MONTREAL—I was born a winter baby in Sherbrooke, Que., a long time ago. It was a sombre time for what was then a city of about 110,000. Bikers clogged the local courthouse, foreshadowing the area’s eventual reputation as home to one of the most notorious Hells Angels chapters in North America. La Tribune’s year-end tally of strikes and plant closures and resulting crime in Thetford Mines, the nearby asbestos-producing town, reads like an obituary for Quebec’s manufacturing sector. The sum of these malaises hit my birthplace hard. Between 1976 and 2001, Sherbrooke’s population decreased by more than 30 per cent.

Today, I’m happy to report, Sherbrooke tells an entirely different story, and not just because that Hells Angels chapter is long gone. The population has increased 25 per cent, to just over 175,000, between 2016 and 2023. Its industrial parks are brimming. Housing prices have seen big-city increases. And with little acclaim, or even notice, Sherbrooke has become a renowned leader in quantum computing.

Last year, the city became the site of the province’s first “innovation zone,” which aims to attract academics and match them with entrepreneurs, with the goal of bringing research to market.

The Quebec government announced there would be $435 million in investment in Sherbrooke, which among other things has seeded the development of IBM’s fourth quantum computer outside of the United States. Vancouver-based quantum computing software company 1QBit has set up shop in the city, as has Paris’s Pasqal. Stockholm’s Ericsson has partnered with the Université de Sherbrooke. Eidos-Montréal produces video games in Quebec’s largest city, but has branched out to Sherbrooke in part to develop the quantum side of things. A bevy of quantum-based startups have sprouted in the city. 

I, too, did a double take. When it comes to tech in Quebec, be it video games or AI, Montreal tends to suck up the oxygen. The city is home to four universities—including McGill, recently recognized as one of the best in the world. Attracting (and retaining) world-class researchers is often as easy as selling the city itself. Sherbrooke, just 155 kilometres to the east, might as well be on another planet.

Which, paradoxically, is precisely why the Université de Sherbrooke became a quantum computing leader. The process began in the bad old days of biker gangs and urban decline, and was less intentional than a result of having to exist in Montreal’s long shadow. “I’d be lying if I told you it was a 45-year master plan,” as Christian Sarra-Bournet, executive director of the university’s quantum institute, told me recently. “What actually happened was that the physics department was having a tough time competing with McGill, l’Université Laval and l’Université de Montréal when it came to recruiting professors.”

Rather than trying to attract professors and students on the merits of its physics program, variations of which existed at those bigger universities, Université de Sherbrooke instead concentrated on condensed-matter physics, the study of substances in their solid state, very much de rigueur at the time. Condensed matter physics gave us the transistor, and was key in the development of quantum computing. 

“It wasn’t like we were thinking ahead 45 years about an incredible wave of investment from around the world. It was pure scientific curiosity, and the idea that if we had a critical mass of researchers, we would become more attractive,” Sarra-Bournet told me. Today, Alexandre Blais, Louis Taillefer and André-Marie Tremblay are among the boldface names who call the university home.

Sherbrooke now counts among Cornwall, Ont. (logistics), Windsor, Ont. (EV batteries), Surrey, B.C. (agtech), and even Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., as a former also-ran city that has come into its own. Charlotte, N.C., and Portland, Maine, are two stateside examples. Even gloriously decrepit Detroit is seeing the beginnings of a resurgence as an EV-driven tech hub. In the U.S., anyway, the rise of smaller cities has come at the expense of larger ones, which as of late have been hemorrhaging college-educated workers. 

There’s another, lesser-known advantage to Sherbrooke’s success. Montreal is home to the lion’s share of the province’s recent immigrants and visible minorities. Though it is historically and infinitely richer because of it, this reality has made the city a target of nativist politics. Prominent members of the current government, Premier François Legault included, rarely mention the word immigration without suggesting it is a mortal threat to the French language and Quebec’s allegedly secular culture. By implication, they’re talking about Montreal.

But Sherbrooke’s economic and cultural revival has made it the third-largest immigration centre in Quebec, counting far more visible minorities than places like Chicoutimi, Trois-Rivières and Saint-Jérôme. As such, it is a burgeoning counter-example to a long-standing demographic trend—and a counterpoint to the government’s toxic rhetoric on the subject. As newcomers move beyond Montreal’s shores to places like Sherbrooke, those communities become harder to caricature as uncultured backwaters. At the same time, cosmopolitan Montreal seems less exceptional.

Apart from one summer job, I haven’t been back to Sherbrooke much since leaving it in a swaddle many moons ago. Blame disinterest, born of the notion that the place had never much changed. It’s heartening to know how wrong I’ve been. 

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