‘Among these fields is situated and seated the said town of Hochelaga, near to and adjoining a mountain…we named this mountain Mont-Royal’, wrote the explorer Jacques Cartier in 1535.
The value one places on history as essential to a country’s present and future is one of the great divisions among civilised people, Canadians included.
Another division peculiar to Canada is the fierce debate over whether Montreal or Toronto is superior, which may never truly die, and hopefully it does not.
If you think a born-and-bred Vancouverite’s opinion is irrelevant to that debate, stop reading now. But if you consider a relative outsider’s view valuable precisely because it is uncoloured by hometown bias, perhaps read on.
People often treat the Montreal–Toronto rivalry as something like a hockey pool, citing demographic data, the total number of head offices and GDP figures. An imperfect comparison would be to declare Milan, rather than Rome, Italy’s greatest city because the former is the modern Italian financial centre.
However busy Milan and Toronto may be, commercial bustle alone is no evidence of glory.
No doubt, Toronto is an important and famous city central to Canadian life. Nobody should deny this or overlook the charms that survive there. Nevertheless, Montreal remains the great Canadian city because no other place from sea to sea has ever come close to shaping history in the same way. Nor has any other city been the setting for so much of the ambition and conflict that made Canadians who they are.
Sentimentality aside, Montreal still commands the largest share of the Canadian imagination today, and that share was greater still in decades past. Even those who scoff at Montreal and the often brutal hang-ups of Laurentian Canada still spend time and energy doing so. While Montreal is no longer Canada’s most populous city, the size of its population has never been the sole reason for its greatness.
