by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Back in the day there was a right way to leave Montreal. It wasn’t enough to pack your bags and move. You had to spread the word about what an awful place this has become. You needed a publicist, a press conference and a megaphone. The more vicious the denunciation the better, as exemplified by Sam Orbaum, a Jerusalem Post columnist who lived here until 1981 and felt qualified to knock our city a dozen years after he moved. “Montreal is not what my Montreal was. It is now a spiteful, ungracious, unfriendly, depressed city knee-deep in slushy bigotry.” I’d say Orbaum is a loudmouth bore, but seeing as he died this week… I’ll say he was a loudmouth bore.

I’m not sure when the demoralizing phenomenon of ex-pats bashing Montreal started. But it’s reported by Paul Theroux as early as 1975, who describes a former Montrealer ruining everybody’s train trip through Siberia with speeches about how terrible things have become in Mtl.

But now, with the exception of Guy Carbonneau expressing a preference for Dallas last year, proclamations of our city’s inferiority have slowed. The last slam came in the fall of 1998 when the very important pundit Gwynne Dyer took his leather bomber and beard comb and dashed off from St-Henri to London, declaring this place too unfriendly to him.

Flaky filmmaker and one-time Mirror writer Albert Nerenberg bashed our city from every direction as he left for Toronto in 1997. Some praiseworthy individual named Thomas Mele wrote this paper asking Nerenberg to please shut up, and requested our paper balance stuff out by reporting on those who are actually moving to this city.

Suzanne Verdal McCallister’s departure was also a supposed moral blow to our city. In May 1992, Verdal, the woman who inspired the Leonard Cohen song “Suzanne,” announced that she was leaving because she was pissed off at Hydro-Québec sending her a disputed bill for $5,000. Cohen, more cleverly, never acknowledges that he actually doesn’t live here. After Expos manager Buck Rodgers got canned in 1991, he wrote in La Presse that this city would be “a ghost town in 10 years” unless political and language restrictions were loosened. Mayor Jean Doré immediately disputed Rodgers’ assessment, but on that very day Doré testified to a provincial committee that restrictions were harming Montreal and that our city “is in danger of collapse.”

Pudgy CBC personality Wayne Grigsby once wrote that he would never leave his hometown. Within weeks he announced he was moving to Toronto. Janet Torge remains the reigning champion of the why-I’m-leaving-Montreal industry. In ’91 Torge, who was apparently somebody at the time, wrote a departure note detailing why it sucks in Montreal. In 1997 she moved back, writing a why-every-other-place-sucks-even-worse article

Some say they’re going and don’t. Geraldine Doucet declared she was moving in 1989 as a response to Bourassa’s anti-English Bill 178. Doucet stuck around. I met her while rescuing her umbrella from behind a fence at Club Price last spring.

Nowadays people leave without blaming politicians. When Gazette editor Alan Allnutt left two years ago, he insisted that Quebec’s nutty politicians played no role. “In fact, as long as they were having any impact, I refused to budge,” he wrote.

Similarly, in 1997 Gazetteer Eve McBride wrote a blameless and tearful goodbye, but not without twisting the knife. “All the moving companies I have asked for estimates have told me they have never been busier. One company’s salesman said that in his 30 years of working in residential relocation, this is the biggest exodus he’s seen.”

Now Montreal is booming. Our unemployment and vacancy rates are lower than Toronto’s. So what happens when everything changes and people move back and stop complaining about politicians? Well, the politicians start complaining about the people, of course, as evidenced by Premier Landry bellyaching about there being too much English in Montreal. I say if Premier Landry doesn’t like Montreal version 2002, he’s welcome to grumble from a distance. :

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca