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  #21  
Old Posted Aug 22, 2017, 2:08 PM
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When did Quebec City get it's name? I know it was founded in 1608 and only had about 500 people 50 years later but at what time did they start calling it a city by name?
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  #22  
Old Posted Aug 22, 2017, 2:21 PM
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Originally Posted by TorontoDrew View Post
When did Quebec City get it's name? I know it was founded in 1608 and only had about 500 people 50 years later but at what time did they start calling it a city by name?
Québec and Montréal were founded as cities. It came automatically in Québec's case with the institutions : the Habitation (gouverneur's house), the central church that soon became a cathedral (the seat of a diocèse), the religious communities, the education facilities... All of this was quickly put in place in the very beginning. It was a planned capital. The villages around Québec (Beauport, Charlesbourg, Sillery, Sainte-Foy, Cap-Rouge, Château-Richer...) followed a much more organic settlement path.

Theoritically Québec has never been considered a village. Other cities in the USA followed the same pattern.
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  #23  
Old Posted Aug 22, 2017, 2:38 PM
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When did Quebec City get it's name? I know it was founded in 1608 and only had about 500 people 50 years later but at what time did they start calling it a city by name?
If you were referring to the "Quebec" rather than the "City", the first mention of Quebec dates back to 1601, before the City was founded. It referred to the location where the City now stands. So it never changed name. However Champlain tried to change it to "Ludovica" in 1618, with no success.
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  #24  
Old Posted Aug 22, 2017, 2:48 PM
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And by the way, in the prov. of QC, until the mid-80's, according to the law (loi sur les Cités et les VilleS), a village or a municipality could ask for the title of "Ville" ("Town") as soon as they reached a population of 3000. In the most recent text of law, the threshold has been lowered to 2000. Interestingly enough, 3000 still appears to be the threshold for a small town to be considered as such today too, in people's minds and in governmental services at least, especially in regional Quebec (La Pocatière, Forestville, Havre-Saint-Pierre and the likes are all considered as towns).

An exception to the law may be granted in the case of municipalities with a lot of summer residents.

According to the same law, and until 1968, a town of over 6000 inhabitants could ask for the title of "Cité" ("City"), which came with more powers and a greater administration (more councillors, etc.) However, the two last "Cités" in the province, Dorval and Côte-Saint-Luc, lost their titles in 2001 when the whole island of Montréal was merged into one municipal administration (and later de-merged).

Now, if we consider the geographic phenomenon rather than the law, the generally understood classification goes as follows (these are not legal titles, it's a classification of the urban nodes on the territory, you know the kind of point they will put on the map ) :

0-500 (no centrality) : hamlet
0-500 (centrality) : small village
500 - 1500 : village
1500 - 3000 : big village
3000 - 10000 : small town
10000 - 30000 : town
30000 - 50000 : big town / regional city
50000 - 100000 : city / regional city
100000 + : big city


Finally, the UMQ (Union des municipalités du Québec), has created some "caucus d'affinités", which are groups of municipalities that share similar problems or situations. Those groups are :
  • Municipalités de la métropole : all the suburban municipalities around Montréal (the CMM) and Montréal
  • Grandes villes : all the municipalities with at least 100 000 inhabitants
  • Cités régionales : every census agglomeration (CA) of every administrative region
  • Municipalités de centralité : towns that do not have a CA, but still are regional centres, such as Farnham, La Pocatière, Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce, etc.
  • Municipalités locales : rural municipalities.
The mayors of each group usually meet on a yearly basis to discuss of their preoccupations.
I love these groups because they rather use qualitative criteria than quantitative ones to classify the municipalities, which IMO makes more sense.
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  #25  
Old Posted Aug 22, 2017, 2:56 PM
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It's worth mentioning that even though the word "cité" exists in French, in common usage (official on non-official) there is no real equivalent in French to the English distinction between "city" and "town".

Every "town" is a "ville" and every "city" is also a "ville".
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  #26  
Old Posted Aug 22, 2017, 2:58 PM
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
It's worth mentioning that even though the word "cité" exists in French, in common usage (official on non-official) there is no real equivalent in French to the English distinction between "city" and "town".

Every "town" is a "ville" and every "city" is also a "ville".
Exact. Cité was only a legal status in most of the cases. And in French, it's more a philosophical concept than a geographic one.
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  #27  
Old Posted Aug 22, 2017, 7:31 PM
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Exact. Cité was only a legal status in most of the cases. And in French, it's more a philosophical concept than a geographic one.
And of course in France "cité" has a negative connotation: concentrations of high-rise cheap dilapitated ugly commieblock housing populated by the poor (usually immigrants or their French-born kids).

The word "cité" isn't stigmatized in that way for us here.
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  #28  
Old Posted Aug 23, 2017, 3:29 AM
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
It's worth mentioning that even though the word "cité" exists in French, in common usage (official on non-official) there is no real equivalent in French to the English distinction between "city" and "town".

Every "town" is a "ville" and every "city" is also a "ville".
I think Dorval is the only place left that officially uses "cité" from what I've read. I'm pretty sure both Rouyn and Noranda used it as well until they merged into the Ville de Rouyn-Noranda in the mid 1980s. Didn't many more Quebec cities use it in the past until about the 1960s and 1970s? (I've never researched it but I remember seeing "cité" in old photos, documents and records.
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  #29  
Old Posted Aug 23, 2017, 3:52 PM
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Originally Posted by Loco101 View Post
I think Dorval is the only place left that officially uses "cité" from what I've read. I'm pretty sure both Rouyn and Noranda used it as well until they merged into the Ville de Rouyn-Noranda in the mid 1980s. Didn't many more Quebec cities use it in the past until about the 1960s and 1970s? (I've never researched it but I remember seeing "cité" in old photos, documents and records.
That is correct. Though it's virtually disappeared at this point. This may have coincided with the abandoning of quasi-systematic bilingualism across much of Quebec. A lot of places were likely "Cité de / City of" back then.

But yeah I do remember seeing the word "Cité de Hull" before, but this was quite some time before the merger that created the new Gatineau. At that point the term had been "Ville de Hull" for a couple of decades I'd say.

And when the location of the Olympic Park in Montreal was announced, it was said to be in the "Cité de Maisonneuve" which was an formerly separate municipality that eventually merged with the City of Montreal.
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  #30  
Old Posted Aug 23, 2017, 6:12 PM
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Originally Posted by Loco101 View Post
I think Dorval is the only place left that officially uses "cité" from what I've read. I'm pretty sure both Rouyn and Noranda used it as well until they merged into the Ville de Rouyn-Noranda in the mid 1980s. Didn't many more Quebec cities use it in the past until about the 1960s and 1970s? (I've never researched it but I remember seeing "cité" in old photos, documents and records.
I'll requote parts of my (maybe too) long post (which is still on this very page, and that probably no more than 1 or 2 people have read) to answer that.

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Originally Posted by Laceoflight View Post
And by the way, in the prov. of QC [...] according to the law (loi sur les Cités et les VilleS) [...] and until 1968, a town of over 6000 inhabitants could ask for the title of "Cité" ("City"), which came with more powers and a greater administration (more councillors, etc.) However, the two last "Cités" in the province, Dorval and Côte-Saint-Luc, lost their titles in 2001 when the whole island of Montréal was merged into one municipal administration (and later de-merged).


Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
That is correct. Though it's virtually disappeared at this point. This may have coincided with the abandoning of quasi-systematic bilingualism across much of Quebec. A lot of places were likely "Cité de / City of" back then.
Virtually every town and city in the province has been incorporated as a "Cité" once, before 1968... From the biggest (Montréal, Québec, Hull, Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke, Saint-Jean, Saint-Hyacinthe, Chicoutimi, etc.) to the smallest (Farnham, Maniwaki, Deux-Montagnes, Montmagny, etc.)
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  #31  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2017, 2:04 AM
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Same with Calgary. As GernB alludes to, changing to a ward system is an option once a municipality becomes a city, but not mandatory. Although I said it might be problematic to have councilors 'at large', I also wonder if it results in more collaborative governance.
When Thunder Bay was created in 1970, the election we had in 1969 to appoint its council included most of the people that ran on the previous two 12-member councils of the former cities as well as numerous newcomers. The ballot was about 4 feet long. Over 100 people ran in that election for 12 at-large seats and voters have to pick 12 of those 100+ candidates. The winners got something like 20% of the vote overall, and something like 5% to 7% of the actual votes cast (over 500,000 votes since each voter got to make up to 12 picks). Dozens of people got less than a thousand votes.

It was a totally absurd system and one of the first things they did was implement wards. But people didn't like getting to only pick one of the 12 councillors, so shortly after that we established the current system (which I think was one of the first in Canada).

Seven wards, five at-large councillors. Each voter picks 6 people to serve on our 12 person council.

So we get to see within our own system the pros and cons to the two.

Ward councillors make it easier for people to get into politics. It focuses on a smaller area and the cost is less because you're competing with fewer people for fewer votes. The races have an average of 5 candidates for up to 6,000 votes. The downside is that some of the ward councillors are pretty useless and we end up with the silly issue that Parliament finds itself in, where people representing the opposite end of town from a minor project are voting on it.

In the at-large race, you have people who have more money and a longer period of public exposure. They tend to be career politicians or very well known political figures and the money they spend on the races eclipses what the ward races spend. The seats aren't accessible to the average person because even if 5,000 vote for an at-large candidate, you usually need 12,000 to 15,000 to win and you're competing with 30+, not 5. So in our system, the at-large councillors tend to function similarly to senators: they're wealthy, well-known, and well-entrenched. They're more likely to get re-elected than ward councillors because they're better known than ward councillors, and let's face it, municipal elections are basically treated by the electorate as a multiple choice question of "Who is currently sitting on City council?"

That last point is why I oppose all at-large systems. It basically cements people's political careers. It rewards wealth and public exposure over ideas, vision and experience. It makes politics less accessible to people and I think it's led to voter apathy.

But then in our case it's all kind of a moot point. You mention collaborating: despite their political affiliations, most of our councillors have nearly identical viewpoints on almost everything.

Now, if you want to see a really fucked up system to determine the composition of a governing council, look at INACs requirements on Indian Band councils. If we had the same policies in municipalities, it would expand the number of elected officials in this country by a magnitude.
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  #32  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2017, 5:07 AM
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Originally Posted by Laceoflight View Post
I'll requote parts of my (maybe too) long post (which is still on this very page, and that probably no more than 1 or 2 people have read) to answer that.







Virtually every town and city in the province has been incorporated as a "Cité" once, before 1968... From the biggest (Montréal, Québec, Hull, Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke, Saint-Jean, Saint-Hyacinthe, Chicoutimi, etc.) to the smallest (Farnham, Maniwaki, Deux-Montagnes, Montmagny, etc.)
Thanks very much!
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  #33  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2017, 4:13 PM
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The rule of thumb in New Brunswick for years was that you reached city status at a population of 10,000, town status at 1000 and village status at (I think) 300. The recent introduction of "rural communities" and "regional municipalities" have fudged things a bit, but the general rule still stands.

Some of these places have kept their status even though they've dropped down below the threshold, and some towns that passed 10K never did apply to become a city, mainly because they'd have to go through the expense of translating all business into French.

Colloquially, of course, it's not always that cut and dry.
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  #34  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2017, 4:47 PM
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Originally Posted by Laceoflight View Post
Québec and Montréal were founded as cities. It came automatically in Québec's case with the institutions : the Habitation (gouverneur's house), the central church that soon became a cathedral (the seat of a diocèse), the religious communities, the education facilities... All of this was quickly put in place in the very beginning. It was a planned capital. The villages around Québec (Beauport, Charlesbourg, Sillery, Sainte-Foy, Cap-Rouge, Château-Richer...) followed a much more organic settlement path.

Theoritically Québec has never been considered a village. Other cities in the USA followed the same pattern.

Thanks!
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