Members of the Olde 78th Fraser Highlanders (Photo by Stéphan Poulin; © Tourisme Montréal.)

Montréal: How It All Began
By Frank McNeirney

The Palais des Congrès, site of this year’s Annual Meeting & TXPO, sits only a few blocks from Customs House Square. That is the spot where, in 1642, the city was founded by a group of about 50 French settlers led by 30-year-old Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve.

Maisonneuve and his entourage weren’t the first to see the island locale, at the junction of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers. It had been spotted more than 100 years earlier by explorer Jacques Cartier. What caught Cartier’s eye was the island’s impressive 736-foot-high mountain, which he dubbed Mont-Royal.

The original colony, called Ville-Marie, experienced a rocky start when the local Iroquois, whose ancestors had lived in the area for thousands of years, objected to the influx of newcomers. Attacks were frequent until fortifications were built and more troops arrived from France.

The first school was established in 1657. By 1685, the number of colonists had risen to about 600, most of them living in simple wooden houses. The name of the town was changed from Ville-Marie to Montréal in 1705. Construction of the first road between Montréal and Québec City, then the capital of New France, was completed in 1734.

Rivers Pave Way to Progress
Location, as the saying goes, is everything. It certainly paid off in Mon-tréal’s early days, when the 780-mile-long Ottawa River, reaching deep into the country’s wild interior, enabled fur trappers to bring their products to the city via rafts and canoes. Even though the city is a thousand miles from the ocean, the extra-wide-and-deep St. Lawrence allows goods to be transported eastward to the Old World by oceangoing vessels.

Years later, the fur trade would be upstaged when the building of railroads added other products, like grains and minerals, to the bills of lading. The result: Montréal became not only Canada’s biggest metropolis, but also one of the world’s largest inland ports.

By the mid-1700s, relations with the Iroquois had mellowed. Relations with the British were another story, however. English troops took the island in 1760, and French control over all of Canada ended three years later. But the new rulers established a system of government that respected French civil law and customs. Their kindness paid off in 1775, during a brief and unsuccessful invasion of Montréal by south-of-the-border American colonists who hoped to persuade residents to join the rebel cause. “Thanks anyway,” was the French Canadians’ reply.

Language Not a Problem
Since then, the history of the city has been peaceful, if you don’t count the cliffhanging vote in 1995 that barely defeated a proposal by Québec separatists to form their own French-speaking nation. Only 51 percent of the citizens of the Province of Québec voted against the initiative, although Montréal residents turned it down by a 70 percent margin.

Today, polls show that language-based divisions are increasingly less of a problem in Québec. Although road signs, public information displays and ad billboards are in French, English is spoken in just about all hotels, restaurants, shops and other places frequented by visitors to Montréal, according to AABB member Guy Isabel, of Ovo Biosciences. “Montréalers are welcoming and friendly people,” he says. “Their ‘joie de vivre’ is palpable and contagious.”