Delphi complete works of.., p.764
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 764
These new facilities, and the rapid suburban trains now put on by the railways, made it possible for Montreal to spread out, to get rid of the congestion of its close-packed streets, its solid rows of houses; a still greater opportunity came with the boring of the tunnel under the mountain, a work undertaken by the phenomenal but ill-starred Canadian Northern Railway that was spreading at this time like a web all over Canada, built up of odd bits and odd benefits. At least it had enterprise. It needed a direct route from Ottawa to Montreal. Mount Royal was in the way. So the railway dived clean under it. The making of the tunnel through the solid core of rock that is the remaining base of a volcano was a marvelous piece of engineering work. The tunnel was begun from both ends at once, on Dorchester Street and behind the mountain, and duly met in the middle with absolute precision.
The opening of the tunnel meant that any Montrealer who liked could now live in the pleasant open country behind the mountain and be whirled into town through the tunnel in ten minutes. Convenient car or bus lines could connect, fan shape, with the suburban tunnel station. Wise people saw at once that this meant a wholesale migration to the back of the mountain. Hence came into being the new suburban town of Mount Royal. But the wise people were wrong. Montreal wouldn’t move. It still clings to its tenements and its rows and its clustering nests of piled-up apartments.
The reason is simple. It’s the cold. One has only to look at the wide expansion of Toronto, a city smaller in population, under the influence of the electric age. Toronto now reaches so far that where it ends it is called Aurora, or something else.
For we must remember that there is all the difference in the world between waiting for a suburban bus on a summer night in California, or even Toronto, and waiting for a suburban bus on a winter night in Montreal.
The scene is California. The night is soft and still, the air heavy with the scent of the peonies, their drooping heads fallen asleep upon their stems. Around us and about us, as we stand, the leaves of the magnolia stir faintly in the night air. Above us the velvet sky is soft with a myriad of stars, and from somewhere in the distance — so still is the night — we can hear the murmur of the sea. On such a night Young Love stands hand in hand together, waiting for the bus, talking of the stars and whether people love one another there also and hoping the bus will never come . . . Even Middle Age stands silent in something that feels almost like religious contemplation but which is really digestion.
Now change the scene to Montreal, in the heart of a winter night, with a blizzard blowing. “A rough night,” the Joneses said as they put us out of their suburban apartment after the game of bridge, as you put a cat out in the snow. A rough night, indeed! As we stand on the corner, waiting, the blizzard drives the hard-frozen snow against our faces . . . it blurs the electric light . . . we can hardly see the few scattered houses around us . . . nor the few frozen people huddled for shelter. The sidewalks are drifting fast with snow that piles in ridges and wedges, and all the sky is one great smother of gray. “Is that damn bus never coming?” — and at the burst of profanity nature rebukes us by lashing the snow in our faces . . . Even Young Love stands speechless in the lee of a lamppost, its temperature down to what science calls “absolute zero.” “Didn’t they say one every twenty minutes?” “Ah, here it comes!” The headlights show, blurred but powerful, through the driving snow . . . the bus crunches to the sidewalk. “In we get”— “What! This one going east?” Going and gone . . . Jones may keep his suburban rock garden and his asparagus bed. We don’t care if he grew more lettuce than he could eat: let him eat less. We are going to some place, 25 × 50, out of the cold.
We turn back again for a moment to the uptown movement which has utterly transformed Upper Montreal — St. Catherine Street West and its side streets — within easy living memory. When the move began the street was hardly to be called a street at all, a pleasant country road bordered with houses. It had nothing of the aristocracy and grandeur of Sherbrooke Street, just above it and parallel to it. The houses were modest buildings of two stories and an attic, with a little bit of garden in front or a big bit of garden behind. The side streets were built up to a good extent with stone houses in rows, but with much open space of gardens and orchards. Ten years later St. Catherine was still a street of houses but with many stores jostled in among them and square buildings going up on the best corners. Ten years after that it was a street of continuous shops but with many of the houses still showing, plastered over with false fronts, revamped, the lower stories gutted into bigger floor space. On the chief corner where Windsor Street, in crossing, changes its name to Peel, in true Montreal fashion, there stood a church. Presently the church was refaced, boarded, and bricked into a department store but with plenty of church showing. Then the church gave place to a real building, and later on the whole wide block was demolished and shoveled up to make room for the vast modern building that now stands there, the Dominion Square Building, perhaps the most symmetrically beautiful of the commercial buildings of Montreal.
This last, of course, was after the Great War. For it was not till then that building on a scale proportionate for the opportunity began. Within a few years along stretch of the street was crowded with tall buildings, department stores, business buildings, and the side streets rapidly invaded with all sorts of mongrel halfway transformations of dignified old stone houses into undignified “cafés,” “night clubs,” and the mushroom growth which precedes the real reconstruction of a modern city quarter.
Sojourners in the Mount Royal Hotel, one of these vast new structures, might be interested to know that not so long ago the hotel was chiefly garden and orchard, then a large high school and playground. The streets around were residential, quiet and filled with trees. Hard by there lived a Montreal poet, John Logan, whose friends still treasure his memory, and who wrote a poem on the singing of the birds that sang to wake him in the early morning. It began:
I have no garden, but a quiet street, Meeting another makes a cool retreat . . .
The hotel stands on one of the quiet streets where the birds sang. Other birds sing there now, and even earlier in the morning.
The pity is that the rebuilding has been all wrong from the start and condemns the great shopping street of St. Catherine to the narrow width and hopeless congestion that has been the fate of New York. It is too late to alter now; it was so easy then. They had only to slice all the houses on one side of the street into two halves and throw away one half. It seems that the only wide streets ever laid out are in towns that never grow.
This new age of expansion threw upon the city a larger and larger need for public works and a greater and greater opportunity for public theft. Hence the period witnessed, as culminating in the year 1910, the greatest and most resolute struggle for clean government that had yet marked the history of Montreal. This struggle for clean government had been going on ever since the city had been a city; but so had the struggle for dirty government. The struggle for clean government took the form of trying to find some method of election, of tenure of office, of area of representation, which would mean honest administration. The struggle for dirty government took the form of providing increasing temptations which would mean dishonest administration. It was like Milton’s battles in the sky: at times the citizens looked up and watched it; mostly they didn’t. The final result after a hundred and ten years is to leave the city of Montreal burdened with so huge a debt at so high an interest that in many areas the annual taxes for property eat up its entire rental value.
It will be recalled that under the original incorporation of 1832, proclaimed in force June 5, 1833, the city government was based on a universal vote of men over twenty-one (there were no women then) resident in the city twelve months and possessing real estate. These elected two councilors from each of eight wards, the original wards being East, West, St. Joseph, St. Ann, St. Lawrence, St. Louis, and St. Mary. These sixteen men chose one of themselves as Mayor. The Mayor was to receive a salary of four hundred dollars, the councilors nothing. It looks as simple and honest as early Massachusetts. The Council sat modestly in a rented house (of Madame de Beaujeu) on Notre Dame Street. When we add that the Mayor and Council selected as the figures on the coat of arms of the city a beaver, a rose, a shamrock, and a thistle (meaning something for everybody), and their motto, Concordia salus, the thing seems complete. The corporation took over the old local administrative duties of the justice of the peace; the act gave it power to buy and sell property and to borrow money. That was the thorn in the rose.
This government was authorized to last till May 1, 1836. They let it lapse, unwept, and went back to justices of the peace. Then came Lord Durham, horrified at the lack of municipal liberty. His report started a clean government movement that created, by Act of the Province of Canada, a new city government under Mayor and councilors, with six aldermen, to keep their eye on the councilors, chosen from the Council. This time they had only six wards. In 1845 they tried five wards. In 1851 they found it didn’t do to let the Council choose the Mayor, so the people elected him. In 1874 the distinction of aldermen and councilors was abolished. All were elected as councilors.
Under this city government Montreal staggered along as best it could until 1909. It was never satisfactory. In the earlier years the English element “ran” the city Council. But English-speaking people, honest and dishonest alike, are not keen about the emoluments and casual profits of small office. They want something bigger. Hence the men elected presently brought the Council into disrepute. “To be quite frank,” writes a local chronicler, “there was a long period during which the English-speaking people seemed to think that almost anybody was good enough to make an alderman.”
On the other hand, the French thought that the job of alderman was good enough for almost anybody, and so, says the same authority, “they had the good sense to elect their ablest men.” It is indeed characteristic of the French, both here and in what was France, that they are far more keen on securing the certain tenure and the assured living of a government office than the English ever are. One may count it in a sense to their credit. Life, in its sordid sense of livelihood, being thus assured, they may turn to the real things of life — the garden, the library, the picture gallery, the game of chess, or the diversion of love. Not so the English; they want to take risks, go after big things, put in years of sustained effort up the hill of life to gain the eminence, the wealth, the wide horizon of the hilltop. Often they gain it, to find it empty and windswept.
Such in miniature was the course of our city government. The bulk of the English people, those not interested in franchises and contracts, lost interest in the city government. They have never regained it, except in a sort of feverish make-believe as in 1909 and in 1939, when people tell them that the city government is rotten and the fault is with the citizens.
Hence the French element took over the city government and have held a majority control ever since. The annexation of outlying French-speaking suburbs, such as Hochelaga in 1883, St. Henri and St. Cunégonde in 1905, and the steady refusal of British Westmount to join Montreal (which surrounds it) helped to maintain French dominance.
Meanwhile, after 1890, the electric age had put a new face, or at least a much bigger face, on the city government. Huge sums had to be spent on lighting and tramways and telephones, on repaving streets and remaking sewers, and that, too, in connection with technical engineering services of light and power on which the intelligent citizen could have no proper judgment at all, and which the honest alderman couldn’t understand and which crooked aldermen didn’t need to.
The result was a new cry for clean government, a movement in 1898 to recast the whole city charter. A commission was appointed to prepare the legislation to submit to the Provincial Government. There was much genuine enthusiasm, much repentance for past sins. Here was prominent the work of young Mr. Herbert Ames, a rising businessman who both practiced and preached the doctrine of civic interest in civic affairs, lecturing and writing on the government of Montreal. He began here the career that later carried him to well-deserved eminence at Ottawa and Geneva.
The new statute called for a longer term — two years; for a Mayor possessing $10,000 worth of real estate in the city; for a Mayor’s salary up to $4000; for aldermen with property worth $20000 and salaries, called an indemnity, of $600. A salary means pay for what you do; an indemnity means compensation for what you don’t. It is felt in civic circles to be the more complimentary word.
The new act contained various gadgets for “special committees” and “special meetings” on casting votes — everybody to watch everybody like cats and rats. But all to no avail. Within ten years it had all gone to pieces. The new broom swept as dirty as the old one. “Towards its close,” writes Dr. Atherton, too kindly a critic to convey an untrue accusation, “corruption and inefficiency were rampant under the monopoly of a few who became stigmatized in the mouths of the citizens as the ‘twenty-three.’” The indifferent citizen was as indifferent as ever, bankers as willing as ever to lend at high interest, contractors as willing as ever to pave anything, light anything, or tear down anything. In those days it seems that, after all, the city must be good for it. There had as yet been no war, no depression, no repudiation of Western debts, no shadow of Mr. Aberhart lengthening out in the sunset to shadow the East. Hence the rope was woven for the neck of the property holder of today, who at times perhaps looks enviously at repudiated debts, the severed ropes of Western communities.
Montreal had thus got into the position of little Jim of the nursery rhyme, who never washed:
His friends were much hurt to see so much dirt, And often they made him quite clean, But all was in vain; he got dirty again And never looked fit to be seen.
Meantime the year 1908-09 witnessed a great civic revival as earnest as an old-time camp meeting. All classes in Montreal, except the criminal class, had become utterly disgusted and seriously alarmed at the flagrant dishonesty of the alderman. A “Citizens Association” began agitation for reform in 1908. Powerful influence obtained from the province the appointment of a Royal Commission (which means a nonpolitical body) under Justice Cannon, which made its report on December 12, 1909. It declared that since 1892 the administration of Montreal had been “saturated with corruption”; that “the majority of the aldermen have administered the committees and Council in such a manner as to favour the private interests of the relatives and friends, to whom contracts and positions were distributed to the detriment of the general interests of the city and of the tax payers”; that “25% of the annual revenue of $5,000,000 had been spent in bribes and malversations of all kinds,” and of the balance “the greater part in works of which the permanence has very often been ephemeral.”
The storm of anger drove twenty-two of the twenty-three aldermen out of office. The eager approval of all the best citizens accompanied Judge Cannon’s recommendation to the Provincial Government in the advocating of scrapping the whole system as it existed and setting up a “commission government.”
This, it will be remembered, was democracy’s latest remedy for its own ailments in the early part of the twentieth century. The prevailing method of election of councils too numerous for individual responsibility, bribable one by one, with too little power for honest control and plenty for stealing, had led all over North America to a desire for something else. What was really wanted was a new heart, or rather an old one renewed: the fault was not in the form but in the spirit. A crooked alderman is no worse than a crooked commissioner.
But they asked for commission government — a government of strong men with large power, longer terms, and great responsibility, men too well off, or at least too well paid, to need to steal — government, in a word, on a business basis of efficiency.
Much was made of the experience of the city of Galveston, flooded out for its sins by the angered Gulf of Mexico and reborn under a commission of businessmen. This was a part of the apotheosis of the “businessman,” as the man who knows everything and can do everything, which lasted till he fell like Humpty Dumpty from the wall of Wall Street in 1929. “Oh yeah!” said the world.
But the current ran strong in Montreal. A plebiscite endorsed the request for commission government. Hence a new city government was created by a provincial statute of 1910, in which the Council surrendered its financial powers to a Board of Control.
There is no doubt that the institution of government by a Board of Control marked a real determination “to be good,” a real intention on the part of the citizens to keep their eyes on the city government, a genuine rebirth of public spirit. “This government,” wrote a local authority at the time, “is now on trial.” Then came the Great War and put all else in the shadow. The best men had better things to do than keeping their eyes on aldermen. And so somehow government by commission in Montreal, a new broom that swept very clean at first, was presently discarded again and a statute of 1921 restored aldermanic government. This time the city Council consisted of a Mayor and thirty-five aldermen of whom five were selected by the whole body to act as an Executive Commission. This arrangement merely added the new problem of too great a division of authority. Things were soon as bad as ever. “City administration in the dark thirties,” says a current witness, “called desperately for action.” Hence another wave of clean government enthusiasm led to the adoption of an entirely new system in 1940. This time reliance was placed on the patriotic citizen, not a professional politician, serving without pay for service’s sake. Under this system Montreal is administered by a Council composed of a Mayor and ninety-nine councilors. The Mayor is elected by a general vote of the ratepayers. Of the councilors, sixty-six are elected, six from each of eleven divisions of the city; of each six, three are elected by property holders, three by all the voters. The other thirty-three are appointed by various business and educational bodies, such as the Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, McGill University, the University of Montreal.
