Mount_Royal

Mount Royal, Quebec

Town of Mount Royal, or Ville de Mont-Royal in French, is a town located on the northwest side of Mount Royal, north of downtown Montreal, on the Island of Montreal in southwestern Quebec, Canada. pop. 18,933 (Statistics Canada, 2006).

Name

The town is commonly referred to as the Town of Mount Royal (in French, Ville Mont-Royal), or by the abbreviation TMR (VMR in French).

History

The town was founded in 1912. It was created at the initiative of the Canadian Northern Railway. The town was designed by Frederic Todd, a planner who was heavily influenced by the likes of Ebenezer Howard and incorporated many aspects of the City Beautiful movement into his design. The plan was to build a new town (or "model city" as it was called) at the foot of the mountain. The company bought 4,800 acres (19 km²) of farmland, and then built a rail tunnel under Mount Royal connecting their land to downtown Montreal. The profits from the venture helped finance the development of Canadian Northern's transcontinental railroad, which eventually became a significant constituent of the Canadian National Railway system. The town was designed by Canadian Northern's chief engineer, Henry Wicksteed, based loosely on Washington, DC.

Mount Royal has always been an upper-income community, and until the 1960s its population was almost exclusively Anglophone and largely of English or Scottish ancestry. This began to change after the Quiet Revolution, as francophones gained access to the well-paying careers. Mount Royal became popular and today the community is 46% francophone.

The town was merged with the city of Montreal on January 1, 2002. On June 20, 2004 the residents of the town voted to demerge from Montreal following the calls for de-amalgamation. Mount Royal was re-established as a town on January 1, 2006.

Starting in June 2006, the town accepted to convert the designations on their bilingual street signs to French only signs, as mandated by law. This came after repeated requests from the Quebec French-language office, a provincial agency aimed at promoting French (the official language since 1977) in the province of Quebec (where 82% of the population is French-speaking), and limiting the use of English in public signs and official communications to situations where the Anglophone minority is sufficiently high. Some residents complained and the town agreed to reinstate the English lettering on the signs. The new English designations are now smaller than their official French equivalent, in compliance with the 1993 amendment to the Charter of the French Language. For unknown reasons, there are still street signs for several major boulevards for which the lettering has not been changed back to bilingual.

One peculiarity of the town is the sometimes odd naming of its streets, and also its occasionally strange numbering system. Some streets may thus bear two names (in whichever language). For example, Jean-Talon avenue, a large East-West thoroughfare crossing Montreal on kilometres, goes through Mount Royal under the name of Dresden Avenue on a few hundred meters, only to recover its Montreal name on the other side of town. This confusion has been recently alleviated by putting the two names on the street signs. On these few hundred meters, Mount Royal uses a house civic numbering totally different from that of Montreal on either side, leading to more confusion. This unexpected change in the numbering system also occurs on smaller streets shared by both Montreal and Mount Royal (for example, Trenton, Lockhart and Brookfield avenues, where the Mount Royal numbering system decreases from East to West, only to jump from 2 to 2400 on the few meters of the street that still belong to Montreal).

Geography

Two main thoroughfares, Laird Boulevard and Graham Boulevard, cut across the borough diagonally and meet at Connaught Park, a green space located in the centre. Mount Royal Train Station (Gare Mont-Royal) is located adjacent to this park, a commuter train station on the AMT Deux-Montagnes Line. Trains going through the Mount Royal Tunnel link the station to downtown Montreal in nine minutes.

Mount Royal is surrounded on three sides by a highway, a rail line and a fence.

The highway is Metropolitan Boulevard, a major constituent of Autoroute 40. It was built as an elevated highway throughout, except when it passes through Mount Royal (between Sainte Croix Avenue and l'Acadie Boulevard), since the town council requested that it be built on the ground, in order to separate the town from the industrial area to the north.

The rail line is the last portion of Canadian Pacific's Adirondack subdivision. It originally ran through the northern part of the district of Côte-des-Neiges. However when the town became part of the City of Montreal in 2002, the part of Côte-des-Neiges north of rail line was incorporated into the Mount Royal borough.

A fence runs along the eastern border with Park Extension at Acadie Boulevard. The stated purpose of the fence is to prevent children and house pets from running into the busy thoroughfare but some have contended that it was built to keep residents of the working-class Park Extension neighbourhood out of the town. This fence originally had several gates built into it, which the became a subject of controversy when they were locked one year at Halloween, preventing children from Park Extension from trick-or-treating in the town. The town council responded by removing the gates so that the fence could be crossed at any time at any of the six crosswalks along the 1.2 km boulevard. Inf 2007, the gates were restored, with signs explaining that they are for the safety of children and pedestrians.

Government

Municipal

The current town mayor is Vera Danyluk. Town council has six councillor seats: candidates run for a specific seat and are elected by the entire town electoral population (a ward system is not used). Only the town mayor sits on the agglomeration council of Montreal.

Erin Kennedy (Seat No. 1)
Fouad Sahyoun (Seat No. 2)
John Miller (Seat No. 3)
Minh-Diem Le Thi (Seat No. 4)
Melpa Kamateros (Seat No. 5)
Philippe Roy (Seat No. 6)

2005 Municipal Elections

The 2005 election, which took place on November 6, involved a three-way race for mayor between incumbent borough mayor Suzanne Caron, former mayor Vera Danyluk, and Brigitte Mack-Arsenault, president of a municipal watchdog association. The election also involved municipal political parties for the first time. Both Danyluk and Mack-Arsenault formed parties, and Caron, although officially running as an independent, affiliated herself with a group of independent candidates for town council.

Danyluk won the election.

Federal and Provincial

The entire borough is located within the federal riding of Mount Royal, and within the smaller provincial electoral district of Mount Royal.

Demographics

Note: Percentages may not add up to 100 percent due to rounding of data samples.

As of the census of 2001, there were 18,682 people, 7,065 households, and 5,215 families residing in the city. The population density was 2,438.90/km². There were 7,267 housing units at an average density of 948.69/km². The racial makeup of the city was 84.51% White, 1.71% Black Canadian, 0.08% Aboriginal, 6.66% Asian Canadian, and 0.84% Latin American.

Languages

Knowledge of Official Languages (Statistics Canada: 2006, 2001)
Language(s)	2006	2001
Language(s)	Percentage (%)	Percentage (%)
Both English and French	77.6%	76.9%
English only	10.1%	11.6%
French only	11.1%	10.1%
Neither English nor French	1.2%	1.4%

The 2006 census found that, counting single responses only, French was spoken as a mother tongue by 43.9% of the population, which was a decrease from 46.4% in 2001. English was spoken as a mother tongue by a total of 21.8% of the population in 2006, which was a decrease from 26.2% in 2001. Counting single responses only, the next most common mother tongues were Arabic (7.3%), Greek (3.1%), Italian (3.0%), Armenian and Chinese (2.5% each), and Vietnamese (2.4%).

Mother tongue	Population	Percentage
French	8,185	43.86%
English	4,060	21.76%
English and French	225	1.21%
English and a non-official language	210	1.13%
French and a non-official language	160	0.86%
English, French and a non-official language	55	0.29%
Arabic	1,355	7.26%
Greek	570	3.05%
Italian	555	2.97%
Armenian	465	2.49%
Chinese languages	460	2.47%
Vietnamese	445	2.38%
Romanian	280	1.50%
Spanish	155	0.83%
Persian	155	0.83%
Russian	145	0.78%

Mother tongue	Population	Percentage
German	125	0.67%
Korean	95	0.51%
Polish	85	0.46%
Hungarian	80	0.43%
Tagalog	75	0.40%
Creole	60	0.32%
Tamil	60	0.32%
Gujarati	45	0.24%
Ukrainian	45	0.24%
Portuguese	40	0.21%
Hebrew	35	0.19%
Yiddish	35	0.19%
Bulgarian	30	0.16%
Czech	25	0.13%
Kurdish	25	0.13%
Slovak	25	0.13%

Age

In the city the population was spread out with 18.7% under the age of 15, 11.6% from 15 to 24, 24.8% from 25 to 44, 26.0% from 45 to 64, and 19.0% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 41 years. For every 100 females there were 89.2 males. For every 100 females age 15 and over, there were 85.9 males.

Households

There were 7,065 households out of which 33.7% had children living with them, 57.6% were married couples living together, 7.2% had a female lone-parent as a householder, and 25.8% of all households were made up of individuals. The average married-couple family size was 3.2.

Religion

Christians made up 71.9% of the population, or 53.2% Catholic, 6.0% Protestant, 10.9% Orthodox, and 1.8% other Christian. Other religions in the city include 5.5% Muslim, 12.0% Jewish, 2.9% Eastern religions, and 0.0% other religions. 7.6% of the population claimed to have no religious affiliation.

Income

The median income for a household in the city was $75,473 CAD, and the median income for a family was $98,657 CAD. Males had an average income of $86,428 CAD versus $41,883 CAD for females. About 4.5% of the labour force was unemployed. The largest occupation categories were 24.1% employed in management occupations, 19.4% business, finance, and administration occupations, and 14.7% in sales and service occupations.