Can-Challenge: Montreal revitalized

With a POD of 1945, keep Montreal the Canadian financial centre and the largest Canadian city. Hint: Unionism and Liberty. :cool:
 
Quebecois decide to take part in the pride of Canada's accomplishments during WWII. This is turn leads to a slightly larger/well-kept Canadian military with Quebecois serving proudly. This newfound national unity essentially amkes the Quiet Revolution seem like a brief fad that a few eccentrics came up with, and is promptly dismissed. This in turn prevents seperatism in Quebec from gaining any truly major ground, which doesn't scare off many companies to Toronto, leaving Montreal as the financial capital of Canada and it's largest city. :D
 

Sachyriel

Banned
An accidental transport of the first Nuclear bomb to Toronto and detonation by idiocy destroys the city and makes Montreal the only city to claim the title.

A very surprised Harry S. Truman is dropped onto Nagasaki after wondering why the trip to Canada was taking so long.

:p
 
An accidental transport of the first Nuclear bomb to Toronto and detonation by idiocy destroys the city and makes Montreal the only city to claim the title.

A very surprised Harry S. Truman is dropped onto Nagasaki after wondering why the trip to Canada was taking so long.

:p

Ooh, I like that even better. :D
 
A simple PoD is no PQ win 1976. Montreal has its problems, but the centre of Canada's financial gravity, while already shifting, only firmly shifted after that.
 
You need to keep the Unionists alive by Paul Sauve living to realign Quebec politics along left-right rather than federalist-PQ lines. Which means they might have to become a conservative PQ- what Daniel Johnson Sr. did IOTL. They have to absorb nationalist sentiment- which cannot be butterflied without major ASBs.
 
I'm not sure how you could do it without butterflying away the nationalist sentiment. It was already real in 1945, and by the 1960s it was bubbling like crazy despite Trudeau's attempt to keep a lid on it. Canadian Federation's first idea might work, but you'd have to get around the fact that the Canadian military was always overwhelmingly British and many French-Canadians wanted nothing to do with it through both world wars.
 

glowjack

Banned
Well for one thing you can remove bill 101 for starters,

  • stating that all kids must attend french schools unless both parents were schooled in english
  • stating that all businesses employing more than 50 people must speak french
  • stating that all signs must be in french(later revised to all signs must have french letters bigger).
This bill essentially killed the economy as alot of the companies owned by anglophones and anglophones in general perfered to move out than to pay for expensive/"uncomfortable" language requirements. Furthermore this assured that anybody schooled on Quebec can only really find work in Quebec unless they lived with english people (living with the people is the only real way to master a language) and discouraged investors from investing in the province.
 
Loi 101 was pretty much inevitable: the Unionists introduced loi 63 allowing freedom of choice in 1969 following the St-Leonard riots, which accelerated their demise. In 1974 Bourassa passed Loi 22, a diluted version of 101, and again with Loi 178 in 1988. Three of four passed under a non-PQ government.
 

glowjack

Banned
yes it pretty much was, but it made them a hell lot poorer and more reliant on tax money from ontario and alberta. (plus francophones are quite in my personal experience impatient and rude unless you speak perfect french, the lack of english speakers growing up will have an impact as the french feel that they are entitled due to the english conquering them a long time ago)
 
Loi 101 was pretty much inevitable: the Unionists introduced loi 63 allowing freedom of choice in 1969 following the St-Leonard riots, which accelerated their demise. In 1974 Bourassa passed Loi 22, a diluted version of 101, and again with Loi 178 in 1988. Three of four passed under a non-PQ government.

Yes, Bill 101 was pretty much inevitable - but glowjack is right that is pretty much sealed Montreal's fall. The business world in Montreal at the time, and really into the 1970s, was English. You'd have to reconcile that in order to keep Montreal being Canada's primary business center. Perhaps having it annexed by Ontario might help, but the chances of that are ASB territory.
 
The Anglo business community reconciling themselves to nationalist sentiment (the French fact) is plausible, vice-versa is ASB. At the time there really were two solitudes: few knew the other language, which led to nasty incidents in stores, etc.

Another problem was the hysteria: Charles Bronfman said that "blood would run in the streets" if the Liberals were ousted. Bourassa I was like Rajiv Gandhi, lurching from crisis to crisis and winning due to the lack of a credible opposition: the Unionists were dead and the PQ was still embryonic. You need to keep the Unionists in power, but the only way to do that is for them to absorb nationalist and mild separatist sentiment- what Johnson Sr. did IOTL. If one party doesn't do that, the PQ is inevitable.
 
The Anglo business community reconciling themselves to nationalist sentiment (the French fact) is plausible, vice-versa is ASB.

Considering that the majority of Canada speaks English and its an official language in over 50 countries, I'd say trying to get the Anglo business community to reconcile with nationalist French sentiment is ASB as well. The business community only grudgingly liked most of the Quebec premiers of your TL era, Duplessis the dictator included. Trying to get that community to reconcile with the nationalist sentiments when Toronto is four hundred kilometres away is ASB - they'll move rather than have to deal with the nationalists, just like OTL.

Another problem was the hysteria: Charles Bronfman said that "blood would run in the streets" if the Liberals were ousted. Bourassa I was like Rajiv Gandhi, lurching from crisis to crisis and winning due to the lack of a credible opposition: the Unionists were dead and the PQ was still embryonic. You need to keep the Unionists in power, but the only way to do that is for them to absorb nationalist and mild separatist sentiment- what Johnson Sr. did IOTL. If one party doesn't do that, the PQ is inevitable.

If you want to keep Montreal as Canada's primary business center, you have to kill the nationalist sentiment dead, period. The Unionists will be more moderate than the PQ, but either way they will push the French identity, which as you correctly point out will cause a massive rift between the business community and the Quebec nationalists. The only other way around that is to try and integrate the Quebecers into Canada and allow the French and English cultures to mix well, creating a Canadian identity that overrules the French and English ones. And with Canada's government being predominantly made up by englishmen and much of Canada's population descended from them, that's pretty much ASB unless you want to change the rules from Confederation onward.

In short, Montreal's decline in influence in comparison to Toronto, and to a lesser extent Vancouver and Calgary, was inevitable. It was a matter of time until the French-Canadians began finding their voices after two centuries of the minority English Canadians primarily running the provinces' economic systems, and when they did, Montreal's status would fall. It was simply a matter of when, not if.
 
Part of the problem was that Duplessis controlled the system, but the system dated pre-WWI. Like Marcos' PI, this was a corporatist "state" with the iron triangle of business, Catholic Church, and government. Duplessis even exercised more control than Ferdie did in some ways: he controlled the papers via the price of pulp, personally phoning propreitors to demand "insolent" journalists be disciplined, etc. Not to mention controlling who U of M hired (PET) by threatening to foreclose on their massive debts. His press conferences were more like statements- along with your $100 Xmas bonus. He had the most nationalist creds of any premier except Levesque.
 
Part of the problem was that Duplessis controlled the system, but the system dated pre-WWI. Like Marcos' PI, this was a corporatist "state" with the iron triangle of business, Catholic Church, and government. Duplessis even exercised more control than Ferdie did in some ways: he controlled the papers via the price of pulp, personally phoning propreitors to demand "insolent" journalists be disciplined, etc. Not to mention controlling who U of M hired (PET) by threatening to foreclose on their massive debts. His press conferences were more like statements- along with your $100 Xmas bonus. He had the most nationalist creds of any premier except Levesque.

So, are you saying that you need a dictatorial premier to keep nationalism from flaring up and thus causing massive problems in Quebec? Good luck finding a replacement for Duplessis after he dies. There is a reason why the Union Nationale fell apart only to have some revival thanks to Jean Lesage's bungling.
 
I think Daniel Johnson Sr. or Paul Sauve could hold the fort, but I was merely describing Duplessis' methods- not suggesting that they be used in future. Apart from Lesage's arrogance, the Unionists had developed an internal tension between their federalist and separatist wings that Johnson controlled by his personality.

This surfaced when Johnson won the leadership in Oct. '61 and Bertrand in Oct. '68- a compromise would have to be hammered out like Levesque's OTL sovereignty-association, and since no one did, from 1970 Levesque took the separatists and Bourassa (hardly a conservative) took the rest. Had they stayed in power longer, you would likely see something like Beau Risque, where a formal split occurs. But when your party is founded by one man, and his successors are the ranking politically active cabinet members from the founder's era, there's an inevitable decline. This happened in the UN and the PQ- Marois is the last politically active member of the Levesque cabinet in provincial politics. The UN never had a second generation- all leaders were born either before or during WWI. The PQ doesn't have any right now either...
 
You need to keep the Unionists alive by Paul Sauve living to realign Quebec politics along left-right rather than federalist-PQ lines. Which means they might have to become a conservative PQ- what Daniel Johnson Sr. did IOTL. They have to absorb nationalist sentiment- which cannot be butterflied without major ASBs.

To get that to work, Duplessis needs to be butterflied away. I'm sorry, but if you want to keep some form of a conservative party alive, he needs to go. After all, he destroyed Québec conservatism. Now, if the UN was more of the centre-right, Christian democrat type instead of OTL, that could probably work.
 
What bugs me is that generally speaking, Alexandre Taschereau and Maurice Duplessis were both quite conservative, and the Liberal Party was conservative as well (the only difference in their 1935 platforms were agriculture subsidies when Imeldific graft among the premier's own relatives had been exposed :rolleyes::rolleyes:). Godbout was the one who changed it to a progressive party, but became demonized as a vendu for many reasons: "if Mr. King asked me to go to Europe and shine the boots of our soldiers, I would." I shudder to think of what Levesque, or dare I say the Parizite, would've thought of that.
 
An interesting tidbit about Tascherau from Wiki :)D):

Taschereau introduced a measure in 1930 to create a Jewish board that would have provided for Jewish participation on the highest decision-making educational body in Quebec, the Quebec Council of Public Instruction. Some newspapers saw the move by Taschereau to revamp the confessional school system as an example of an undermining of Christianity. As a result of the opposition, the Jewish leadership did not push the issue when Taschereau was forced to repeal the Act and submit a compromise which he had the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church examine and approve beforehand. In the resulting bill, Jews were sent back into the Protestant system, and the Jewish board had no power beyond the right to negotiate a deal with the Protestant School board.

What if Tascherau was able to pull off the creation of a Jewish school board? That could be something interesting about that.

Plus, as I've already said, in many of the books on the history of Franco-Americans in New England that I've read, Tascherau shows up a lot and is generally credited with trying to maintain a connection between Québec and the Franco-American communities in New England (a connection which was ultimately broken not just by assimilation into American society, but by the Sentinelle Affair [where, in part, Henri Bourassa, Lionel Groulx, and other ultramontanes like them share the blame], among other factors). Duplessis is not mentioned at all, since by the time Duplessis came around, the New Deal (along with other things, like the activities of the KKK) practically turned the Franco-Americans into, well, Americans, with the connection broken.

Personally, if both the Conservative and Liberal Parties in Québec had been progressive earlier (in the case of the Conservatives, along the lines of a Christian-democratic party whilst getting rid of the influence of the ultramontanes in the party), Québec could have been different. Sure, there would have to be a way founded to give French prominence in Canada (which, contrary to TheMann, I could find plausible), but other than that, it would at least sideline the ultramontanes - since ultramontanes like Henri Bourassa and Duplessis did much to damage Québec.
 
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