Neha Chandrachud is a media strategist and writer living in Montreal. She is currently developing two television series and has previously reported on politics and culture across Canada and the United States.
It was the summer of 2012, and I was walking a pal’s golden retriever to the dépanneur near Lionel-Groulx metro station when I was intercepted by a young woman with a clipboard. Perhaps she could sense I was an anglophone and that I was a bit hungover – the ideal victim to be lured in by the pitch she was delivering in rapid-fire French – and obliviously, I nodded along and let her guide me to a stall selling plants a few feet away.
Little did I know I had just been initiated into Quebec’s most sacred tradition: becoming a mark on Just for Laughs Gags.
This was perhaps my most seminal experience in Montreal, and it reflects my life in the city over the past 10 years: magical, frustrating, hilarious. But lately, I’d add another word to that list: siloed. For anglos in their 30s, like me – particularly those of us who are visible minorities – life in Quebec has become more and more onerous. Increasingly, it feels like the government is trying to push us further toward the perimeter of the public sphere. The message from the top is clear: Quebec wants my tax dollars, my investments and the cultural benefits of my creative output, but it does not want me.
Since taking office in 2018, Premier François Legault and his Coalition Avenir Québec party have effectively mainstreamed anti-immigrant rhetoric across the province while creating deep social divisions. Bill 96, which claims to protect the French language by, among other things, requiring that immigrants and refugees learn French within six months of arriving in the province to communicate with the government, and Bill 21, which prohibits certain Quebec public servants from wearing religious symbols on the job and primarily targets Muslims, Sikhs and Jews, are as authoritarian as they are ludicrous.
To justify these policies, rammed through using the notwithstanding clause, the Premier has claimed that Quebec’s culture and language are under siege. But this narrative is exaggerated; despite a 2.3-per-cent decline in the percentage of Quebeckers who speak French at home, the same report from Statistics Canada also indicated an increase in bilingualism and the overall number of people whose mother tongue is French. The president of the Association for Canadian Studies has also argued that Statscan may have inflated the decline of French by not incorporating those with multiple mother tongues in its definition, as it did for English speakers.
Most recently, there has been moral panic in Quebec over the appointment of Amira Elghawaby as Canada’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. Ms. Elghawaby has come under fire for a 2019 op-ed in which she and her co-author wrote that “the majority of Quebeckers appear to be swayed not by the rule of law, but by anti-Muslim sentiment”; she apologized for her comments multiple times, clarifying that she does not believe Quebeckers are Islamophobic. But that did not stop the province’s four main political parties from calling for her resignation, signalling that there is no room for ideological dissent in Quebec. Not only does this prove Ms. Elghawaby’s initial point, but it indicates how Quebec’s politicians are able to weaponize populist rhetoric to nudge the province toward an ethnic and religious monolith.
To make matters worse, hate crimes in Montreal are surging. According to the most recent data from Statscan, they hit an all-time high in 2020, having increased by a shocking 80 per cent from the year before. It seems like each week brings a new video of yet another racist encounter somewhere in the city: of slurs being hurled at a South Asian family in their own driveway in LaSalle, for instance, or of a Black man being handcuffed after being accused of stealing his own car – a reminder that Black and Indigenous people in Montreal are four to five times likelier to be stopped by police.
Yet even as the bigots get louder, the Premier has been busy linking immigration to violence and extremism (even though Quebec’s two deadliest mass shootings were carried out by white men born in the province), denying the existence of systemic racism in the health care system (despite the brutal treatment of Joyce Echaquan, who was forced to endure racist taunts in a Joliette hospital as she died), and selecting a white member of the legislature to be Quebec’s first anti-racism minister.
Quebec’s politicians seem ignorant to the two truths that exist at once: that Quebeckers suffered terribly under the Catholic Church for decades and are rightfully skeptical of organized religion, and that legislated hyper-secularism is itself a form of extremism that feeds xenophobes while stealing agency from the marginalized. Mr. Legault’s attacks on the English language thus feel like an attack on the outsider, the foreigner, the Other; indeed, the family in LaSalle who faced racist taunts were also attacked for speaking English, though they are fluent in French. And while he may well believe in his government’s protectionist policies and his divisive rhetoric, the Premier vastly underestimates how deeply Quebec will suffer if he continues to try to antagonize young, multicultural English-speakers so much that they leave the province.
The province is grappling with a severe labour shortage, straining business owners and forcing some companies to turn down or cancel billions of dollars worth of contracts or investments. Yet, in 2018, two out of three graduates of Quebec’s universities were leaving the province to find work elsewhere – diminishing a potentially large pool of bilingual workers. Quebec’s English-speaking population is also younger on average than the French-speaking population, meaning that their departure has disproportionate effects on the economy.
Quebec simply cannot afford a repeat of the 1970s, when tens of thousands of English Montrealers left the city after the October Crisis and the 1976 election of the separatist Parti Québécois government. This “brain drain” irreparably damaged Quebec’s economy and allowed Toronto to become Canada’s financial centre.
Yet over the past few years, I’ve watched some of my closest friends pack their lives into U-Haul vans and make the monotonous trek down Highway 401 to “Lesser Canada” – or Toronto, as the joke goes. For them, an existence on the fringes of society – where it feels like Mr. Legault wishes anglos would remain – feels untenable. The exodus of anglophones in their late twenties from Montreal is such a common cultural practice that it was recently referenced in the plaintive Boygenius track Emily I’m Sorry: “Just take me back to Montreal/I’ll get a real job, you’ll go back to school.”
For my racialized friends, leaving Montreal is also often motivated by the pursuit of life in a city that isn’t actively regressing when it comes to race issues. In the 2019 Télé-Québec documentary Briser le Code, a racialized woman shares how her Québécoise mentor counselled her that a good immigrant in Quebec is “quelqu’un qui dérange pas” – someone who doesn’t rock the boat. My own experiences here have mainly been limited to the quiet kind of prejudice that Canadians like to pretend makes us better than our American counterparts – though there have also been occasional outbursts of explicit racism, like the time a food-delivery worker screamed that “people like you are so ungrateful.”
And yet, like thousands of my peers, I continue to live in my beloved Montreal.
I stay because I love the home I have built, the incredible creative opportunities opening up in front of me, and the dozens of friends I have made – old, young, Anglo, Québécois, Haitian, Arab, French. I stay because I appreciate how safe Montreal is compared to Paris or New York, and how much more exciting and unorthodox it feels compared to Toronto or Vancouver. I stay because it is livable and walkable and affordable, and because I still believe that it belongs to anyone who chooses to claim it.
The late Anthony Bourdain once remarked that “without Montreal, Canada would be hopeless.” Perhaps Mr. Legault would benefit from a reminder that what inspired Mr. Bourdain’s words, at least in part, was Montreal’s embrace of both its francophone and anglophone traditions. Because whether the Premier likes it or not, English speakers, immigrants, and religious and ethnic minorities are a part of this province’s social fabric – and its future.