Excerpts from Mark Steyn:
There was a big anglo exodus when the separatist government was first elected 30 years ago, and the city has never recovered from that population adjustment. The big corporate HQs soon followed: the Bank of Montreal is no longer headquartered in Montreal, etc. If you drive west to Toronto, you head out of Montreal on a four-lane autoroute and by the time you're on the outskirts of Toronto it's some crazy New Jersey Turnpike-type gazillion-lane nightmare full of feeder lanes and express lanes. In other words, the Montreal-Toronto traffic's all one way. ...
John O'Sullivan and I occasionally discussed Montreal, and he observed that a big-city heritage without big-city overcrowding can be very pleasant: You've still got all the art galleries and symphony orchestras and so on. You've got tickets for Pavarotti at the Place des Arts. Curtain up, 7.30pm. So you leave at 7.20, park outside the front steps and stroll in. As John put it, societies in the early stages of decline can be very agreeable - and often more agreeable than societries trying to cope with prosperity and rapid growth.
Which brings me to my usual everything-comes-back-to-demography shtick. Precisely because the first stages of decline are so agreeable, it's very hard to accept it as such. Part of the problem in Europe is that, when chaps like yours truly shriek "Run for your lives! The powder keg's about to go up!", etc, the bon vivant enjoying his Dubonnet at the sidewalk cafe thinks: Are you crazy? Life's never been better. Civilized decline can be so charming you don't notice it's about to accelerate into uncivilized decline.
Actually, Montreal's decline started way before the election of the separatists. It started at the end of WW2 when the usa's economy made a transition towards the west and when the st-laurent canal was built, making it useless for boats to stop at Montreal.
Posted by: Dan | 05/01/2009 at 03:09 PM