For your amusement, a laundry list of Montreal evils

Montreal and Quebec City have long had a rather intense rivalry. Thing is, it’s entirely one-sided. Quebec City exists only on the periphery of Montreal’s imagination but, in the minds and media of our provincial capital, la métropole looms very large. Quebec City’s fixation with Montreal could only be described in terms of a massive inferiority complex. It usually manifests itself in snide talk-radio quips, but in today’s Le Soleil, it came in the form of a perplexing rant about Montreal and everything that is wrong with it by Pierre Desjardins, who is apparently a philosophy professor at a Laval cégep.

Desjardins begins his polemic by claiming that Montreal is a city of ghettoes, one divided between the wealthy, anglophone west and the poor, francophone east, with an alienated and marginalized bunch of immigrants stuck in the middle along St. Laurent Boulevard:

On a aussi beaucoup parlé de Montréal comme de la ville aux deux solitudes. Ce qualificatif reste cependant vrai. En fait, plusieurs l’ont dit, Montréal n’est pas une ville, mais deux villes : à l’ouest, la montagne, les arbres, les beaux quartiers et les boutiques de luxe. À l’est : peu d’arbres, des industries — ou ce qu’il en reste—, des manufactures, des quartiers pauvres, des logements insalubres avec une grande concentration de HLM. À ces deux solitudes, il faut en ajouter aujourd’hui une troisième: c’est celle des immigrants de plus en plus nombreux qui se regroupent en ghettos de part et d’autre du boulevard Saint-Laurent. Notons d’ailleurs que ce boulevard, dont on a tant chanté autrefois la poésie, est devenu une poubelle à ciel ouvert où rats et souris se croisent de jour comme de nuit.

Anglos, it seems, live mostly in Westmount, where they do not speak French and deign only to leave their “ghetto” to venture into the east end “in groups, a bit like tourists discovering South America.” Francophones and immigrants, meanwhile, cower in fear of the great Anglo-American economic engine that powers Montreal. “Notons comment les immigrants de Montréal nous considèrent comme leurs frères, c’est-à-dire, tout comme eux, comme de frêles étrangers dans une ville anglophone,” writes Desjardins.

I could point out that some of Montreal’s poorest neighbourhoods are found in the west end, or that large parts of the east end are as verdant and beautiful as anywhere in Montreal, or that Montreal’s immigrants live, for the most part, in extremely diverse, heterogeneous neighbourhoods. But what would be the point? Desjardins’ main goal is to tear Montreal to shreds for the amusement of his Quebec City audience, and his efforts aren’t limited to rehashing decades-old stereotypes about Montreal’s linguistic solitudes. He goes on to dress a laundry list of things that are supposedly wrong with Montreal, complaining about the city’s filth, its lazy blue-collar workers, it lack of river views, its dangerous street gangs, its crazy drivers and the large number of festivals in the summer that “disturb the normal life of the city.” The highlight of his missive is when he declares that no Montrealers feel any affinity for the city; the only true Montrealers, he claims, are suburbanites.

While anti-Toronto sentiment plays well throughout Canada, especially amongst anglo Montrealers, it has nothing on the veritable industry of Montreal bashing that exists in Quebec. The only way to deal with it is to accept it, like Urbania magazine did in its most recent issue, dedicated entirely to our fair metropolis. After 81 pages exploring Montreal’s people, symbols and character, Urbania’s editors, tongues planted firmly in their cheeks, gave the last word to country-dwelling iconoclast Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, who treated us to a piece called “Montréal, ville morte.” You can imagine the rest.