Montreal 2.0: Could it challenge Toronto for Canadian economic supremacy?

financialpost.com:

Sam Ramadori laughed as he spoke of his youth and the chaos involved when working alongside his siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts and parents at Pasta Casareccia, the Italian family restaurant his immigrant family opened in Montreal some 40-odd years ago.

There were never any high-minded discussions around minimum work-age standards at the mom-and-pop establishment. If your last name was Ramadori, by the time you turned 13, you were expected to wash dishes, bus tables and generally pull your weight in a restaurant where Old Country recipes were dished out to New World customers.

Much of the chatter among working family members centred around food, and hurrying the heck up. But on slower days, the talk might be more sombre as the owners fretted over whether they had made a colossal mistake in leaving Italy to build a new life in Montreal, since that city in the late 1970s and 1980s was a mess.

Anglophones, and the corporations that employed them, were leaving in droves for Toronto, and points further west, hurried out by the ruling Parti Québécois’ incessant talk of separation and Bill 101, which made French the province’s official language. On top of that, there was the failed 1980 Quebec sovereignty vote that didn’t fail by all that much. Between November 1976 and February 1979, a whopping 368 businesses moved their head offices out of Quebec.

By the time Pasta Casareccia opened, the European-flavoured metropolis that had once dominated the Canadian business scene was a second-rate power compared to Toronto, and Calgary was closing in fast. Even worse, the home of the hated Maple Leafs was now home to a preponderance of educated Habs-loving Montreal ex-pats, further enriching a rival city already getting fat from shiny