MONTREAL — In a very real sense, Montreal looms large in Quebec. About 23 per cent of the province’s population (and its tax base) lives within the city’s 4,258 square kilometres, along with nearly 30 per cent of its businesses, the bulk of its startups and the near-entirety of its head offices and media corporations—not to mention the economic and cultural heft that comes with them. Also: Go Habs go. We ostensibly secular Quebecers don’t have any other hockey deity worthy of our prayers.

I am as much a Montreal snob as anyone living on this lovely, ridiculous island, if only because its loveliness and ridiculousness are addictive, almost all-consuming. Yet Montreal’s charms have long masked a political reality about the place. For all its might, the city has spent a considerable part of its 380 years being maligned or ignored by the provincial government. This has rarely been truer than under Premier François Legault and his Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government, which rose to power with very little help from Montrealers—and which returned the favour by rendering the city nearly invisible, politically speaking. As the province heads toward an election on Oct. 3, the differences seem even starker. 

“Montreal is an international metropolis with a $200-billion GDP. It’s an important centre for finance, aerospace, education and pharmaceuticals. Yet it has very little autonomy and inadequate representation at the National Assembly,” Balarama Holness, the founder of the Montreal-centric political party Bloc Montréal, told me recently.

Quebec’s real locus of power is a two-hour drive northeast, behind the old ramparts built to stave off the English. Apart from housing the National Assembly, Quebec City is prone to fits of populism that have of late benefited the CAQ, which represents 80 per cent of Quebec City’s ridings. By comparison, the party represents less than eight per cent of Montreal-area ridings.

On paper, at least, this has benefited Quebec City mightily. In 2018, the party published “Priorité Capitale,” a 20-page report laden with promises to, among other things, fix Quebec City’s bridges, expand its airport, gussy up its churches and dig a $7-billion, eight-kilometre tunnel under Quebec City to ease the commutes of some 50,000 suburbanites a day. No lesser figure than the province’s finance minister is officially tasked with wooing the NHL for a return of the Québec Nordiques. Meanwhile, Montreal can’t get a minister to set foot in the city as it struggles through a spate of deadly shootings.

I wanted to know whether these favours are lifting Quebec City’s prospects, so I looked to the city’s startups for answers. This wasn’t an accidental choice. Startups tend to pay well—a data analyst makes an average of $33.65 an hour in the province—thereby providing exactly the kind of “quality jobs” Legault set about creating during the 2018 election cycle. 

So how appreciative were these startup types of all this attention? Not very, it turns out. 

First, an aside. Though not as big as its Montreal counterpart, Quebec City’s tech sector is thriving. There are 87 video-game companies in the city, generating $170 million in revenue, while the city’s ICT sector accounts for over four per cent of the regional GDP, according to statistics compiled by Québec International, the city’s economic development agency. A full 20 per cent of the population over the age of 15 is trained in new technologies, and as recently as 2018 the city had the highest employment rate in Canada among 25- to 54-year-olds. 

Helping drive the city’s tech sector is a compelling argument long used to sell Americans on Montreal: Quebec City is cheap by comparison. “Just in terms of salaries, to say nothing of housing and renting, everything is more expensive in Montreal. In terms of quality of life, it’s a 15-minute drive from one end of [Quebec City] to the other,” as Stéphane Guérin, president of marketing-tech startup DashThis, told me. “And the tech entrepreneur community is small, so it’s easy to rub shoulders.”

“Don’t say it too loud, because Montreal will try to poach from us, but we have an incredible talent pool here,” echoed Guillaume Duchesneau, whose software development firm Ingeno mostly serves U.S. tech firms. ”And, no false modesty, we develop products for startup companies in Silicon Valley, where they have access to the best resources in the world. And the fact that the companies there trusted Ingeno to develop their software for millions of their workers tells me something.”

Yet there was a moment, as awkward as unexpected, when I asked Guérin and Duchesneau about the current government. For more than a year, Montreal’s tech sector has fumed over the CAQ’s stance on immigration—Legault asserts that an increase would come at a cost to “national cohesion”—and its equally severe law regarding the use of French in the workplace, which in some cases mandates fines for the use of English in the course of doing business. I’ve always assumed these were problems for multicultural, multilingual Montreal, not more homogeneous, overwhelmingly French Quebec City. 

I was wrong. “I want it to be super clear: the French language needs to be protected, and I’m for it, but there are parts of the law that make businesses here less competitive with the rest of the world,” Duchesneau says. He takes particular exception to the requirement that immigrants must learn French in six months upon arriving in the province. “We at Ingeno don’t think this is reasonable.”

One gets a similar vibe from Guérin. Ninety per cent of his company’s business is outside Canada’s borders, and its website is almost entirely in English. For this, he says, he has had the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), the province’s language-enforcement body, “on my ass” practically from the company’s founding in 2011—even though he doesn’t have any Quebec-based clients to speak of. Most recently, he says, the OQLF told him his social media posts had to be predominantly in French. “Sacré-moi patience,” he said, which is an impolite way of saying, “Gimme a break.”

It reminded me that in June, 37 tech executives in the province signed an open letter calling on the government to suspend the law restricting the use of English, saying it “is threatening to do enormous damage to the province’s economy.” A total of 171 people had signed it as of last week—including leaders of 25 firms based in Quebec City. They are located two hours and what often feels like a world away from Montreal. Sometimes, though, the denizens of the old walled city are just like us. 

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.” @MartinPatriquin