We are true lovers and believers in the city, and for all the naysayers and all the haters that have left Montreal, we wanna tell you that they were waiting for it to happen, but you have to build it, you have to make it happen for yourself, and if you build it, they will come. We strongly believe that, that if you put the energy and the effort into creating something that you believe in, in the city, there’s an amazing community of people that will support you here, and that can allow you to have a future and a successful living, so you have to make it happen, you have to put in the time. It doesn’t take that much money. As we said, the cost of living is very attainable here, and we believe that it’s a great city to invest in.
“I’m Tania Tassone. I am an event producer in Montreal. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years now, so I started my company in 2005 and at that time my focus was very corporate-oriented. So I approached a lot of companies. I was doing a lot of corporate retreats, a lot of employee recognition events, annual general meetings, and that sort of thing. In 2008 when things started, when a lot of corporate budgets got cut, I turned my focus a little bit more to the private sector. So I started doing a lot of weddings, a lot of private events, 50th birthday parties, a lot of that sort of thing, and since then I’ve been doing a good mix of both type of events. I love both ares very much because they both bring me such a diverse knowledge and I get to meet so many different people I would say sixty percent of the business is private forty corporate.”
I don’t think that anything that I’ve done could’ve been done without being in Montreal. Montreal, as I started with right at the beginning, is I think one of the major reasons that I’ve been able to do what I’ve done through my career both on the business side and on the community side. Montreal gave me that opportunity and I just want people to know that this city has it all. You don’t need anything more than what’s available in Montreal. All you have to do is look a little bit harder than the way that you would have to look for it in some other cities. It may be hiding, but it’s all there. There’s no question in my mind, Montreal has it all and they definitely can build whatever they want to build here, the same way that they can do anywhere else in North America, on a global basis, we do it all.
Well, we’ve seen a reverse brain drain for the first time in everybody’s memory, right? People from California who knock on the doors of our companies here to move to Montreal. Of course, we’ve always had immigration from Europe and other areas, but, you know, that’s really new that we attract Silicon Valley people, that’s fascinating to see it happen. The capacity that we have today to make people move to Montreal, attract people from around the world, and make people move back to Montreal really lies in our geopolitical stability, right, where we stand out for peacefulness, predictability, the capacity to integrate, the ease of raising a family because the prices are, cost of living is lowered in most North American cities, housing is affordable so we can raise a family here. Even though a software engineer here might earn only 40% here of what he would earn in Silicon Valley, but at the end of the month he has more purchasing power to create a new life, and build their families and their lives.
Let me start by saying that I am an immigrant. So I came to Montreal when I was five. My dad came here a year earlier to check it out. And he fell in love with it and he ended up bringing his whole family here. We didn’t speak English. We certainly didn’t speak French. And we were so welcomed. And from day one, I think, all of us fell in love with the city to the point that we’re lifers. But I could tell you that my love for Montreal has grown deeper the older I get and the more experiences that I have and the more people that I see, and in fact, how much I travel around the world. When I go and see other cities, I might love some of their architecture. I might love some of their people, some of their food. But when I come back to Montreal, when I fly in or I drive over the bridge, or even when I navigate all the construction, the fact is, I have never felt more at home in this city than anywhere on the planet.
I think that the focus has to stop being on the nonsense of the past. I think that we really do have to focus on the people that have stayed and are willing to sit there and give their blood, sweat, and tears to this city, to make it sing. You know, and not every time you get through an election process, or through a major overhaul of the city, it just kind of dampens everybody’s will to show off the things that we do the best, showcase the stuff that we do here. And we do beautiful things, and we do it in multiple languages, with multiple faces, and multiple cultures. And that is very well preserved and is not quaint. It is powerful.
