Comment by michael1999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael1999 | Hacker News Reader

Mirabel was well planned, but was undone by events.

Montréal in the 19060s was the undisputed centre of Canada for business, culture, population, sport, politics, and international relations. Canada expected to grow by millions of people, and we expected a large number of them to settle in Montréal. 35 miles was a modest buffer zone anticipating enormous suburban sprawl.

The whole project was derailed in the 70s by the terrorism of the FLQ, and then the 1980 secession referendum. Suddenly, banks, insurance companies, and foreign offices took flight and moved on down the road to Toronto. Montréal _lost_ hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs, and hundreds of thousands people as anglos and jews fled. Montréal sunk into a 15 year depression. Toronto became the new centre of Canadian business, culture, and sport. Toronto became a major Jewish city, and immigration shifted for good. The influx triggered a property bubble (and then the condo-crash of 1989).

The growth of Toronto of the last 40 years was planned for Montréal, and had it happened there, Mirabel would be a thriving international airpot. Toronto was unprepared, but Montréal had been planning for decades. To this day, Montréal _still_ has more subway track than TO.

mtl was absolutely not the indisputed business center of Canada in the 1960s.

Headquarters and capital were already moving towards Toronto by the 60s, following the opening of the St-Lawrence Seaway, the growing importance of the american economy for Canada and the progression of the quiet revolution which saw the province become way less interesting for the old money from the Golden Square Mile.

The FLQ was also most active in the 60s, culminating in 1970 with the October Crisis and then nearly seized to exist in the 70s/80s bar the occasional bombing by the RCMP (see the Keable, Mcdonald commissions and Robert Samson)

The 1980 referendum did lead to what a few economists dubbed the "Montreal Effect", and there's certainly some factual basis to it in the form of the flight of many anglophones from the province, but arguing that the sovereignty movement was mostly if not solely responsible for this trend we were seeing before it was on the radar instead of precipitating the ongoing changes is overstating the case.

That said, Mirabel was a disaster regardless of the following growth of mtl. It was rushed for the Olympics, the plans to properly connect it fell before it became clear that mtl's population wouldn't grow as fast as predicted and airlines absolutely loathed it from day one.

I’m not sure we disagree. I consider the quiet revolution, the FQL, the nationalist movement, and the PQ to be all of a piece -- the same thing in different generational clothing. I'll agree that far-sighted foreign money saw the writing on the wall as early as the 60s and started making new investments outside of Quebec But actually moving running businesses is much more disruptive, and only happened later. The whole process took decades, and culturally, Montreal was the capital well into the early 80s. Toronto didn't even have a baseball team until 77.

I probably underweight the impact of the seaway. Me experience is in office work. And there, Hogtown was decidedly a solid second city -- like Chicago, or Lyon. Commercial banking was booming. But RBC, BMO, and many insurance companies still had their head-quarters in Montréal in the 1960s. RBC moved their headquarters in 1976, and BMO moved in 1977. Sun Life moved in 1978.

It think it is obvious that the condo boom/crash of the 1980s was a direct consequence of 400k wealthy people moving en mass over a decade. Just an enormous bolus of money.

The discussions of the day make are explicit that the PQ, the nationalist movement, and bill 101 in particular were driving the exodus.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/history-through-...

As for Mirabel - agree. The plans made sense in the 1960s when the planning started, but the shift to Toronto was underway before they broke ground in the mid 70s. But politics is run by older people, and their imaginations are rooted in the past, not the future. Toronto has the mirror problem -- run by Orange-order children who long for the days of zipping down the Kingsway to downtown in 15 minutes. We're only now moving into a generation of leaders who grew up with Toronto as the centre of Canada, and realizing we need infrastructure to match. We spent 40 years without building a thing while millions moved here.

And who knows -- maybe they wouldn't have all left if you didn't regard them as "anglos and jews"

   > Toronto became a major Jewish city

I am confused by this part. Can you please explain? On the surface, it doesn't read well. Maybe my English isn't so good.

It means there are lots more Jews living in Toronto now.

'major' is in terms of its relevance to the wider Jewish community, which is inevitably going to be affected by how many members live there.

None of the various sorts of people being stupid about Jews are involved :)

Yes. I mean it in the same way that Toronto is a major Italian city. We have more people identifying as Italians than all but 6 cities in Italy.

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