What do we know about her time and her concerts here?

Well, I was curious when I was looking into, like, you know, what connections can I make between Celine and Montreal? I thought, well, obviously she's played at the Bell Centre, so let me just go search how many shows she's actually done at the Bell Centre.

So she did a tour there, Falling Into You Tour, 1996.

Let's Talk About Love Tour, 1998.

Taking Chances Tour 2008, most recently the Courage Tour, which she was there in 2019 and 2020.

And I looked it up and all the shows she's done, she's done over 50 performances at the Bell Centre.

And I thought, well, obviously she did a lot more at Caesars Palace,

Let's talk about food now, because Sydney and Dion has a particular connection to some pretty iconic spots in the city.

Eaton's.

Eaton's not originally from Montreal because most of the other things on this list that we're going to talk about today were from Montreal.

Eaton's was opened in Toronto in the 1860s, moved to Montreal in opened up a shop here and in 1925 opened up the giant flagship store on St. Catherine Street.

It was like one of the great shopping institutions of Montreal, famous for its Christmas windows, famous for, you know, the real Santa Claus was at Eaton's.

Yeah.

You know, everyone knew that.

Yes.

It was a big deal to get your clothes from Le Chateau.

Of course,

of course.

But, you know, what students give to Montreal, I mean, Montreal is just all the better for it.

You know, the students, they work in our restaurants, they work in our bars, they support our cafes, they support our bookstores, they go to concerts.

You know, some students even, you know, they'll start companies, they'll start startups or something or like they'll fall in love with Montreal and they'll stay here or they'll fall in love with a Montrealer and they'll stay here.

And they're supporting our economy, they're building our identity, and I think it's really fascinating that Montreal is kind of based on that.

And plus, we have the advantage in this city that we have some schools in English, some schools in French, and that's an enormous competitive advantage for our city.

They said they really, they keep it with their banking documents and their passports.

Where does it start? Where does it end?

Okay.

Well, you got three names there, right? You have Mercier, Hochelaga, Maisonneuve.

It's pretty big.

It's one of the biggest boroughs of the city.

Let's say the river is the borderline in the south.

The CP tracks are the borderline in the west.

Okay, so if you haven't been to Mercier-Chelag-Amazonneuve in a while, where should you go?

Where did that come from? It

does sound very folksy.

It's a British surveying term, land surveying.

So unlike most of Quebec, which was, you know, divided into long, narrow plots of land during the seignorial system, If you go to all the rest of Quebec, it's long, narrow plots of land.

This was different.

This was, you know, it was set out by the British crown when they opened it for settlement.

And so instead of long, you know, narrow rectangles, it's more into squares, which in surveying terms they call townships.

Yeah, yeah,

So let's, you know, the idea was to make Montreal traffic free, right? And then what happened?

Well, exactly the opposite.

We ended up being a city full of traffic.

So yeah, what happened? They did set out with the best intentions.

Okay, let's go all the way back to 1950s, 1960s Montreal.

Quebec was building a highway system all over the province to connect the cities and within cities to make cities traffic-free.

So the intentions were good.

What about some of the other main highways? Let's talk the Met, the Ville-Marie.

So talk to us a little bit about the beaches that used to exist.

So I think if you were like in a time machine, and you went back about, you know, 80, 90, 100 years ago, and you'd ask a Montrealer, you know, where do you go on a hot summer day? So many of them would say Lac St.

Louis.

So West Island, Dorval, Pointe Claire, Lachine, like Beaconfield.

There were beaches all around.

There was Pine Beach, which is why that neighborhood in Dorval is called that.

There was Pine Beach.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

What we have to our advantage is the numbers.

We have over 100 festivals every year.

Wow.

And what's especially unique about Montreal is that there's a concentration, like a geographical concentration.

We have a whole neighborhood that was built and dedicated to festivals and Le Quartier des Spectacles, the entertainment district.

We even have a section called La Place des Festivals.

When we

What do we know about what's happening?

Yeah, so this is what I think is really, really cool, is that there's no obligation.

The streets that did it, it was always like a pilot thing, a pilot project.

And some of them, it worked.

Some of them, it didn't work.

So I'll give you an example of ones where it didn't work.

Saint-Hubert Street, La Plaza Saint-Hubert, which went pedestrian in 2024.

Do we know what happened?

throughout the years, the centuries even, what is something that most people, Tom, don't know about the Old Port?

Okay, first thing I want to say is that we've only been calling it the Old Port for about 40 years.

Oh, okay.

Prior to that, it was just the port.

The port.

It was just the port.

It was an industrial part of town.

And sort of what happened there?

Isn't that insane?

But it's called the Hochelaga Archipelago, which is the coolest thing to say.

Yes.

And it starts all the way east, like at Trois-Rivières, and it goes all the way west to like Vaudreuil area.

And that whole area has about 230 islands.

And guess what? That wasn't enough for us.

So in the 1960s, we built more.

OK, I can't let you go without talking about Nuns Island.

So

why New Zealand? New Zealand wasn't an issue.

The issue was that the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, they had toured in South Africa the year before.

And a lot of African countries saw that as legitimizing the apartheid state of South Africa at that time.

So the Olympic Committee refused to ban New Zealand.

So a bunch of African countries just said, well, we're not playing in the Games.

And what ended up happening because of that is the Games kind of suffered because we lost a lot of world-class competitors, athletes that trained their whole lives to go to the Games.

Yeah.

1698, that's a long time

ago.

And then the village of Côte-des-Neiges was incorporated in 1862, making it a tiny little village not too far away from Montreal.

And then big, hungry Montreal gobbled it up in the early 1900s, and it became a neighborhood of the city ever since.

But what's interesting is that there's so much surviving pieces of history there You've got the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery, which I think is the greatest example of history in that neighborhood because people started being buried there around the mid-1800s because they moved all the tiny little cemeteries that used to be in the rest of Montreal.

They moved them all to there because Montreal was expanding so fast, we needed to move the cemeteries.

Why?

Yeah.