Seven Oaks Magazine.

History may record George Clinton’s mid-seventies metaphor as among the cutest, most irony-laced assignments of benign, dessert-like properties to violent processes of ghettoisation and the guarding of social privilege: “God bless Chocolate city and its (gainin’ on ya!) vanilla suburbs.” If sweets be the language of segregation, and sugary treats the easiest device for describing the ethnic and socio-economic breakdown of a city and its privileged, outlying boroughs, then the island of Montréal might best be summed up thus: French toast, English (upper) crust. The current merger/de-merger debate raging in the Montréal megacity is one with deep historical roots, sending the WASP nests on the island’s West into fits of “Paws off my city!” while giving blue-power, Québecois nationalists reason to let loose with a chorus of some Frank variant of “Gainin’ on ya! Heh!”

Conventional wisdom across Canada has it that a new interest in municipal-level politics has swept the nation in recent years. The landslide election of a progressive slate in Vancouver represents the Good, the Toronto Megacity project exemplifies the Bad, and the circus around “Une ile, une ville” in Montréal, the Ugly aspects offered up by this new fascination. Opponents of the Montréal merger project -- who in the past decade have vociferously tried to prevent, then ‘rectify,’ the forced absorption of 28 largely English-speaking cantons into the country’s second-largest city -- have expertly identified and exploited the “small is beautiful” ethos that possesses so many of those suddenly taken with the politics of the City. Peter Trent, former mayor of Westmount and darling of the anti-merger crusaders writes (in an article that appears on Democracite.org) that “the creed of giantism and uniformity is very much alive… This giant bureaucratic edifice conceived by a statist and centralising government, seen in the harsh light of rational examination, cannot lead to the municipal salvation these authors so earnestly seek.” If, in fact, “small” and “beautiful” are interchangeable, then the forlorn residents of Trent’s Westmount live on streets lined with very ugly houses.

To be sure, there are a plethora of yawn-inducing zoning and re-zoning what-have-yous bound up in this debate. I don’t mean to suggest that the discussions surrounding firefighting and library services are wholly disingenuous. It’s very clear that the renewed interest in municipal affairs across the country marks a healthy democratic initiative geared towards reclaiming a political space which profoundly affects the lives of citizens.

What is also clear, however, are the national and class dimensions which underlie what is ultimately and most importantly an attempt by the anti-merger movement to safeguard the long-standing privileges of the small, Anglo-Saxon minority in Québec -- Rene Levesque’s “Rhodesiens.” Lost in the talk about the ‘grassroots’ is the fact that Westmount stands squarely alongside neighbourhoods such as Vancouver’s Shaughnessy in terms of concentrations of residential wealth, and that the anachronistic division of the island of Montréal into nearly 30 different “cities” has been largely nothing more than a system of guarding tax-revenue and English-language rights for a small, privileged elite. As an aside, for those convinced that the English language is, in fact, under siege in Montréal and therefore in need of special shelters like the cantons on the island’s West, might I suggest a history lecture at McGill or Concordia, followed by a hearing check-up at Royal Victoria Hospital?

Infinitely more so than in Toronto, the Montréal megacity debate is rooted in long-standing culture wars lying just under one of the most significant socio-political ruptures in the country. Perhaps one of the earliest weigh-ins on the question of merger can be found in the FLQ Manifesto of 1970, which states that Québecois workers “will always be the diligent servants and boot-lickers of the big shots, as long as there is a Westmount, a town of Mount Royal, a Hampstead, an Outremont, all these veritable fortresses of the high finance of St. James Street and Wall Street…” On both sides of the issue, heavy historical memories, mostly absent in Toronto, colour perspectives enormously in Montréal.

Canadians, fattened from gorging on the illusions fed to a shared U.S. infotainment market by commentators like Michael Moore have come to relish self-congratulation in the face of American barbarism. When instances of anti-French Canadian racism do rear their heads in the diatribes of the Paleolithic Don Cherry or the Yanqui-that-beat-SARS, Conan O’Brien, English Canada is largely ill-equipped to deal with them.

Conversely, we are expert in analyzing the hypocrisy and the xenophobia of our neighbours to the South. “Of course politics in California are profoundly anti-Latino,” we might be heard to offer. “Just look at the way cities are divided into wealthy, Anglo West Palo Alto or Los Angeles on the one hand and poor, Mexican East Palo Alto or East L.A. on the other.” Funny. What is it about Latin that translates so poorly in a Canadian context?