And so Montreal was made up of two very different worlds, with language and religion separating French-speaking Catholics from English-speaking Protestants. Each group had its own churches, its own education system all the way up to university, and its own hospitals, social services, social and cultural organizations, and newspapers. They lived apart in Montreal. Between them was the Irish community, with one foot in the English-speaking world and the other in the world of Catholicism dominated by French Canadians, but the relative size of the Irish population was waning. The small Jewish community, another group set apart by language and religion, was boosted by the arrival of a wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe in the 1880s.
Despite seemingly rigid ethnic and religious barriers, groups and individuals did interact around town—at the workplace, in stores, out on the street, and in public places—and exchanges were common. Co-existence is necessarily a dynamic process in any city. Social divides only added to the diversity, with each group having its own bourgeois and working class, its own elites high above the masses. At times, ethnic or religious solidarity overcame other barriers, while at different moments social solidarity seemed to predominate. In other words, Montreal society in the late nineteenth century was a complex whole, a juxtaposition of distinct worlds in constant interaction.
CHAPTER 8
Canada’s Leading Metropolis
1896–1914
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the First World War, Montreal experienced one of the strongest growth spurts in its history. Its population exploded and spread further and further from the city centre. The city was a hive of activity and reached the peak of its powers as the biggest in Canada.
Explosive growth
The numbers speak for themselves. A city that had no more than 217,000 inhabitants in 1891 (250,000 including the suburbs) had 468,000 in 1911 (528,000 with the suburbs), a gain of over a quarter of a million people in twenty years.
Needless to say, the birth rate alone couldn’t explain such growth; it was tens of thousands of new arrivals that made the difference. The immigration movement in Canada had slowed considerably in the late nineteenth century, but picked up again at the start of the twentieth century to reach new heights. Part of the wave flowed into Montreal. So who exactly decided to come and live in the city? First and foremost, the English, particularly skilled workers looking for factory jobs. But Montreal also saw a new phenomenon: the arrival of European immigrants not from the British Isles. Of these immigrants, by far the majority were Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, but there were also Italians, Poles, and Russians, all looking to escape the misery of their countries of origin. French and English Canadians also continued to leave the countryside for the city in droves. At the turn of the century, Montreal was a magnet for those hoping to improve their lot and start afresh.
Montreal’s remarkable economic growth bore out this migration. Every sector of the city’s economy was given a shot in the arm. This was the case for international trade and navigation, for example. Agricultural development in Western Canada made Montreal the country’s biggest port of export for grain. To keep up with demand, the Harbour Commission had to quickly modernize its facilities and build new wharves and grain elevators. That was when what we know today as Montreal’s Old Port was developed, along with the eastern section of the harbour near the suburban town of Maisonneuve. Expansion of the railways also boosted Montreal’s role as Canada’s transportation hub.
The manufacturing industry soared like never before. Many factories expanded to cope with growing needs and new ones—like the CPR Angus Shops or the Canadian Vickers shipyards—sprang up, more often than not in the suburbs, where land was available. Meanwhile, Canada’s rapid development helped consolidate the financial sector. Montreal banks were still undeniably leaders in the field, despite the growth of their rivals in Toronto. As the country’s biggest businesses merged, spawning companies like Dominion Textile and Montreal Light, Heat, and Power, the Montreal Stock Exchange and the city’s financial stakeholders grew in importance.
Montreal fully performed its role as Canada’s leading metropolis. The city’s financial institutions, railway companies, and wholesalers played an active role in the development of Western Canada, where branches sprung up and new markets were made available for Montreal’s industrial plants. They were also involved in developing natural resources and expanding the manufacturing sector in Quebec and Ontario.
All this activity brought major changes to the city and surrounding area. The downtown was dotted with office towers where large companies had their headquarters. Rue Saint-Jacques, or St. James Street as it was then known, became Canada’s business power centre, with each bank having its own distinctive building there, decorated with huge columns that aimed to show the world just how sound they were.
The industrial development along the Lachine Canal spread westward, while similar development in Sainte-Marie-Hochelaga expanded eastward towards Maisonneuve and Longue-Pointe, and the garment industry underwent a northward expansion along Saint-Laurent boulevard, also known as The Main.
The biggest phenomenon of all, though, was the extraordinary growth of the suburbs as the city underwent a population boom. Urban sprawl extended well beyond the city limits and a number of small municipalities expanded rapidly, Saint-Henri, Saint-Louis, and Maisonneuve, the biggest among them. This development came on the cusp of a new technology: the electric tramway, introduced in 1892. Streetcar lines shot out in all directions, helping people get from A to B and allowing Montrealers to live further away from their work. Montreal tried to make the most of this expansion. The annexation movement, which started between 1883 and 1893, picked up again with a vengeance in 1905 and kept going until 1918. Montreal added on 33 new areas in all, swallowing up 23 distinct municipalities in the process. When the dust settled, the city was five times bigger than in 1867.
A changing society
Population growth brought about major social change. This was particularly true about ethnic makeup, the result of migratory movement. Migration to the city from the Quebec countryside kept French Canadians at a little over 60 percent of the population. Montrealers of British stock, on the other hand, saw their share fall, even though their numbers were still growing in absolute terms: in 1901, they still made up one third of the city’s population, but had dropped back to a quarter by 1911.
The sea change was brought about by the rise in other ethnic groups. Representing less than 2.5 percent of Montreal’s population in the nineteenth century, they reached 5 percent in 1901 and close to 11 percent in 1911. More than half were Jews. Concentrated along Saint-Laurent boulevard, the Jewish population—Yiddish in language and culture—were mainly workers in the garment industry who lived close to their shops. They had many synagogues, cultural organizations, and charities, and even a daily Yiddish newspaper, reproducing the organizations of their Lithuanian shtetl in Montreal. The Italians were the other group of significance. Mainly employed in the construction industry, they started to form a neighbourhood of their own in the north end of the city and already had two parishes by 1910. Add into the mix a few thousand other Europeans and a couple of hundred Chinese, who were beginning to bunch together on La Gauchetière, and Montreal was looking more and more like a patchwork of various ethnic origins, even though groups of French and British origin continued to predominate.
Social differences remained stark. The higher echelons of the British bourgeoisie retained their dominant position. Having become much richer with the prosperity of the day, its members enjoyed luxurious lifestyles in their huge homes in the Golden Square Mile and Westmount. Individuals such as Cornelius Van Horne, Thomas Shaughnessy, Richard B. Angus, Vincent Meredith, and Herbert Holt were at the very top of Canada’s social ladder, and their decisions shaped the development of the whole country.
For its part, the French-speaking bourgeoisie continued the ascent it had begun the previous century. Economic growth also
gave it the opportunity to grow richer and enjoy a better lifestyle. Even though some members like Louis-Joseph Forget and Frédéric-Liguori Béique reached the heights of Canada’s financial world, most owned medium-sized businesses that essentially focused on the Montreal or Quebec markets. Businessmen such as Oscar Dufresne, Hormisdas Laporte, Trefflé Berthiaume, and G.-N. Ducharme played a major role in the economics and politics of Montreal and its suburbs. Meanwhile, small neighbourhood businesses multiplied as the city expanded both in size and population.
The working class, however, continued to make up the bulk of the population. The manufacturing, transportation, and construction sectors employed the lion’s share of the labour force. Skilled workers also took advantage of the favourable labour market. More and more joined trade unions, almost all of which were affiliated with international unions that had originated in the United States and were now expanding. Skilled workers took a greater interest in politics, thanks to the Labour Party and its workers’ clubs. This led to Alphonse Verville, a plumber and president of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, being elected to the House of Commons in 1906, and to the election of carpenter Joseph Ainey, a union organizer, as a member of the city’s Board of Control in 1910. For their part, labourers and unskilled factory workers had more precarious conditions, characterized by low wages, seasonal unemployment, and job insecurity. A group of white-collar office workers and store clerks was also emerging and tended to have steadier employment, but wouldn’t really take off as a social group until after the First World War.
In the French-Canadian milieu and among the Irish and the Italians, the Catholic Church remained a social force. Parishes proliferated as the city grew in size and number. Religious orders also increased their numbers and endeavoured to meet the growing demand for social services and education. The Church tried to meet the challenges posed by an urban society that had become more complex and diversified, and where people were becoming more materialistic.
Archbishop Paul Bruchési tried his best to stand up to these new values, impose stricter morals, and censor newspapers and entertainment, but his efforts were not exactly a success. If the Church were to continue to control society, it would have to rely on new organizations, like the École sociale populaire (an organization dedicated to spreading the Catholic social doctrine) that sought to reconcile religion with life in the city.
City life
The social differences that characterized the population of Montreal were naturally reflected in living conditions. The grand bourgeois residence on Sherbrooke and the tiny apartment in Griffintown or in the “faubourg à m’lasse” (literally the molasses suburb) were worlds apart. The distance between them was driven home by the physical appearance. On the one hand, roomy houses boasted handsome stone facades and were surrounded by trees and lawns. On the other, poorly lit brick rowhouses were starved of greenery and had muddy lanes and yards cluttered with old wooden sheds.
But the contrast wasn’t entirely black and white. Housing in Montreal covered a broad spectrum. Generally speaking, even working-class homes were improving. There was none of the overcrowding that was found in some European and American cities. Backhouses, still common in the 1890s, disappeared almost entirely. New homes, which were plentiful, better met the demands of modern living: inside toilets, baths, gas cooking, coal heating, electric lighting. These changes came gradually, though: there were still plenty of filthy, dilapidated homes to be regularly denounced by the apostles of social reform.
In fact, one of the most significant phenomena of this period was the elites becoming aware of the social problems caused by urbanization and industrialization. For years, they had been content to give to the poor, but now the voices calling for far-reaching reforms were growing louder. They gave rise to a current of social reform that set up a great many organizations and set about tackling many of the problems at the same time. Most energy was devoted to the health system, which was also the scene of the greatest advances.
It must be said that Montreal in the late nineteenth century remained a danger to public health. The mortality rate, particularly for infants, was high and more than one child in four died before turning one year old. The situation was worse for French Canadians than for other groups. In the early twentieth century, doctors stepped up their public health campaign, backed by businessmen and women associated with the feminist movements and charities. Their most distinguished spokesperson was Dr. Emmanuel-Persillier Lachapelle, founder of the Notre-Dame hospital and president of the Quebec Provincial Board of Health.
Efforts at improving hygiene concentrated on water since poor quality water was a vector for disease. Simply adding chlorine to the city’s water in 1910 was enough to reduce the mortality rate. A few years later, filtration further improved the quality of the water available in Montreal and its suburbs. To improve the health of the city’s children, two specialized hospitals were set up at the start of the century and in 1910 a network of free community clinics—Les Gouttes de lait (literally, “the drops of milk”)—was tasked with handing out pasteurized milk and making families more aware of good hygiene. Information campaigns came thick and fast, aimed at mothers in particular. The public hygiene movement led the city to take on more employees and scale up inspection and prevention activities at its public health unit. On the eve of the First World War, public health still had a long way to go, but the city had begun to put things right and the fruits of the campaign would be there for all to see in years to come.
Social inequality was also visible in the world of education, with pronounced differences between Protestant and Catholic schools. Since each school board was funded largely by a property tax collected from members of their religious denomination, Protestant schools had much greater resources, which had an influence on the quality of equipment at their disposal and on teachers’ salaries. The underfunded Catholic school commission paid poorly and its schools were overcrowded. Moreover, the rise in the number of pupils worsened the situation. Here, too, reformers tried to step in to improve the quality of teaching programs, teacher training, and school management, but they came up against stiff resistance from the Church, which saw education as a matter for it and it alone. In spite of everything, reforms were introduced, although their effects would mostly be felt after 1914.
The reform movement also questioned the treatment of women as second-class citizens. At the start of the twentieth century, Montreal was a hotbed of Canadian feminism. The Montreal Local Council of Women, founded in 1893 and aimed at the English for the most part, was joined by the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, created in 1907 to reach out to the French-speaking population. Both organizations battled to have women’s political and legal rights recognized, and to allow them access to higher education and professional occupations. They played a very active role in the social reform movements. Key Montreal feminists were Marie Gérin-Lajoie and Julia Drummond, although countless other women, most of whom were comfortably well off, played their part too.
Along with these changes to the social landscape, the cultural world was burgeoning. A real French-language popular culture was emerging, one that was unique to Montreal. Resolutely urban, this culture still drew on French-Canadian traditions, but looked increasingly to the United States for inspiration. Mass-market newspapers played a key role in this cultural affirmation. Popular newspapers, especially La Presse and La Patrie in French and The Montreal Star in English, reached most homes and put forward a modernist vision of society. They were also devoting more and more space to a phenomenon that would become a major part of any city’s culture: professional sports. Long the preserve of well-heeled (usually English) amateur athletes and fans, sport was now well organized, with teams, stadiums, stars, and fans. Hockey was growing in popularity, to the detriment of lacrosse, and on its way to becoming Canada’s national sport.
Cinema was another novelty that carved a place for itself in Montreal in 1906 with the opening of the Ouimetoscope. Movies wer
e hugely popular and theatres appeared all over the city to cope with the demands of a people in search of entertainment. Movies were only a part of the commercialization of leisure activities, another side of which was shown with the opening of amusement parks like Dominion Park in 1906.
The development of municipal parks encouraged leisure activities. Many other parks came to join the ranks of the biggest—Mont-Royal, La Fontaine, and Île Sainte-Hélène—and the city opened its first playgrounds.
The start of the century was also a vibrant time for upper-class culture. The theatre was going through something of a golden age, with one professional theatre company being set up after the next. Literary life also enjoyed a boom thanks to the meetings of the École littéraire de Montréal, which included many literary figures such as Émile Nelligan. Montrealers were also able to enjoy their own new symphony orchestra and opera company. On the whole, however, cultural productions in Montreal remained limited and the public mainly relied on touring foreign productions and literature from France, Britain, and the United States.
A lively political scene
The social and ethnic divisions that characterized Montreal were naturally reflected in political life as the struggle between populists and reformers continued and even intensified. Montreal’s most popular politician, Raymond Préfontaine, became mayor in 1898 and held the position until 1902 when he retired from municipal life. The political machine he had built fell apart, however, with electoral victories for the reformers in 1898 and 1900. The reformers managed to bring on board a number of French-Canadian businessmen, led by Hormidas Laporte, an alderman from 1897 and mayor from 1904 to 1906. Laporte and his colleague Herbert Brown Ames, leader of the English-speaking reformers, tried to clean up the city’s finances and improve the services it provided, particularly when it came to public health. They also took on the big businesses running the public utilities: gas, electricity, the tramway, and water (in the annexed districts). Many citizens, backed by certain newspapers, accused these businesses of not offering services in line with the needs of a rapidly growing population and of overcharging to obtain enormous profits. But these powerful companies belonging to Montreal’s leading financiers held a monopoly and were able to hold off the critics and maintain strong support among city councillors, giving in to only a few concessions.
The History of Montreal Page 7