Finding hope in Montréal
Anthony Bourdain said, “Without Montreal, Canada would be hopeless.” He was right.
It was perfect. Before me sat a fat pile of meat, half a foot tall and sizzling atop a creamy garlic and capers sauce. Halved tomatoes nestled within the curve of the bone, a perfectly fresh and acidic accompaniment for the rich, steamy goodness on my plate. A gorgeous young lad came by with another rhubarb cocktail. I was at Au pied de cochon, the first stop on my Montréal vacation.
Anthony Bourdain once called de cochon’s head honcho, Martin Picard, the best chef in Montréal. You can add my experience to whatever catalogue of evidence stands in his favour. I ate a week’s worth of amazing food during my time in la belle province—including a classic steak dinner at Gibby’s and a menagerie of smoked meat at historic Schultz’s deli—but nothing compares to Au pied de cochon. I will dream of that pork shank et le pouding chomeur until I die.
You may assume the remainder of my vacation savoured of anticlimax, but the rest of Montréal didn’t just not disappoint me, it set new standards. I know I’m not all that worldly, but if I had to pick one big city to revisit I think it would be Montréal.
The only real obstacle I faced while enjoying Canada’s greatest city was, naturally, the language barrier.
I really don’t speak much French. Every secondary and post-secondary lesson on how to conjugate avoir et être? Worthless. My most recent Duolingo streak? Abandoned last fall. My Rosetta Stone subscription? Lost to time. I might know just enough phrases to get by, but you don’t learn a new language when you don’t have opportunities to speak it at home, simple as that.
You think your imposter syndrome is bad? I walked into a different restaurant every night for a whole week, including Au pied du chochon, and recited some version of “Bonsoir! Pour Alexandre DeLorme, merci.” The true, francophone version of my name was enough to earn preferential treatment, but the facade ended quickly when I inevitably revealed my authentic self in conversation.
To be clear, you’ll do fine in Montréal if you don’t know any French, especially downtown and the more touristy areas near the ferris wheel and Notre-Dame basillica. There are a handful of anglo neighbourhoods with centuries of history and influence, but not all of Montréal is so accomodating, and most of Quebec is virtually inaccessible to those without a working knowledge of the language. I think this trip might be what finally gets me to learn French seriously. I may, at least, graduate from listening to Coeur de pirate and annoying that little green owl.
I owe a debt to Jon Milton for helping me along. Jon is a comrade who worked with me for two years at the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees but is once again living his best life back home in Montréal. We hung out a few evenings—he even gave me a ride on the back of his cargo bike—and he was more than patient when fielding all my questions and observations which, to him, must have seemed laughably ignorant. One usefull phrase Jon taught me is “Aweille crisse!” an almost literal translation of “Let’s fucking go!” I hope everyone is so lucky to have a friend like Jon.
A phrase I did not expect to use so often, however, was entirely English: “Oh, me? I’m just here as a tourist.”
By coincidence, several activists from across the country arrived in Montréal just days before me, including a large and influential delegation from Alberta. They came for workshops and training to prepare for the launch of a new progressive organization, and Jon and I ran into them at the new, co-operatively owned bar milton parc entirely by accident. Two of the Albertan attendees were even from Lloydminster. I wonder if anyone noticed I stood a bit taller after I learned there are such people braving the border city’s racist and reactionary forces.
I can’t spoil the details—and, in truth, not many were revealed to me—but if these new and old friends are the ones establishing this organization’s goals, chapters, and strategies, we should expect big things. If nothing else, we can at least expect some banger karaoke nights amidst the societal collapse that persists despite their efforts.
Three days later, Jon and I got together with some independent journalists, labour scholars, and activists at parc la fontaine. André Goulet of the Harbinger Media Network organized our little party. There was, yet again, an Alberta-majority, which almost felt like a shame simply because we all can, of course, just hang out anytime. But this was different; we were in Montréal.
Goulet and Harbinger Media do good work. I am not much of a podcast person, but I know other people are, and the Harbinger network is reaching an audience no one else in Canada is. I recommend the Alberta Advantage podcast for anyone looking to learn more about the province’s surprisingly leftist past and our present political situation. Strangely enough—this really was news to me—where I thought Quebec would be fertile ground for independent media, it is instead a bit of a desert right now. The exception is pivot, which you should follow for left media en français. Be on the lookout for their upcoming report on AirBnB.
Later in the week, Goulet organized a similar soirée with Paris Marx, the tech (or anti-tech) writer from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Once again, humble parc la fontaine played host to some of the most influential, radical organizers and writers the Canadian left has to offer (and I was there, too).
Bourdain said Montréal is the place where all the cool kids hang out. I should not be the one to judge whether this collection of activists and I attest to his assertion, but sure, why not? I certainly felt as if I were cool and with the cool kids, or, if not exactly cool, like I was at least doing something more interesting than I have at any point during my decade in Edmonton.
Even my old cab driver to the airport said Montréal was cool. Specifically, he called it a city where people find escape. He moved there from Haiti in 1991, two years before I was born, and said a lot has changed since then. We had a lively conversation about the greedy 1% and the spikes in rent, the latter tenuously kept at bay by lease transfers, a practice the province is trying to end.
My chauffeur then went on and on about the French people themselves, how they invade everywhere but leave nowhere better than as they found it, how even the French here in la belle province are occupying land that is not theirs. His voice, even in tortured English, betrayed sadness but also conviction; how could I possibly disagree?
We spoke more of the Haitian revolution, of all the battles Napoleon and other French armies lost through time. Shortly before we arrived at the airport, I asked: “So then what are the two of us doing here?” He sighed as a way of acknowledgement. “Well,” he said, “we are all looking for better, aren’t we?”
Montréal and Quebec have their problems. You may run into an alarming number of Confederate flags in rural Alberta, but only in Quebec will you find people and politicians who are so openly, disgustingly racist. Consider: I had just unlocked a Bixi one morning when a man approached me, asked where I’m from, and then asked if Edmonton also “had an Arab problem.” I quickly pedalled off toward parc du mont-royal.
It is an alien dynamic. One Albertan friend who moved to Montréal from Calgary described Quebecers as a people enamoured with robust public services and regressive social values—the opposite of what progressive politicians and their capitalist allies foster in Alberta.
Still, I can’t escape my driver’s words: “We are all looking for better, aren’t we?”
Everything I experienced in Montréal was all about maximums. Sometimes those maximums were contradictory, like when the maximum of bike infrastructure and active transportation collides with an all-poutine diet. Or the maximum of vitality alongside the maximum of leisure; the maximum of pride alongside the maximum of hospitality; the maximum of modernity alongside the maximum of tradition and history. I think these and other contradictions, and the resulting synthesis I do not yet grasp, is what truly interests me about the place.
Unlike so much of where I have been in Canada, Montréal feels like an actual polis. It feels like a real city build for real people, not just an old Fort that got some highways installed once resource extraction picked up.
Edmonton likes to call itself the festival city, but in Montréal, there’s a festival going on in a different neighbourhood every other night of the week. In Edmonton, you can bike along the river, but in Montréal, you can bike everywhere. That bustling, citizen-focused experience you can only get on Whyte Ave? Every neighbourhood in Montréal has one or two streets like that, and they are fully blocked off for pedestrians during the summer. I know this is all difficult for western folk to imagine—we really don’t see anything like it in the prairies.
But we could.
I am reminded of some relatively new infrastructure Jon Milton showed me. As it turns out, a city can simply decide to destroy a freeway overpass and transform it into a slower, greener, pedestrian-friendly street. A city can simply decide to annex a parking lot next to la fontaine and turn it into a course where children can learn to ride their bikes. And, while we’re at it, we can build baseball diamonds and public washrooms and simply allow alcohol and barbecues all over that same central park.
Montréal is a vision of how things could be. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it is a glimpse of how things could improve in a world where ordinary people are discouraged and outright punished for demanding better. It is, for an outsider like me, a new source of optimism.
And so, at the end of my vacation, I find myself in agreement with the late chef. Without Montréal, its people, and my time spent with them, I really would feel hopeless.