Case Study: Montreal

Montreal is located in southern Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River. It is the only metropolis in Quebec, and one of Canada’s three main cities.

Concentration of Population

One of the main characteristics of the metropolis of Montreal is the concentration of its population. The Greater Montreal Area has a population of 3 979 402 inhabitants.^[1] This represents close to 50% of the total population of the province of Quebec.

Population Density

High population density is another element that characterizes Quebec’s metropolis. There is a big difference between the population density of Montreal and that of the entire province.

Diversity of the Population

The concentration of political and economic power contributes to the appeal and influence of the metropolis of Montreal.

Political Power

While Montreal is not the capital of the province, there is still a large concentration of political power there. The metropolis is home to several government offices and agencies, as well as consulates from more than 70 countries and over 60 international organizations.

Economic Power

Like all metropolises, there is a significant concentration of economic power in Montreal, including several economic and financial institutions, such as banks, real estate agencies and insurance companies.

Montreal has a high concentration of activities and services, which contributes to the city’s power of attraction.

Activities

The metropolis of Montreal offers lots of cultural activities, such as museum events, performances, exhibitions and festivals.

Services

Montreal is home to several major hospital centres, including two university super hospitals: the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Montréal (CHUM) and the McGill University Hospital Centre (MUHC). The city also has several specialized health institutes, such as the Montreal Heart Institute, the Montreal Neurological Institute (affiliated with the MUHC) and the CHU Sainte-Justine, a university hospital centre focusing on mother and child.

Given the city’s large population, there is a need to have many educational institutions. There are several school boards and school service centres offering elementary and secondary education in the Montreal metropolitan area, as well as many colleges and universities, including Collège de Rosemont, Cégep du Vieux Montréal, Université de Montréal and McGill University.

Montreal is also known for its concentration of media outlets, many of which have their offices in the metropolis. The city is home to several newspapers, magazines and publishers as well as television and radio stations, such as Radio-Canada. Many advertising and communications agencies as well as video game creators are established in Montreal, including Ubisoft.

Commercial Neighbourhoods

In Montreal, the largest commercial neighbourhood is located downtown. It is crossed by Sainte-Catherine Street, running 11.2 km in length, with its 1200 department stores, boutiques and restaurants.^[8] Also located on this street is the Eaton Centre, the largest shopping centre in the city. It attracts the residents of the Greater Montreal region as well as tourists, with more than 30 million visitors per year.^[9]

Residential Neighbourhoods

There are residential neighbourhoods across the entire metropolis and many of them are on the Island of Montreal. The densely populated neighbourhoods close to downtown are mostly residential. In this type of neighbourhood, the houses are often attached in rows and there are many apartment buildings. These neighbourhoods also have a high concentration of services and access to public transit.

Suburbs

In the 1950s, Montrealers started to move away from the city centre to live in the suburbs. Several factors explain this phenomenon. People who move to the suburbs are often in search of:

• a better quality of life

• less expensive houses

• less air pollution

• bigger yards

• quieter neighbourhoods

As a result, suburbs developed, first on the Island of Montreal and Île Jésus (Laval) and then, with the growth of the population, on what is now known as the North Shore and South Shore of the metropolis. More than 50% of the population of the Greater Montreal Area now lives off the Island of Montreal.^[34]

The expansion of the metropolis around the Island of Montreal required the development and extension of public services, such as the aqueduct, electrical grid and sewer network. The transportation infrastructure, including highways, bridges, tunnels and commuter trains, also had to be developed. The expansion presented some challenges, such as protecting farmland and getting around within the metropolis.

There are many means of transportation in the Greater Montreal Area, allowing inhabitants to get from place to place and for businesses to trade with the rest of the world. One of the particular characteristics of the metropolis of Montreal is that it is built across two shores and two islands, requiring the construction of more than 40 bridges and tunnels.

A few means of transportation in Montreal
	The Port of Montreal is one of the largest in North America. It is connected to over 140 countries around the world, and more than 2000 ships pass through it every year, making it one of the area’s most important economic motors.
	The Montréal-Trudeau International Airport is the largest airport in Quebec and the second largest in Canada.[35] More than 30 airlines fly out of this airport to hundreds of destinations.
	The Greater Montreal Area also has many highways criss-crossing its territory, totalling 1735 km.[13]
	There are many railways in the Greater Montreal Area, mostly to transport goods. Its geographic location, on an island, makes the planning and development of rail transport more difficult because it requires the construction of several bridges.
	Montreal has developed a large public transit system, including a metro system with four lines and 68 stations.[14]
	Buses are another important part of the public transit system. The Greater Montreal Area has more than 220 bus routes and 900 stops.[2]
	People living in the suburbs have access to public transit, including commuter trains. There are six commuter train lines interconnecting several boroughs in the metropolitan area.
	The Greater Montreal Area has a very well developed network of bicycle paths and one of the largest bicycle path networks in the world is on the Island of Montreal. The City of Montreal alone has 889 km of bike paths.[15]

To learn more about public transit on the Island of Montreal, take a look at the following map: note that the neighbourhoods close to downtown Montreal have a greater concentration of public transit than the neighbourhoods further away, due in part, to the metro system.

The metropolis of Montreal faces a major challenge that most other metropolises do not have to deal with: Quebec’s heavy snowfall in the winter. Snow removal in Montreal is a major challenge. The City’s employees not only have to clear snow from highways, bridges and tunnel entrances, but also from streets and sidewalks. What’s more, they must collect all that snow and transport it to snow dumps in the city. Some neighbourhoods, like downtown, can be particularly difficult to clear because each day close to 160 000 cars are parked there, and more than 500 000 people move through its streets and sidewalks.^[16]

One of Montreal’s innovations in response to the winter climate is the development of a network of tunnels, called RÉSO, one of the largest underground networks in the world.

RÉSO is 32 km of tunnels, providing access to more than 1600 boutiques, 300 restaurants, 9 hotels, 8 metro stations, 5 train stations, several office buildings and university pavilions, as well as the Bell Centre. More than 500 000 people walk these tunnels every day.^[2]

Industrial Neighbourhoods

There are many industrial neighbourhoods in the metropolis of Montreal, with a concentration of industries, warehouses and technology companies.

The Greater Montreal Area brings together five different agglomerations: Montreal, Longueuil, Laval, the North Shore and the South Shore.

The agglomeration of Montreal is located on the Island of Montreal, which is comprised of the City of Montreal, divided into 19 boroughs, as well as 15 other cities.

Like every city in the world, Montreal has many different neighbourhoods. These are distinct in terms of their function and their location in relation to downtown. The neighbourhoods closer to downtown often have a higher population density and a greater concentration of activities and services.

Downtown

Multiethnic Neighbourhoods

Montreal has a very large immigrant population. Immigrants often choose to settle close to people from their communities. Consequently, Haitian, French, Moroccan, Algerian, Chinese and Italian cultural communities, among others, have developed in the metropolis. These cultural groups tend to come together in designated neighbourhoods, such as Chinatown, Little Italy, Little Maghreb and the Portuguese quarter.

Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods

There are significant inequalities in the distribution of wealth in Montreal and this inequity can be seen in the different neighbourhoods or boroughs of the city, some of which are privileged while others are impoverished.

Areas such as Montréal-Nord, Saint-Léonard, Saint-Michel, Côte-des-Neiges, Hochelaga and Parc-Extension have a greater number of inhabitants living under the low-income cutoff.

​​​​​In contrast, there are some very wealthy neighbourhoods and boroughs, such as Westmount, Outremont, Mount-Royal, Senneville, Beaconsfield and Sainte-Thérèse.

Montreal, like every metropolis in the world, has to deal with many issues, most of them related to the large population living in the city.

Cause

Urban sprawl is a major issue for the metropolis and one of the main causes of transportation problems in the city.

Over the last 20 years, the population density of the Greater Montreal Area has decreased by 10%. One of the reasons is that almost every neighbourhood built between 2002 and 2021 is a low-density suburb.^[17]

The suburbs are very different from neighbourhoods closer to downtown. They are residential neighbourhoods mostly comprised of individual houses built with a greater distance between them and on larger lots than in the city, meaning the population is much less dense. This type of neighbourhood makes transportation and pollution problems worse because 80% of the people living in suburbs use cars to get to work or to access various services.^[17]

Many people living outside the MMC nevertheless work in the city, which also contributes to transportation and pollution problems. More than 40% of people living in some 30 municipalities around the MMC go to work each day in the metropolis, and approximately 94% of them use their cars, adding to the traffic.^[18]

Problem

The large proportion of people who use their cars considerably increases the problem of road traffic. This is not just a suburban problem. More than half of the people living in the City of Montreal use a car to get to work, despite the high concentration of public transit.^[19]

Consequences

Car traffic in the Greater Montreal Area has many consequences:

• financial loss of more than $4 billion each year in the economic sector due to delivery delays and work absences^[21]

• increase in travel time for people living in Montreal, who, on average, spent more than 130 hours in traffic jams in 2019^[22]

• contribution to air pollution: the transportation sector in Quebec has the highest rate of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions

• greater pressure on transportation infrastructure leading to a faster deterioration of roads and bridges, which then require greater investment to maintain

Solutions

Public transit remains the best solution. Montreal’s transportation problem cannot be solved with more roads, bridges and overpasses.

Public transit means fewer cars on the roads, and this decreases traffic in a sustainable way. The use of public transit also often reduces travel time.

In the Montreal metropolitan area, if 3% of people used public transit instead of their car, costs related to road traffic would be reduced by $60 million and those related to air pollution, by $6 million.^[22] That’s why the Montreal metropolis is expanding its public transit system with the Réseau express métropolitain (REM), a completely electric and automated above-ground metro. It will provide a second metro link to the South Shore and a first link to the North Shore.

Cause

Like all large metropolises, Montreal must manage the waste produced by its population. Montrealers produce on average 465 kg of waste per year per person.^[23] Although much of this waste could have been recycled or composted, close to 50% of it is sent to the dump because individuals and businesses are improperly sorting their waste.^[24] According to the communications coordinator of Complexe Enviro Connexions, close to 70% of what is taken to the dump in Terrebonne should have been placed in recycling or compost bins.^[25]

​​​​​Problem

The Greater Montreal Area produces an enormous amount of waste. The Complexe Enviro Connexions in Terrebonne, the only landfill site in the Montreal area, receives 47% of the metropolis’s waste. That’s more than 3500 tons of waste that ends up in landfills every day,^[25] and they are filling up very quickly.

The rest of the GMA’s waste is sent to various sites outside the area.

Consequences

The large quantity of waste produced in the GMA has several consequences:

• the Complexe Enviro Connexions in Terrebonne will reach its full capacity and shut down in 2029

• shipping all of the metropolis’s waste elsewhere is much too expensive

Solutions

Despite the fact that Montreal already has recycling and organic waste (compost) pick-up, the metropolis has to rethink its system because it is not efficient enough. Montreal must reduce the quantity of waste it produces.

With the goal of solving this problem, the Greater Montreal Area (GMA) established a plan known as the Metropolitan Waste Management Plan. Its two main objectives are regional autonomy (to not send waste outside the area) and zero waste. In other words, the GMA does not want to send its waste to other regions and does not want to open a new landfill site. Instead, it wants to reduce the quantity of waste produced.

Here are some of the solutions put forth in the plan:

• attain a 70% recycling rate for recyclable materials by 2020 (the objective was not attained)

• attain a 60% recycling rate for organic materials by 2025

• modernize sorting centres

• modernize the return process for bottles and cans

The regulations around single-use plastics (straws, cups, bags) will help attain these objectives, since more than 15 000 tons of single-use plastics are thrown out in the metropolis every year. The City of Montreal banned several single-use plastic products, such as straws and cups, on March 1, 2023. Plastic bags were banned on September 1, 2022.^[26]

Various regulations will also be put in place to reduce food waste. Food businesses, such as grocery stores, will be encouraged to partner with food banks. The City may also eventually ban restaurants and grocery stores from throwing out food that is still edible.

Housing in Montreal is a major issue. It can be divided into three sub-issues, each with its own cause, consequence and solution.

The Shortage of Affordable Housing

Cause

Like all metropolises around the world, Montreal has a housing problem, caused in part by the fact that the average price of an apartment in the metropolitan area increased by 20% between 2015 and 2020. Since there are fewer and fewer rental units available, rents are going up. The rent for a two-bedroom apartment has increased from an average of $760 per month to more than $915.^[27]

Problem

The problem is that even if there are rental units available in the metropolis, they are too expensive for many tenants, especially those with low incomes. There are 213 000 low-income tenant households in the Greater Montreal Area, which represents about one-third of all tenant households in the area.^[28]

Consequences

The significant increase in rent is having very serious consequences for some people, who have to spend too much of their income on rent. This impoverishes tenants and forces them to cut back on other essential needs, such as food, education, transportation or clothing. Some tenants are being evicted because they are unable to pay their rent.

Some landlords are pressuring tenants to leave, claiming that they want to do major renovations when, in fact, they want to increase the rent. This is referred to as ‘renoviction’.^[29]

In some cases, people who are evicted run the risk of becoming homeless. There are currently more than 30 000 people experiencing homelessness in Montreal.^[30]

Solutions

Overcoming the shortage of affordable housing requires the construction of social and community housing. It has been shown that investing in this type of housing also leads to savings in other sectors, such as health and social services.

Another solution could be to set some controls on the housing market with various measures designed to prevent abusive rent increases and evictions (such as renovictions).

The Shortage of Social Housing

Social housing is built specifically for people with low incomes, and can be a solution to the shortage of affordable housing.

However, there are also issues related to social housing in the Greater Montreal Area.

Cause

There is very limited social housing available because very few units have been built. Of the new rental housing built between 2017 and 2020, only 5.1% is social housing.

Problem

There are too few social housing units when compared to the number of people who need it. Low-income individuals and families who are not able to find affordable housing turn to social or community housing, but there are not enough units in the Montreal area to meet the demand.

This problem is worsened by the fact that many social housing units are unsanitary. According to the mayor of the City of Montreal, Valérie Plante, in 2019 there were hundreds of unsanitary social housing units that were uninhabitable because they had not been maintained.^[31]

Consequences

The shortage of social housing forces low-income households to find other housing. These households must sometimes pay for housing that is much too expensive for their income. Some people do not have the means to pay for another type of housing and end up homeless.

Solution

There are three main solutions to the shortage of social housing:

• build more social and community housing

• require a minimum number of social housing units in new apartment buildings

• renovate existing social housing that is in poor condition

Unsanitary Housing

Cause

A number of factors result in unsanitary housing, including lack of maintenance and repairs.

Problem

Unsanitary housing is a problem in the metropolis. According to Maxime Roy, spokesperson for the tenants rights organization Regroupement des comités de logement et associations de locataires du Québec, one-third of tenants in Montreal are living in unsanitary housing.^[32]

Consequences

Unsanitary housing also has serious consequences for tenants’ health. Housing infested with vermin, such as cockroaches, is harmful to tenants’ health and wellbeing. Also, housing that is poorly insulated in the winter, or is unsafe, for example, has an unstable balcony, can have many negative consequences for its tenants.

In the case of unsanitary social housing, it remains vacant, which further contributes to the shortage of affordable housing.

Solution

To counter the problem of unsanitary housing, Montreal will be implementing a new certification that must be renewed every five years, starting in 2023. This will affect some 250 000 housing units in buildings of eight units or more. To obtain certification, landlords must prove, on the basis of an inspection, that none of their units are unsanitary or dangerous. They must also declare the rent being charged for all of the units at the time of certification.^[33]

To access the rest of the module, you can consult the following concept sheets.