Another City, Not My Own
My wife and I had been planning a trip to Montreal for quite some time. It was the only place in Canada that we could agree on as interesting. We had been to Montreal once before and enjoyed it's streets and shops. It was the antithesis of my home town Calgary, in the West of Canada.
Please note that I have used the awkward phrase "West of Canada." I have picked my words deliberately here, avoiding the semi-republican separatist connotations of "Western Canada" and the historically colonialist implications of "Canadian West." I like "the West of Canada" as it alludes to the sprawling nature of our country while turning Western Canadian alienation into an amusing Elmer Fuddism.
I must admit, growing up in Calgary, I never felt alienated. Quite often aloof though, as if Canada was something that happened over there, somewhere else, but not around here in Calgary, with its new suburbs and wide open spaces. There was never anything that tied me to this thing called Canada and I often longed to be a part of something more than vast empty prairie.
To me, Montreal was where Canada happened. Maybe I'd viewed too many Expo posters in the childhood bedrooms of my aunts and uncles; but everything about Montreal whispered "Canada" to me. Quebecois separatistes might disagree and say that Montreal is an integral component of their "distinct society"apart from Canada. Historians too,might point to Montreal and say that is unique to all of Canada, with its blend of French and English, Europe and North America, but to me that's what the rest of Canada should have aspired to become - neither old world nor new, a phrase too often taken to imply our cousins below the 49th Parallel and their state of perpetual "now-ness."
This has been my problem with Calgary. Both Calgary and Montreal experienced tremendous periods of growth after the Second World War. Montreal, already sitting at close to a half million citizens, exploded with suburbs and then reinvented the inner city neighbourhoods, superimposing modernist structures, like office buildings and expressways on pre-modern urban landscapes. Calgary, on the other hand, had very little to build upon and so just built out with reckless abandon. there was nothing to preserve and so my hometown has preserved nothing. Forget trying to find a building that dates from Calgary's incorporation barely over a hundred years ago, it's hard to find something from before the Second World War. The downtown core has been completely worked over, save for two or three blocks and every year hundreds of pre-war homes are run into the ground to make way for in-fills and condominium complexes.
I am not against modernism, or the march of progress, and I know that some Montrealer's feel that the same processes of historical erasement is underway in their city too. Leonard Cohen complained that the construction of bland square box offices over top the Victorian houses on St. Laurent were destroying the soul of the street - over fifty years ago. I am sure there are those who say the same about the many condominium conversions going up all over the place now. What bothers me is that despite all of its modernization, Montreal as managed to maintain its identity and character whereas Calgary's identity and character is becoming synonymous with its sprawling soulless suburbs. The sprawl creates problems, many of which Calgarians want to ignore, such as the environmental resource mismanagement that results from having the lowest housing density in Canada with one of the lowest occupancy rates at 2.1 people per dwelling and 1.2 automobiles. This sparseness prevents small residential businesses from succeeding, keeps public transportation from having the necessary critical mass to become cheap, efficient, and allow for anything but rush hour delivery of workers to and from the city's core. The net result is the direct inhibiting of the type of great city character that Calgarians so desperately want.
