The City of Laval was modern and forward-looking from the beginning and has continued to follow that path for the past six decades.
In the summer of 1965 when the Quebec government was pulling the legislative levers that would unify all the towns and villages on Île Jésus into the City of Laval, few people might have imagined that 60 years later the new municipal entity would be the third-largest municipality in the province.
With its high-speed autoroutes and futuristic city hall, the City of Laval was born at a crucial historical moment – during Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” – setting the tone for an evolving agenda of innovations from the start.
There’s no denying, however, that prior to this, most of the island was highly rural and that most of its towns and villages were quiet and quaint.
In each of the small municipalities, urban planning was uneven and spotty, and some remnants of the old ways might still be seen in places like Saint-François, where infrastructure such as sewers was still lacking just a few years ago in isolated areas where septic tanks remained a legacy of the past.
Signs of the City of Laval’s inherent desire from the beginning to embrace the modernism that was overtaking Quebec in the mid-sixties can be seen not only in its strikingly brutalist city hall on Souvenir Blvd. (now undergoing an extensive renovation).
It’s also visible in the high-rise office skyscrapers along Daniel Johnson Blvd. near the Carrefour Laval mall, and, of course, in the city’s expanding downtown sector, including Place Bell, Espace Montmorency and other major projects.
But as the city stated in its strategic planning vision for the future more than a decade ago, what the strategists are aiming for is a blend of the rural elements that characterized Laval at the beginning, along with the urban qualities, to achieve what is likely to truly become an exemplary city of tomorrow that has the potential to stand out in the North American landscape.
It’s for this reason that Laval can be said to be a success that far exceeds even the City of Montreal’s attempts to grow, since Laval’s emergence after the merger of its constituent towns and villages worked from the beginning, while Montreal’s efforts, hampered by the demerger of many municipalities nearly a quarter-century ago, largely failed to achieve the goals.
On the occasion of the City of Laval’s 40th anniversary in 2005, I spoke with former Parti Québécois MNA for Laval-des-Rapides (who later was also the Bloc Québécois MP for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin) Serge Fortin. In the interview (see sidebar for full text), he recalled the political turmoil that surrounded Laval’s beginnings as a city in 1965.
“I can’t help but remember the controversy over the creation of Laval – about the same as the one that surrounded the recent municipal mergers,” he said, referring to the City of Montreal’s controversial amalgamation process.
However, he added, once Laval’s amalgamation had been completed, it soon became a “collective success,” with important sectors such as the pharmaceutical industry playing a dominant role.
“It has become a place to live where people have all the advantages of a large metropolitan region, but also the outdoors and lots of room for children to play; a very comfortable and safe place to live,” he said.
In hindsight, Ménard believed that the merger of the 16 small municipalities that were on Laval Island in the early 1960s, into one large city in 1965, succeeded mainly because of the determination of the provincial government, not only to carry it out, but to make sure it would hold long after it was done.
– Martin C. Barry –
