“The Montreal Expos in the early ’80s were more popular than the Montreal Canadiens,” Mitch Melnick of TSN Radio 690 says in the documentary. “That’s a fact. That’s not pie-in-the-sky thinking from hardcore baseball fans. They were giving away 2,000 tickets a game to fill the seats at the Montreal Forum in the early ’80s while the Expos were setting franchise attendance records.”
It's not a fact
per se but there's pretty strong evidence in support of this claim. Full Gazette article
here.
And during this period (from 1969 through the early '80s), the Expos were 'Canada's team.' It was only once the Jays got good (1983 ish) that they actually started to push Expo fans out of Southern Ontario and the rest of Anglo Canada. Some converted. Some just disappeared. ;-)