 30, referendum day, I arrived in Dollard des Ormeaux, where I grew up. Driving down an empty St. John’s Boulevard (it’s officially Boulevard St. Jean, but nobody called it that when speaking English), I passed a group of about 10 cars, rolling in convoy and with Canadian flags out their windows.
They turned into the parking lot of the strip mall at the corner of Roger Pilon, circled, paused for a moment, and then headed back into the night.
The civil wars in Yugoslavia were top of mind in 1995, and as I watched my neighbours flying their flags – my flag – I wondered how badly things might go after sunrise, and on the next morning. I wondered what new conflicts lay ahead, and what violent denouement they might give birth to.
The place where I grew up voted 90 per cent “No” that day, as everyone knew it would. Carving Quebec off Canada was not going to be a bloodless real estate transaction.
Thirty years later, I still wonder how differently, and how much more tragically, things might have turned out. In other countries, at other times, they usually have.
The Quebec-Canada relationship has been drained of the passions that set us at each other’s throats. Few countries have achieved as much.
But avoiding a hard political separation brought a series of other, softer separations. We’ve stayed together through a gentle parting of ways. We can both celebrate that, and regret it.