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I’m not sure we disagree. I consider the quiet revolution, the FQL, the nationalist movement, and the PQ to be all of a piece -- the same thing in different generational clothing. I'll agree that far-sighted foreign money saw the writing on the wall as early as the 60s and started making new investments outside of Quebec But actually moving running businesses is much more disruptive, and only happened later. The whole process took decades, and culturally, Montreal was the capital well into the early 80s. Toronto didn't even have a baseball team until 77. I probably underweight the impact of the seaway. Me experience is in office work. And there, Hogtown was decidedly a solid second city -- like Chicago, or Lyon. Commercial banking was booming. But RBC, BMO, and many insurance companies still had their head-quarters in Montréal in the 1960s. RBC moved their headquarters in 1976, and BMO moved in 1977. Sun Life moved in 1978. It think it is obvious that the condo boom/crash of the 1980s was a direct consequence of 400k wealthy people moving en mass over a decade. Just an enormous bolus of money. The discussions of the day make are explicit that the PQ, the nationalist movement, and bill 101 in particular were driving the exodus. https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/history-through-... As for Mirabel - agree. The plans made sense in the 1960s when the planning started, but the shift to Toronto was underway before they broke ground in the mid 70s. But politics is run by older people, and their imaginations are rooted in the past, not the future. Toronto has the mirror problem -- run by Orange-order children who long for the days of zipping down the Kingsway to downtown in 15 minutes. We're only now moving into a generation of leaders who grew up with Toronto as the centre of Canada, and realizing we need infrastructure to match. We spent 40 years without building a thing while millions moved here. |