We moved from Montreal to Calgary to escape separatism

In the Spring of 1975, my family moved to Alberta. We took the train from Montreal. My brothers and I would look out the windows as the country sped by in the dark, wondering what lay ahead for us.

All of us were Montreal-born Irish Catholics. We had lived outside Quebec before - a couple years in Dallas, a few more years in Kingston - but Montreal lured us back. Montreal had it all: great culture, great restaurants, great schools. People came from all over the world to live in Montreal, and it made the place better.

If you were English, you knew how to get by in French. If you were French, you knew how to get by in English. It was really, really good - until it wasn’t.

Quebec had always had nationalists and xenophobes and separatists. Everyone knew that - the October 1970 FLQ crisis had made that very clear. But in the early 1970s, those angry people were starting to get closer to power. The Premier, Liberal Robert Bourassa, tried to beat the separatists by accommodating them, by coddling them.

Among other things, English-speaking people were increasingly unwelcome. My Dad saw what was coming. So we left.

Arriving at the train station in Edmonton, I can’t remember my parents’ reaction. But they told me later they wondered whether we had made a mistake. Going from a diverse, vibrant bilingual city of three million people - to Calgary, a much-smaller place, a place we didn’t know. Calgary had just under 500,000 people in 1975, and I guarantee you that no Calgarian was proclaiming that it was the next Montreal. The city’s official slogan in 1975 was “Something to Smile About,” which is a catchphrase that works in two directions.

So, Calgary wasn’t Montreal. But it became home.

In time, we discovered Calgary - Alberta - had great culture and restaurants and schools, too.  It had a welcoming, entrepreneurial spirit that was completely absent in other parts of the country. It had the Rocky Mountains, just a short drive away. It had clean water, it had clean air, it had limitless skies. It had people who welcomed us into their homes and their lives.

And it had stability.

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