Community and Urban Sociology

In our summer issues, the CUSS newsletter team solicits a short piece that introduces CUSS members to the location of the ASA annual meeting. This year, Jan Doering (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, jan.doering@utoronto.ca) generously agreed to write this year’s city spotlight. Thank you, Jan, for your introduction to Montréal! 

Montréal, a contradictory city

Montréal is unlike any other North American city, and I am not working up to the tired observation that Montréal is “so European.” What makes Montréal unique is its contradictory status as a multilingual and diverse city in Québec, a province that proudly insists on the dominance of the French language and Québécois identity. This contradictory status frequently pits Montréal against its province but also produces social conflict within the city, inflecting how debates unfold and how local issues are addressed (see also Carpentier 2022).

Before turning to these unique features, I should acknowledge that Montréal is also a city of its historical moment, a place where familiar urban transformations play out. For instance, Montréal has become a major center for artificial intelligence and software development. The city has a large number of tech startups and leading corporations in this field have established satellite offices. Visit a café in Montréal and you are likely to hear conversations about programming and computer engineering. Aside from changing downtown’s business landscape, the tech boom has been associated with a growing pace of gentrification that has turned the historically affordable city into a much more expensive place. Living in Montréal is still cheaper than in Vancouver or Toronto, but these changes pose substantial problems for recent immigrants, working-class and low-income Montrealers, and the many artists, musicians, and writers that contribute so much to the city’s appeal and vibrancy.

Returning to what makes Montréal unique, however, one can say that familiar issues often materialize in Montréal in distinct ways. The underlying force that produces these peculiarities is the enduring tension between the values and principles that the Québécois hold dear and the realities of social life in Montréal. In other words, many Québécois regard the city and its residents with concern. Is the use of English in the city becoming “normal” (Mann 2024; Saba 2024)? Is the city becoming “multicultural” (CBC News 2022)? Are religious communities practicing their faith in public or demanding special accommodations (Rousseau 2012; Sharify-Funk 2010)? 

There are many examples of how these concerns shape Montréal and the lives of its residents. Here, I will briefly describe two: (1) the specific manifestation of Islamophobia and (2) the province’s recent effort to shrink the city’s anglophone universities.

Islamophobia in Montréal

Since the 1970s, thousands of migrants from the Maghreb and the Arab peninsula have settled in Montréal. These migrants can typically speak French upon arrival and thereby alleviate fears that immigration could threaten the French language. However, most of them are practicing Muslims, and this evokes negative sentiments among some Québécois. Of course, Muslims face discrimination throughout the Western world, but Islamophobia in Montréal has unique causes which inflect its manifestations.

Québécois identity contains a pronounced suspicion against religion and religiosity. When the Québécois overthrew the English elite and assumed political power in the 1960s, they rapidly secularized the province, wrestling control over education, health care, and other social services from the Catholic Church. The province’s churches emptied as the Québécois embraced a post-religious identity (Zubrzycki 2016). Today, many Québécois dislike the idea of religiosity in general (Bibeau et al. 2023). Immigrants to Québec who continue to practice their faith—by wearing the Islamic hijab, for example—thus face distrust and sometimes outright hostility.

Muslim Montrealers feel this aversion in numerous ways. Laws have been passed that ban public employees from wearing religious symbols; veiling has been prohibited in certain spaces; immigrants must demonstrate their understanding of secularism by passing a “Québec values test.”  These government practices do not refer to Islam and are ostensibly neutral expressions of secularism, but most Muslims can point to personal experiences suggesting that it is them who these practices actually target (Doering and Peker 2022). While Muslims view Montréal as more hospitable than the rest of the province, reports of negative encounters in public are common. Women wearing the hijab in Montréal describe hostile comments, rude treatment, angry looks, and sometimes physical assaults. Many Muslim Montrealers—women in particular—spend a great deal of time thinking about how to avoid, manage, or address such situations in their everyday lives in the city (Doering 2024). 

Anglophone students as a threat for the French language

Montréal has four large universities—two of them francophone (UQAM and Université de Montréal) and two of them anglophone (Concordia and McGill). Almost 200,000 international students live in the city. They are joined by large numbers of primarily anglophone students from other Canadian provinces. The student population is an important revenue source for the city and local businesses. Accordingly, the City of Montréal proudly claims the title of “top student city in North America” (Hamilton 2018). 

However, Concordia and McGill draw far more international and out-of-province students than the francophone universities. And since both campuses are situated in the heart of the city, they contribute to making downtown Montréal a space in which English is widely used and frequently predominates. In recognition of this fact, anglophone Montrealers sometimes acknowledge living in what they call the “downtown bubble.” The existence of this bubble and the anglophone universities that anchor it in the city draw the ire of some Québécois. Indeed, in 1969, Québécois protesters demanded that McGill be converted into a francophone institution. The large numbers of anglophone students raise fears that Montréal is “anglicizing.”

Tapping into these fears, the Québec government drastically increased tuition for international and out-of-province students last year, a move that has (as intended) led to a steep drop in applications at Concordia and McGill. Moreover, the government is clawing back some of the excess tuition payments and redistributing the funds among francophone universities. In doing so, the government is seeking to shrink the anglophone universities and elevate the standing of francophone institutions (Mann 2024). Opposing these efforts, business groups and the City of Montréal complain about the negative impact on the city and its reputation. Montréal mayor Valérie Plante criticized the tuition increases just as she has criticized some of the secularist restrictions I mentioned in the prior section. Here and often elsewhere, the politics of Montréal are at odds with its province.

A place of contradictions

The picture I have painted is unflattering, but there is also much to love about Montréal, as virtually any resident will attest—from the elderly Algerian woman to the white student from Ohio. Many Montrealers of all stripes express at best mixed feelings about the province’s heavy-handed policies. It is also a fundamentally quirky and stimulating place, full of unicycles, provocative art, and world-class music. Moreover, Québec’s robust welfare state means that that there is relatively little harsh poverty in Montréal (although it does exist, especially among indigenous people). As Axel van den Berg (2024) points out in his ASA Meeting Location Spotlight, the strong welfare state is itself closely linked to Québécois identity, just like the more repressive policies I have highlighted here. It is indeed a place that is full of contradictions.

References

van den Berg, Axel. 2024. “Spotlight on the Annual Meeting Location: Quebec’s Distinctive Welfare State.” Footnotes 52(2).

Bibeau, Alexis, Evelyne Brie, Yannick Dufresne, and Gilles Gagné. 2023. “Religiosity Matters: Assessing Competing Explanations of Support for Secularism in Quebec and Canada.” Politics and Religion 16(4):634–58. doi: 10.1017/S1755048323000196.

Carpentier, David. 2022. La Métropole Contre La Nation?: La Politique Montréalaise d’intégration Des Personnes Immigrantes. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec.

CBC News. 2022. “Quebec’s Premier Rejects Multiculturalism as Province Celebrates Fête Nationale.” CBC News. Retrieved July 15, 2024 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-premier-multiculturalism-1.6501246).

Doering, Jan. 2024. “How Discrimination Narratives Resolve Ambiguity: The Case of Islamophobia in Quebec.” Social Problems. doi: 10.1093/socpro/spae009.

Doering, Jan, and Efe Peker. 2022. “How Muslims Respond to Secularist Restrictions: Reactive Ethnicity, Adjustment, and Acceptance.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45(15):2956–77. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2022.2052143.

Hamilton, Mark. 2018. “Why Montréal Is the Top Student City in North America.” Tourisme Montréal. Retrieved July 16, 2024 (https://www.mtl.org/en/experience/top-student-city).

Mann, Mark. 2024. “Quebec’s New French Revolution.” Maclean’s. Retrieved July 10, 2024 (https://macleans.ca/politics/quebec-french-language-laws/).

Rousseau, Louis, ed. 2012. Le Québec après Bouchard-Taylor: l’identité religieuse de l’immigration. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec.

Saba, Michel. 2024. “Montreal and the Regions: ‘There Are Two Quebecs,’ Bloc Leader Laments.” Montreal Gazette. Retrieved July 10, 2024 (https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreal-and-the-regions-there-are-two-quebecs-bloc-leader-laments).

Sharify-Funk, Meena. 2010. “Muslims and the Politics of ‘Reasonable Accommodation’: Analyzing the Bouchard-Taylor Report and Its Impact on the Canadian Province of Québec.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 30(4):535–53. doi: 10.1080/13602004.2010.533451.

Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2016. Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.