Quote:
Originally Posted by hipster duck
Montreal has very little in common with a European city. Its built form is largely Eastern Seaboard with some local Quebecois flair (eg. wood-framed, brick-facaded rowhouses with exterior spiral staircases; streets that intersect at right angles with one another). Its demographics are the product of centuries of North American-style immigration. Stores are open on Sundays. Suburban kids hang out at the mall, ride yellow school buses and get 2 months off for summer.
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Not sure about the demographics argument. Not too many big cities on this land mass where "centuries of North American-style immigration" have produced a city with a majority population descended from French colonists who migrated in the first part of the 1600s.
It's true that Montreal's immigration patterns in the 1800s and 1900s were more in line with what you saw elsewhere on the eastern half of the continent, but contemporary immigration is again making the city's demographics diverge from what we're seeing in other big cities in Canada and the U.S.