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Montréal and Québec City

The duality of Canadian life has been called the "Twin Solitudes." One Canada, English and Calvinist in origin, is said to be staid, smug, and work-obsessed. The other, French and Catholic, is thought of as more creative, light-hearted, and inclined to see pleasure as the end purpose of labour. Or so go the stereotypes.

These two peoples live side by side throughout Québec and in the nine provinces of English Canada, but the blending occurs in particularly intense fashion in Québec province's largest city, Montréal. French speakers, known as Francophones, constitute about 70% of the city's population, while most of the remaining population speaks English -- Anglophones. (The growing numbers of residents who have another primary tongue, and speak neither English nor French, are called Allophones.) Although both groups are decidedly North American, they are no more alike than Margaret Thatcher and Charles de Gaulle!

Montréal is a modern city. Its downtown bristles with skyscrapers, but many of them are playful, almost perky, with unexpected shapes and bright colours. The city above ground is mirrored by another below, an underground labyrinth of shops, restaurants, movie theatres, and offices where an entire winter can be avoided in coatless comfort.

To the west and north of downtown are Anglo commercial and residential neighbourhoods, centred around Westmount. To the east and north are Francophone quartiers, notably Plateau Mont-Royal and Outremont. In between are the many dialects and skin tones of the immigrant rainbow.

Over the past decade, a bleak mood prevailed in Québec, driven by lingering recession and uncertainty over the future. After all, it still remained possible that Québec would choose to fling itself into independence from the rest of Canada. Lately, though, passions have cooled, and now, something else is going on.

Québec City is less sophisticated, more conservative, and more French. With its impressive location above the St. Lawrence River and its virtually unblemished Old Town of 18th- and 19th-century houses, it even looks French. Probably 95% of its residents speak French, and far fewer are bilingual, as most Montréalers are. (In the province as a whole, about 81% of citizens are Francophone.) With that homogeneity and its status as the supposed capital of a future independent nation, citizens seem to suffer less angst over what might happen down the road. They are also aware that a critical part of their economy is based on tourism.

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