The History of Montreal Read online

  Municipal government returned in 1840. At first, the governor chose the members of the city council, but elections were again called as of 1843. Councillors and aldermen chose the mayor from among their ranks and it wasn’t until 1852 that citizens would elect their mayor directly. Owners and tenants had the right to vote, provided that the value of their property or the rent they paid was above a certain amount, and they were barred from voting if they hadn’t paid their municipal taxes. Because of these restrictions, a considerable segment of the population was unable to voice its opinion in elections. From the 1840s, the city council had a majority of English-speaking councillors. They were businessmen for the most part and ran the Corporation of the City of Montreal like they might have run a private company. At City Hall, under a tacit agreement the mayor was alternately French or English, although this was not always respected.

  The municipality, funded largely through property taxes, controlled local activities (construction, markets, keeping the peace) and looked after the roads. Public utilities were basically non-existent, and this began to cause serious problems, given the rate at which Montreal was expanding. For as long as Montreal had been little more than a small town of a few thousand souls, private initiatives and groups of individuals coming together had gotten the job done, but now the city was much more heavily populated and some problems were taking on catastrophic proportions.

  As with all pre-industrial cities, Montreal was regularly buffeted by some scourge or other. This was always the case with fires. The worst broke out in 1852, destroying 1,200 homes and leaving 9,000 on the street. Montreal had no more than a few companies of volunteer firefighters, and it wasn’t until 1863 that the municipality organized its own fire brigade. Plenty of water was also required to put out these fires, which was easier said than done. Montrealers got their water from the St. Lawrence and public fountains. A private water system had been in place since 1819, but it covered only part of the city. The city purchased it in 1845, but only began work on a new waterworks system in 1852, completing it in 1856. With all these measures in place, never again would the city be brought to its knees by a disaster as terrible as the Great Fire of 1852.

  Epidemics also tore through the city. Cholera struck in 1832, 1834, 1849, and 1854; typhus in 1847: in all, more than 8,000 Montrealers lost their lives. More generally speaking, sanitary conditions in Montreal were atrocious. Garbage lay everywhere, raw sewage lined the streets, and public hygiene meant scarcely more than isolating the sick when epidemics struck. The city was also flooded on a regular basis, which did little to help sanitary conditions.

  The massive arrival of immigrants worsened these problems and increased poverty. Private charities—religious orders in particular—did their best to relieve the misery and help those afflicted by epidemics. But they lacked numbers and resources, and it was only when Catholic charities grew, at the behest of Bishop Bourget, that these various organizations were better able to cope.

  Montreal, in short, had grown too quickly, and its leaders had been caught off guard. The second half of the nineteenth century nevertheless saw a range of public utilities better meet the requirements of a large city.

  CHAPTER 7

  An Industrial City

  1850–1896

  Towards the halfway mark of the nineteenth century, Montreal began a new phase in its history, a phase that would transform it into Canada’s biggest industrial centre. Its population and landscape were fashioned by forces unleashed by industrialization, with the repercussions lasting for years to come.

  A big city

  From 1850 onward, Montreal was becoming more and more like a big city, a metropolis even. Population climbed from 58,000 in 1852 to 107,000 in 1871 and reached 267,000 by 1901, almost 325,000 if you counted the suburbs. The change of scale was appreciable, but growth like that doesn’t come steadily. A spurt in the 1850s was followed by a twenty-year lull, only for the population figures to again progress in leaps and bounds at the dawn of the 1880s and at the very end of the century.

  Around 1850, immigration was still high, riding a wave of new arrivals from Ireland. But the wave had broken, and for the next few decades or so Montreal welcomed proportionately many fewer immigrants than in years past. Rural migration took up the slack, with hundreds of thousands of people leaving the countryside in the late nineteenth century in the hope of improving their lot. Most headed to the United States, but a fair few stayed in Montreal, among them English-speaking migrants from the Eastern Townships, Ontario, and the Maritimes, along with plenty of French Canadians from the rural areas surrounding Montreal.

  Huge numbers of homes had to be built to accommodate these new arrivals and the children of established Montrealers, extending the city’s urban sprawl. At first, they lived within the city limits but, from the 1870s on, they spilled over into new municipalities in the suburbs: Hochelaga to the east; Saint-Jean-Baptiste to the north; Saint-Gabriel, Sainte-Cunégonde, and Saint-Henri to the southwest; and others that followed. In 1891, there were already close to 70,000 people living in these new neighbourhoods. Montreal was keen to incorporate these municipalities that had sprouted up on its outskirts, annexing four of them between 1883 and 1893.

  As the city’s limits expanded, its homes were given a whole new look. The traditional home with a gable roof made with wood or stone had dominated for two centuries in Montreal, but was now abandoned in favour of newer designs. Flat roofs became standard, the use of brick, widespread. A new type of British-inspired terrace housing sprang up in rows in the more fashionable parts of town, with a lane running behind the lots. But the big new thing in working-class neighbourhoods was the duplex. Two-storey buildings with one apartment on top of the other spread like wildfire from the 1860s, becoming the template for many a Montreal home. The duplex spawned the triplex, each—along with variations that had up to five or six apartments—meeting the needs of a burgeoning population that almost always rented and, because of their low income, needed affordable accommodation.

  This innovative architecture was not limited to housing. Commercial properties began to feature open areas, iron or steel frames, and elevators, making for bigger, taller buildings. Victorian architecture expressed itself in all its forms, especially in Old Montreal, where new warehouse stores and office buildings thrived, eliminating much of the city’s French heritage along the way.

  Population growth and the city’s expansion as a whole required modern public utilities to meet problems that had grown in scope. A new waterworks system was inaugurated in 1856, efficiently supplying water to the whole city, and to this was added a network of underground sewers, helping to clean up living conditions. The fire department was formed in 1863, with a health board following in 1865. The municipality also managed other services, including building inspections, police, markets, and parks. Montreal’s first big park, on Mount Royal, was created in 1874 and designed by the foremost American landscape architect of the day, Frederick Law Olmsted, who had also designed New York’s Central Park. La Fontaine park and another on Île Sainte-Hélène soon followed.

  Nevertheless, some public utilities were managed privately, which was the case for public transit. Montreal’s tramways started rolling in 1861. Their cars were pulled by horses, moving across the city on rails in summer and on skates in winter. The grid spread gradually, but really started to expand after 1892, with the arrival of the faster, more efficient electric tramway. It marked the real beginning of mass transit and boosted the city’s expansion by making communications easier from one end to the other. Private companies managed other services. A gas network had been up and running since 1836. Electricity, first publicly demonstrated by French-Canadian industrialist J.-A.-I. Craig in 1879, became a public utility in the 1880s and even began to replace gas for street lighting. The telephone also rang for the first time in the city in 1877.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Montreal had all the trappings of a modern city. The latest inventions, from the elevator to the
electric tramway, spread across town in no time at all. And the city also had an impressive number of newspapers that published local and international news in French or English and put Montrealers in touch with the world around them.

  The wheels of industry

  Montreal’s expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century was mainly due to the manufacturing industry setting up shop in the city. A first wave of industrialization had hit Canada in the 1840s, then a second in the 1880s. After the union of Upper Canada and Lower Canada in 1840, the domestic market reached a point where it was big enough to support local independent manufacturing in certain sectors and wean itself off imports. The market grew still further with Confederation in 1867, then again with the acquisition of the west and the integration of British Columbia. Much of this new production found a natural home in Montreal, at the heart of the country’s transportation, trade, and financial networks.

  These networks had been set up by Montreal businessmen and continued to grow. Montreal wholesalers, increasingly a different breed from retailers, supplied a vast number of merchants in Canada’s towns, villages, and countryside. Montreal banks multiplied and opened new branches, with the Bank of Montreal remaining the biggest in the country.

  Montreal’s main advantage was nevertheless its strategic position as the hub of the transportation systems. Its port became the busiest in Canada, with a forest of masts bobbing on its waters each summer. The Harbour Commission improved its facilities and, in 1850 at the behest of its president, John Young, had a canal dug in the St. Lawrence River between Quebec City and Montreal. Now bigger ocean-going ships could make it as far as Montreal. Brothers Hugh and Andrew Allan set up one of the biggest transatlantic lines in Canada’s history and played a very active role in many other Montreal businesses.

  Not content with being a maritime hub, Montreal became a railroad hub too, the railway playing a key role in distri-buting manufactured goods. Canada boasted two main systems: the Grand Trunk Railway System covering southern Quebec and Ontario from 1854, and the Canadian Pacific Railway, which cut across the country and made it as far as the Vancouver area in 1886. Both had their North American head offices and main construction and maintenance workshops in Montreal, and both left their mark on the city’s economy.

  For its part, Montreal’s manufacturing industry—with production clustered in huge, mechanized factories—really started to emerge in the 1840s. It had two main axes. The first was light industry, supported by a large labour force that was poorly paid and unskilled and largely made up of rural French Canadians. It had a number of distinct industries. Shoemaking, an old Montreal specialty if ever there was one, was the city’s leading industry in 1870. The garment industry was also a major concern, scattered across a number of small workshops close to the downtown area. And the textile industry—for the most part manufacturing cotton fabrics—took hold in the suburbs where the biggest factories were, such as the Victor Hudon mill in Hochelaga. Montreal also became the biggest tobacco-processing centre in Canada, and attracted a host of industries in the vast food production sector, including flour mills, sugar refineries, breweries, distilleries, meatpacking, and cookie factories.

  The second axis was heavy industry. It required a labour force that was much better skilled and consequently better paid, and workers tended to be British in origin. There were two main sectors. The first, involving iron and steel, made engines, railing, and pipes, along with stoves, kitchenware, tooling, and hardware. The rolling stock sector produced locomotives, railway cars, and parts. The diversity of industry in Montreal was already striking, with most manufacturing sectors represented.

  All this new activity carved out an industrial landscape for the city. Factories tended to stick close to the harbour and railway lines, working-class homes huddling in around them. Nowhere better illustrates the phenomenon than the area around Lachine Canal, the birthplace of heavy industry in Montreal. It was home to Grand Trunk Railway shops, and other factories churning out machinery and many different iron and steel products, not to mention spinning and knitting mills, and the Redpath sugar refinery, while their employees would live on the neighbouring streets. Population was just as dense in the east end in the Sainte-Marie Ward, then in Hochelaga, with a string of shoe and food businesses—including the Molson brewery and the Viau cookie company—and the Canadian Pacific Angus shops. A third industrial area developed in the north of the city, this time dedicated to the garment industry.

  A growing number of people in the labour force now worked in factories. Working conditions were dreadful. Pay was low, particularly for unskilled workers, of which there was no shortage in Montreal. The wages paid to heads of household were generally not enough for families to live decently, and so the shortfall had to be made up by sending some children and most teenagers out to work. Education levels therefore remained low. Mothers had to keep an iron grip on the family purse strings and take on sewing or laundry work at home, or take in boarders.

  Workdays were long, with almost no job security to speak of. Harbour, transportation, and construction workers spent the winter unemployed, as did many factory workers. Trade unionism, a movement still in its infancy, mainly involved the skilled trades and played only a limited role in improving working conditions. In short, the average working-class family lived precariously. Disease was rampant and mortality rates, particularly among newborns, very high. Eighty percent of the population were tenants and their meagre incomes meant they could not always afford adequate housing.

  In contrast, company managers and executives were living high off the hog in spacious, well-lit homes, with big gardens, servants galore, teas, banquets, and receptions. Social divides were becoming more and more pronounced in Montreal in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  A British city with a French heart

  In 1850, Montrealers of British origin were still in the majority. But as immigration slowed and rural migration picked up, the situation was turned on its head, with French Canadians back in the majority by 1866 and making up 60 percent of the population at century’s end. In spite of this demographic change, the city still felt distinctly British in its institutions, architecture, and the predominant role played by the English language.

  The might and influence of the higher echelons of Anglo-Scots bourgeoisie were especially noticeable. The Molsons, the Allan brothers, George Stephen, Donald Smith, and William Macdonald amassed huge fortunes by investing in a number of sectors at once. They controlled Canada-wide businesses and were very close to Britain. They and their likes lived at the foot of the mountain, in the area that would later be known as the Golden Square Mile. They frequented exclusive clubs and made generous contributions to Anglo-Protestant institutions, McGill University, and the Montreal General Hospital in particular. The Board of Trade was a much listened-to representative for this dominant class.

  And yet French Canadians were keen to carve out a place for themselves in their own city. A burgeoning French-Canadian business elite played an active role in wholesale trade and certain manufacturing industries, with the likes of Rodier, Hudon, Barsalou, Rolland, and Viau being among the leading lights of French-Canadian entrepreneurship. They might not have been as powerful as their English-speaking counterparts, but they were setting up big companies operating in Montreal. New French-Canadian financial institutions backed their efforts, particularly Banque Jacques-Cartier (1861) and Banque d’Hochelaga (1874). In 1887, French-speaking businessmen also created their own board of trade, the Chambre de commerce du district de Montréal, in order to defend their interests, which the existing Board of Trade had paid little heed to.

  French Canadians also began to make inroads in municipal politics. In 1882, they obtained a one-seat majority on the city council and their positions were consolidated by a series of annexations after 1883. From that moment on, nothing would ever be the same again. City councillor Raymond Préfontaine set up a solid political machine that drew support from the French-speaking mas
ses and soon took power at City Hall. His politics were populist and aimed at seeing French-Canadian voters and the city’s east end share in the economic spinoffs generated by the major road works he had carried out.

  This raised the ire of many English-speaking city councillors, who came from the world of big business. Labelling themselves reformers, they denounced the patronage practiced by Préfontaine’s party and opposed expensive major public works projects. The clash between reformers and populists soon became a struggle between west and east, between the wealthy English and the French-speaking masses. These tensions would play out on the municipal stage for decades to come, but for the time being French-Canadian populists were in control.

  Inter-ethnic tensions came to a head in 1885. A smallpox epidemic saw clashes, and occasional rioting, over mandatory vaccination, favoured by part of the mainly English elites and opposed by part of the French-Canadian population. That same year in November, the hanging of Metis leader Louis Riel in Regina sparked a bitter reaction among the French-Canadian population.

  Generally speaking, however, both groups tended to keep largely to themselves, attending their own institutions. For French-speaking Montrealers, the Catholic Church played a key role in social life. The Catholic Church was also experiencing something of a renaissance under Bishop Bourget. The bishop bolstered the clergy’s hold over life in the city, bringing several religious orders over from France and encouraging Montreal’s orders to grow. After a long battle with the Sulpicians, Bourget managed to have Rome break up the parish of Notre Dame in 1865, allowing him to create more parishes and better control parishioners. He also fought long and hard for a university, and in 1876 a branch of Quebec City’s Université Laval was established in Montreal. Under his episcopate, women created one new charity after another, along with social services and places of instruction of all kinds.