Something of a daisy-chain here: the station is named after the street, the street after the river, and the river after a third century deacon of Rome martyred in the reign of Emperor Valerian for the impudence of declaring the riches of the church to be the poor. We’ll begin with the river. Jacques Cartier […]
From Champlain’s Unemployment, A Career Change, A Dragon, and Acadie
One of the questions I am often asked about this project is “Why?” or, less bluntly, “What got you started?” Obviously, there is my curiousity in Canadian history and my love of the metro, but the more prosaic and practical answer is that when I started I was unemployed and, as I was just arrived […]
Acadie
Acadie was the name used by the French to refer to the Atlantic coastal area which now includes Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Quebec and Maine. Inhabited by the Mi’kmaq and Algonquin, the first European settlement was established in 1604 on the Ile Ste Croix, now Dochet Island in Maine. […]
Before St Laurent, News of the Cape Breton Landfall
On 24 June 1497, the feast day of John the Baptist, John Cabot made landfall on Cape Breton and planted two flags: one, a banner for his patron, Henry VII of England, the other for St Mark and his native Venice. To read the accounts of Cabot’s voyages from Bristol and the reactions to his […]
From Cartier, Happy Canada Day!
[I’m back from my holidays in Europe, and just in time for Canada’s birthday and Montreal’s moving day too so please excuse the repost, while I unpack, recover, and join the fray. Hope you’re having fun too!] “Canada,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau is supposed to have said, “is a country built against any common, geographic or […]
En raison des vacances, un ralentissement de service
After several major service outages, the STM has started giving more frequent updates about what is delaying metro users. Following suit, I have the follow service update: Delays will be caused by a two week trip to Europe. It’ll be my first time back in since I arrived in Montreal 18 months ago so it’s […]
At Montmorency, Corruption and Secret Deals
With the city of Laval currently basking in provincial tutelage and the title of most corrupt city in the province, one might ask if the mayor had been reading from the life of the man whose name his city takes. Not that François de Laval de Montmorency was himself corrupt. No, it seems that he […]
From Laurier, A Gilded Age, and Its Unravelling
With the news that in preparation for the G8 summit later this month, the small town of Fermanagh in Northern Ireland has been decked out in the image of a sadly lacking prosperity, it is worth recalling a similar event from the nineteenth century, albeit at a different stage of the economic cycle. The 1897 […]
At Lionel Groulx, the Delirium of the Nation
Reading Esther Delisle’s account against the French Canadian nationalist and anti-semite, Lionel Groulx, the case against him seems overwhelming. But Groulx was neither the first anti-semite nor the first person to create a national myth. In the hardships of the Depression, Groulx was hardly in original looking for scapegoats, and finding them. As Delisle, herself […]
At Laurier, Between the Klondike, London and Washington
In 1896, the year Wilfred Laurier became Prime Minister, Canada didn’t have a foreign policy. There was no need; most English speakers rejoiced in being imperial subjects and thought of themselves as British and while French Canadians felt no love for the empire, they were content for their imperial masters to respond to the threat […]
From Jean Talon, New France
Among the traitors to French Canada identified by Lionel Groulx were the young men, Radisson and Grosselliers among them, who in the seventeenth century did not hesitate “between the sedentary life of the pioneer and the seductive existence of the coureur de bois”. Attracted by the land’s “vast prospect, its immensity, served by the most […]
From Lionel Groulx, The Death of a Race
The stations of the Montreal Metro system are not named after people. They are named after streets and places, which themselves may or may not be named after people. So when people call for Lionel-Groulx to be renamed after Oscar Peterson, they are actually calling for the street to be renamed. There is no Peterson […]
From Lionel Groulx, The Birth of a Race
Of all the stations in the metro system, Lionel-Groulx is the most controversial. Named after the priest and historian, he dominated a strand of French Canadian intellectual culture from the 1920s to his death in 1967. To his admirers, including former students at Université de Montréal, André Laurandeau, a future editor of Le Devoir, and […]
From Laurier, Canada
Canadian Confederation was a marriage of convenience performed under the shotgun of the U.S. Civil War. The country created by Macdonald and Cartier existed on paper but was one dominated by English imperialists often hostile to a suspicious French-speaking minority, themselves more dominated by a local Catholic clergy than their English neighbours. Ten years after […]
From Cartier, Pax Canadiana, or Confederation
“Canada,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau is supposed to have said, “is a country built against any common, geographic or historical sense”. Prime Minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, Trudeau was a smart man: he did not to say that it made no political sense. He also had the good sense not […]
At Place d’Armes, An Election and A Massacre
Canada has just now to witness the most foul and barbarous murder of several of her citizens and MONTREAL is about to become no less famous than Manchester, in the annals of Military despotism, outrage and assassination. The Vindicator, 22 May 1832 One of the things that I enjoy most about this project (and the […]
