1967

Montrealers' exodus to Toronto begins
“Vive le Québec libre!” bellowed Charles de Gaulle from the balcony of Montreal’s city hall on July 24, 1967. In response, Pauline Vanier, the widow of the Governor General Georges Vanier, is said to have pressed a note into his hand containing only a date, 1940. It was a rebuke on behalf of the Canadians who had fought for the liberation of de Gaulle’s country after the fall of France to the Germans. De Gaulle’s salvo alienated English-speaking Canadians and inspired Quebec separatists. The Parti Québécois was founded the following year, and even before it came to power in 1976, Quebec Anglos had begun heading west on the 401. When Bill 22, which made French Quebec’s only official language, became law in 1974, the traffic intensified—more than 200,000 have left Montreal since then, and the majority headed to Ontario. With them came most of the country’s business. Montreal’s St. James Street, the financial centre of the country since the 19th century, became Rue St. Jacques—but less and less remained of its supremacy. The two big banks with head offices in Montreal, the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank, began placing key departments and executives here, as well as flagship buildings. Construction on the Royal Bank Plaza, with its pleated gold towers, was completed in 1976. The Bank of Montreal moved into First Canadian Place around the same time. Before the end of the 20th century, 70 of Canada’s 200 biggest corporations were based in Toronto; fewer than half that number made Montreal their home. A secondary legacy has been a cluster of wealthy ex-Montrealers who’ve shown homegrown Torontonians a thing or two about open-handed philanthropy. Including Bram and Bluma Appel, John and Myrna Daniels, Jack Rabinovitch and Fraser Elliott, they’ve supported culture, education and health care generously. Alors, Général, merci pour tout.

1968

Jane Jacobs brings righteous indignation to the Annex
of her brood in front of gabled Spadina houses as “an immigrant family, in their own backyard.” But this was no run-of-the-mill immigration. Jacobs, one of the 20th century’s most important urban philosophers, had moved from New York City to Toronto with her family earlier that year, principally so that her two sons would not have to fight in Vietnam. Twice arrested in New York for demonstrating—against the war and the Lower Manhattan Expressway—Jacobs expected that Toronto would provide a more peaceful writing life. But, oblivious to the disasters expressways had wrought elsewhere, “the most hopeful and healthy city in North America,” as she called it, was planning its own. And, much to the proposed Spadina Expressway’s misfortune, it was to border the apartment that the Jacobses had rented. Jacobs was often asked, she wrote in The Globe and Mail in 1969, “whether I find Toronto sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary.” Not that she or her family sat around waiting for the outcome. Her younger son, Edward, and his minstrel group were ushered out of the mayor’s New Year’s levee after a chorus of “The Bad Trip,” their ode to the expressway. At another demonstration, Jimmy, her first-born, played the bagpipes while her husband, Robert, brought a drum from Long & McQuade. Jacobs herself, used to New York’s more heated discourse, was chastised for her intemperate language at a public hearing. When Councillor Irv Paisley asked how she could expect sympathy when she was so hostile, she answered, “I don’t give a damn.” Paisley retorted, “You don’t give a damn about anything,” and she said, “Yes, I do. I love this city.” Indeed she did, fighting our battles—from the mega­city to the fate of Dooney’s Café—for almost 40 years.