Opinion: Montreal is a refuge, because after 35 years in Toronto, I’m battle-weary

We’re staying at a bona fide Montreal landmark, I tell my partner Dan. As we drive along the Metropolitan, my heart leaps. Mount Royal comes into view.

“Look at that,” I say. “There’s no mountain in downtown Toronto.”

He glances a bit too long and nearly plows into the car in front of us. Traffic has ground to a halt. As we inch our way onto the Décarie Expressway, I can’t help but compare this interchange with the 401 in Toronto, with its 12 lanes or so around the Don Valley Parkway.

Mount Royal, including the cross, is framed by The Ring in the plaza of Place Ville Marie. Photo by John Mahoney /Montreal Gazette

I’m comparing my hometown of Montreal with Toronto a lot these days. After 35 years of living in the 6ix, I now reside in the little town of Brockville, Ont. Not by grand design — being renovicted in 2021 from the Toronto apartment where I had lived for 24 years spurred the move. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath shook down tenants and homeowners alike, the latter cashing in their investments. Dan convinced me it was time to buy a house of our own, and the only way to do that was to go well outside the GTA.

It never crossed my mind to buy a house in Toronto, because renting was something Montrealers just did, no stigma attached. My banker tried to convince me to buy a place, but I rejected his overtures. What would I do with a house in Toronto? A lot, in retrospect.

I gravitated east and settled on affordable Brockville, which is two hours from Montreal and 3½ hours from Toronto. Living between the two urban centres seemed like the best of both worlds.

So, how does living between the places that have shaped me feel?

Tricky.

The Montreal skyline looking east from the intersection of Decarie and St. Jacques St. in Montreal Thursday September 2, 2021. Photo by John Mahoney /Montreal Gazette

Being a Montrealer of a certain generation, we were instilled with a profound contempt for Toronto. We looked down our nose at the place because it symbolized everything staid and boring and grey. When I was a kid, Montreal was Canada’s biggest city; its nightlife legendary, its hockey team supreme, its arts and culture vital to the people. Then, when the Parti Québécois and Bill 101 made it difficult for unilingual anglophones to imagine a life in la belle province’s new reality, more than 100,000 Montrealers fled down the 401 to settle in staid and boring and grey Toronto. I was one of them, in 1986.

Being a Montrealer of a certain generation, we were instilled with a profound contempt for Toronto.

Carolyn Bennett

Moving to Toronto felt treasonous. I was used to being surrounded and influenced by French culture, but due to shyness, speaking the language eluded me. For many years, I worked and lived and played in Toronto, all the while feeling superior to those unlucky enough to have been born and raised in Hogtown. I was from Montreal, enough said, and dropping the occasional mangled French phrase impressed people.

But somehow, something happened.

Toronto overtook Montreal.

Toronto became a welcoming city for people from around the world who wished to settle and raise their families. It became a city that truly embraced diversity, not just paying lip service to it, but actively promoting it as a source of strength. It opened up and began to celebrate the LGBTQ2+ community. Toronto moved with societal change, not against it. Now it’s the fourth-largest city in North America, the economic engine of Canada, the oft-maligned centre of the universe. Who the hell would have thunk it? Not this ex-Montrealer.

The Décarie Expressway hasn’t changed in the 35 years Carolyn Bennett has been away. Photo by Dave Sidaway /Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette

I’m directing Dan toward the landmark where we’re staying.

The Décarie Expressway hasn’t changed in the 35 years I’ve been away.

“Look, it’s the Orange Julep!” I say with glee.

Dan glimpses it quickly. “Are we staying there?”

Happy memories spill out of me. “We gotta eat at the Snowdon Deli. I worked at the Cantor’s on Queen Mary during my Concordia days.”

The Orange Julep is one of many instantly recognizable landmarks in Montreal. Photo by Tijana Martin /Montreal Gazette files

We park the van, deposit our bags in our room and hit the street.

I hustle us toward the nearest métro station. I know where I’m going. After all this time away, after all this time riding the TTC and navigating the vastness of the GTA, je me souviens — Ligne Orange gets me to Old Montreal; Montmorency is now the terminus. Muscle memory kicks in. I rode these lines during my formative years to go to CEGEP and university, to go downtown and do sets at Ernie Butler’s Comedy Nest on Bishop St., where I hung out with Montreal comedy legends Sean Keane and the Vestibules.

Carolyn Bennett poses near the Bonsecours Market in Old Montreal during a trip to her hometown.

Dan and I emerge from Champ-de-Mars métro station to join the flow heading to the cafés and restaurants. We stroll the cobblestone streets, where I once slam-danced at the Hotel Nelson and goofed around at all hours in Jacques-Cartier Square.

Sunlight streams down St-Paul St., bathing the Bonsecours Market in golden light. I stop and hold Dan’s hand.

“Look. Just look.” In the glow of late afternoon, with the blue sky clear and expansive, everything is glorious: the architecture, the street, the people. My soul stirs and I’m elated. Montreal feels like a refuge, because after 35 years in Toronto, I’m battle-weary. What Montreal lacks in dizzying glass and steel it makes up for in art deco and Gothic revival. Montreal is humane. It’ll give you a warm embrace and let you relax with a coffee. Toronto is formidable. It’ll give you a quick pat on the back and tell you to return to work.

Montreal feels like a refuge, because after 35 years in Toronto, I’m battle-weary.

Carolyn Bennett

I will never disparage Toronto. Not to its face, anyway. It’s been damn good to me and I realized my dreams there. But it’s become increasingly inhospitable, the change of pace disorienting. Sipping coffee on a terrasse overlooking a promenade, Montreal is inviting Dan and me to shake off Toronto stress. Even though we’ve been in Brockville now for more than two years, the TO tension runs deep in the nervous system. More time in Montreal, I think, will be good for recovery.

So, what is that Montreal landmark where we stayed?

I’m not telling. I don’t want Torontonians to wreck it.

Writer/comic Carolyn Bennett won a Toronto International Film Festival Studio Grand Prize for her screenplay The Mac and Watson Springtime Reeferendum Show.

[email protected]