The Lost Massey Lectures (28 page)

These emotions of course are always being presented as reasoned and reasonable but that does not always stand up to inspection. Take, for instance, the word “Balkanization.” Spoken with the ring of authority, “Balkanization” can be made to sound like a compressed history lesson proving the folly of small sovereignties. But what about the Balkans, really?

Before they became small and separate sovereignties after the first World War they had been portions of very large sovereignties indeed, the Turkish and Austro-Hungarian Empires. As portions of large sovereignties they had lain poor, backward and stagnant for centuries. That's how they happened to be poor and backward when at last they became independent. If a fate called Balkanization means anything reasoned at all, it has to mean that the Balkans were somehow made to be poor, backward and generally unfortunate by having been cut up small, but that's simply untrue. Or else it has to mean that if Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania had been joined together in one sovereignty after the Great War, or perhaps had been united with Greece to form a still larger sovereignty, they would be better off now. Who knows? In the nature of the thing there is no shred of evidence either to support such a conclusion or to contradict it.

Consider a scholarly and rational sounding prediction like this one for Canada if Quebec should separate. “Deprived of real authority or purpose, the federal state would simply disintegrate, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918.”
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That appears in a new book by a professor of political science at the University of Alberta. The trouble with his analogy is that the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not disintegrate because a successful separatist movement occurred there. It had its separatists, especially in the
Balkans, some of whom were violent, but the movements were kept in check. The empire was defeated in a great war and as it lay in chaos it was deliberately dismembered by the conquerors. The analogy to Canada is so far-fetched historically and so specious factually that we can only understand it as an emotional cry of anguish—not a true account of how things are in this country.

To understand why sovereignty-association has been raised as a serious issue in Canada at this time, we must look at two cities, Montreal and Toronto. They are responsible for what has been happening in Quebec. Between them, they have converted a province into something more nearly resembling a new nation. Nobody planned this outcome. Nobody even recognized what was happening at the time it happened. The events that worked this transformation don't go back very far; we can date them statistically as having begun in 1941, but that is simply because '41 was a census year. I suspect they actually began in 1939 with the war economy.

Let us begin with the part played by Montreal. Between 1941 and 1971, Montreal grew enormously. In those thirty years, the city more than doubled its population, increasing from a little more than a million persons to more than two million.
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These were the years that led up to and included “the quiet revolution,” the turning point in modern Quebec history, when French Quebec culture came out of its shell, welcomed change instead of resisting it, and moved into the modern world. The 1960's were the decade of the quiet revolution.

Immigrants from other countries contributed to Montreal's growth between 1941 and 1971; so did people from other parts of Canada, and of course some were born there. But the major influx of population was from rural and small town Quebec itself.
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Previously, rural Quebecois had migrated into Montreal, Quebec City and to New England. But nothing in the past resembled this
migration. It dwarfed previous rural-to-city movements within the province. Furthermore, the rapidity with which the movement happened, as well as the absolute numbers of people involved, was unprecedented.

These French-speaking migrants into Montreal spent the 1940's and 1950's finding each other. The quiet revolution of the 1960's was then built on their networks of new interests and relationships: in the arts, in politics, working life, and education. French culture in Montreal was in a quiet ferment, as people built these relationships and put together ambitions and ideas they could not have developed even in a smaller city like the capital, Quebec City.

In the 1960's the evidence of this ferment burst forth in French theatre, music, films and television. Talent and audiences had now found each other. There was a new and rapidly growing readership for Quebec books and periodicals; writers and readers had found each other. At about the same time, for a combination of reasons, new kinds of opportunities finally began opening up to Quebecois in city professions and commerce. The most important of those reasons was the economic growth of Montreal.

Until the early 1960's, Montreal still seemed to be what it had been: an English city with many French-speaking workers and inhabitants. But now, because of the growth and the accompanying cultural processes just described, Montreal had become a French Canadian city with many English-speaking inhabitants. By the time people in Montreal, let alone the rest of Canada, recognized what had been happening, it had already happened.

Out in rural Quebec, the old stronghold of French culture, another kind of quiet revolution was taking place. From farming villages, fishing villages, market towns and mill towns, hundreds of thousands of people, especially young people, were trickling and then pouring into Montreal. As the stream swelled, it had its effects on education and aspirations.

But life also changed for many of the people who stayed put in rural Quebec. A million extra city people eat a lot. And even though many of these extra city people had previously been eating on farms right there in Quebec, feeding them now involved city trade and city money. With this growing city market, and so many young people leaving the farms too, equipment was needed to improve rural productivity. Tractors, trucks, piped water, electrical appliances began showing up in places where, in the past, there would have been neither money to buy them nor much reason to need them.

These changes had a profound effect on religious life in Quebec. Contrary to what most people believe, the Quebec religious revolution, meaning loss of authority by the Catholic Church, was not a cause of the city and rural changes I've mentioned, but a result of them. The local priest's word about the world and its ways was no longer the last word in settlements where almost everyone was now at least distantly acquainted with somebody who had been off to a Montreal university for a secular education; in settlements where people now listened to radio, watched television, went to the movies when they got into town; in settlements where changes in the everyday economy and everyday working methods had burst out of the bounds of traditional ways of life. One and the same force, the great growth surge of Montreal, was simultaneously undermining an old culture in the countryside and developing it into something new in the metropolis, and sending this new city-shaped culture back into the countryside.

Now we need to bring Toronto into the story. Montreal used to be the chief metropolis, the national economic centre of all of Canada. It is an older city than Toronto, and until only a few years ago was larger. At the beginning of this century Toronto was only two-thirds the size of Montreal, and Montreal was much the more
important centre of finance, publishing, wholesaling, retailing, manufacturing, entertainment—everything that goes into making a city economy.

The first small and tentative shifts of finance from Montreal to Toronto began in the 1920's when Montreal banks overlooked the financing of new mining opportunities which were then opening up in Ontario. That neglect created an opportunity for Toronto banks. The stock exchange set up in Toronto for trading mining shares then merged, in 1934, with the older, generalized Toronto stock exchange and by the 1940's the volume of stocks traded in Toronto had exceeded that in Montreal.
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During the great growth surge of Montreal, from 1941 to 1971, Toronto grew at a rate that was even faster. In the first of those decades, when Montreal was growing by about 20%, Toronto was growing by a rate closer to 25%. In the next decade, from 1951 to 1961, when Montreal was adding a bit over 35% its population, Toronto was adding about 45%. And from 1961 to 1971, while Montreal was growing by less than 20%, Toronto was growing by 30%. The result was that Toronto finally overtook Montreal in the late 1970's.
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However, even these measurements are deceptive as measurements of what was happening economically. Thought of as an economic unit or economic force, Toronto has in fact been a great deal larger than Montreal for many years. This is because Toronto forms the centre of a collection of satellite cities and towns, in addition to its suburbs. Those satellites contain a great range of economic activities, from steel mills to art galleries. Like many of the world's large metropolises, Toronto has been spilling out enterprises into its nearby region, causing many old and formerly small towns and little cities to grow. In addition to that, many enterprises that needed a metropolitan market and a reservoir of metropolitan skills and other producers to draw upon have established
themselves in Toronto's orbit, but in places where costs are lower or space more easily available.

The English call a collection of cities and towns with this kind of economic integration a conurbation, a term now widely adopted. Toronto's conurbation, curving around the western end of Lake Ontario, has been nicknamed the Golden Horseshoe. Hamilton, which is in the horseshoe, is larger than Calgary.
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Georgetown, north of Toronto, qualifies as only a small Ontario town, one of many in the conurbation. In New Brunswick it would be a major economic settlement.

The economic growth of Montreal, on the other hand, was not large enough to help create a conurbation. Montreal's growth contained itself within the city and its suburbs. That is why it's deceptive to compare population sizes of the two cities and jump to the conclusion that not until the 1970's had they become more or less equal in economic terms. Toronto supplanted Montreal as Canada's chief economic centre considerably before that, probably even before 1960. Whenever it did happen, it was another of those things that most of us never realized had happened until considerably afterwards.

Because Toronto was growing more rapidly than Montreal in the 1940's, '50's and '60's, and because so many of its institutions and enterprises now served the entire country, Toronto not only drew people from many other countries but from across Canada too. The first two weeks I lived here, back in the late 1960's, it seemed to me that almost everyone I encountered was a migrant from Winnipeg or New Brunswick. Had Montreal remained Canada's pre-eminent metropolis and national centre, many of these Canadians would have been migrating to Montreal instead. In that case, Montreal would not only be even larger than it is today, but—and this is important—it would have remained an English Canadian metropolis. Instead it has become more and more distinctively Quebecois.

In sum, then, these two things were occurring at once: on the one hand, Montreal's growth in the decades 1941-1971 shook up much of rural Quebec and transformed Quebec's culture too. On the other hand, Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe were growing even more rapidly. Montreal, in spite of its growth, was losing its character as the economic centre of an English-speaking Canada and was simultaneously taking on its character as a regional, French-speaking metropolis.

These events, I think, are at the core of Quebec's changed and changing relationship with the rest of Canada. Things can never go back to the way they were when an English-speaking Montreal was the chief economic centre of all of Canada and when life elsewhere in the province was isolated and traditional. These changes are not merely in people's heads. They cannot be reasoned away or even voted away. Nor are they merely intensifications or extensions of the old French-Canadian grievances.

A culture can persist without its own metropolitan capital, as Quebec's did for so long, but it cannot flower and thrive without one. Quebec does have its own cultural metropolis now. But Montreal, to continue thriving as a cultural capital must also thrive economically.

Yet as a regional Canadian city, Montreal's economic future is unpromising. To understand why this is so, we must be aware of Canada's customary view of economic life and its traditional approach to economic development. The Canadian approach emphasizes exploitation and export of resources, to the neglect of industry and services based on manufacturing.

The experience of Canada has been that the largest and most quickly obtained fortunes, whether public or private, come from resources—furs, timber, apples, fish, coal, iron, nickel, gold, silver, grain, cobalt, uranium, aluminum, potash, hydro-electric power, oil, to name some of the most influential. Societies, like individuals,
are shaped by their experiences. Canada's get-rich-quick economic experiences have helped mould all the country's major institutions: the national government, the provincial governments, the banks and other financial establishments. They have shaped the way venture capital is used, the ways subsidies are used, the kinds of development schemes considered most attractive, and the thinking of almost everyone in authority. These are not easy things to change. Even most of the Canadian nationalists who object to foreign ownership of branch plants here do not seem to be aware that ownership is a superficial matter if Canada, in reality, does not create industry and develop branch plants of its own.

When one dominant approach to economic life and economic wealth has been pursued as consistently as it has been here, and for as long as it has been here, the experience gets thoroughly built into the way things work. It especially gets built into the uses of capital. Dazzling sums of money are available for resource exploitation and export, and for a few other schemes, usually of grandiose proportions. But although there are some exceptions, especially in Toronto, almost no capital goes into development of the many, many smaller, humdrum and more humble kinds of work. It is this kind of work, taken altogether, that builds up creative city economies and, along with them, an industrially and commercially strong national economy.