Enter the morality squad

Montreal After Dark: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City
by Matthieu Caron

Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2025
$34.95 / 9780228024774

Reviewed by Logan Macnair

*

“The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland.” 

This lament that closes out the 1995 film Casino was delivered as a sort of eulogy for the gritty, under-regulated Las Vegas of the mid-twentieth century before the elements of organized crime were expunged in the 1980s to make way for the more family-friendly, safer, and (ironically) morally pure version of ‘Sin City’ that we have today. 

This is a quote I found myself thinking of quite often while reading Matthieu Caron’s Montreal After Dark: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City, a historical account of the development of Montreal from the 1950s to the 1980s. 

While, in many respects, the patterns and processes of growth and urbanization that Montreal underwent following World War II were similar to those of other major North American cities, one of the fundamental premises of Caron’s study is that Canada’s second largest city experienced unique changes at this time, particularly with respect to municipal legislation concerning the regulation of the ‘night’ and night-adjacent spaces, communities, and activities. 

The picture that Caron paints of 1940s Montreal is an electric one of a city riding high the crest of the Jazz Age. A city where sex, liquor, gambling, and music shaped one of the hottest nightlife spots in North America. A vibrant, heterogeneous city where communities of different races, sexualities, and class backgrounds intermingled. A city where artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs coexisted with organized crime, the police, and the solicitors and customers of all manner of nighttime vices. A rosy picture to be sure, and while Caron teases with nostalgia here, he also correctly points out that ultimately it was profit (and in some cases, exploitation), that shaped 1940s Montreal, and not necessarily a benevolent sense of community.

It is also during this time that some idealistic civil servants and politicians begin taking a more active look at Montreal’s future and potential as a truly global city and travel destination for cosmopolitan tourists the world over. In order for the city to reach its full potential as one of the world’s ‘great cities’ (not to mention the boon to the local economy that this would create via tourist dollars), however, the city would need to undergo a process of sanitization, with some of its rougher edges smoothed down and some of its more lascivious tendencies tempered so as to not cause potential offence to or otherwise dissuade the international community from investing and/or visiting. 

Enter the ‘morality squad’ that made cleaning up the city one of its primary political goals during the 1950s and beyond. Specifically, the book devotes much of its space to former (and still longest-serving) Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, who may well be the closest thing to a ‘main character’ here aside from the city itself. Drapeau is presented as a powerful force shaping the municipal politics and image of Montreal during his nearly thirty year tenure as the city’s mayor. 

While Drapeau was ultimately successful in helping to realize his vision of Montreal as a global city (his accomplishments include securing Montreal as the host of both Expo 67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics, bringing large amounts of international attention and tourism to the city), this came at the cost of increased regulation of the city’s more bawdy or risqué qualities and the communities that sustained and whose livelihoods depended on them. To control the city, Drapeau believed, first required control of the night.

Specifically, Caron argues that this regulation occurred primarily through nighttime spaces (music clubs, bars, brothels) and nighttime activities (sex, ‘mingling,’ vagrancy) while affecting those who solicited, utilized, or otherwise made a living from these spaces and activities (sex workers, taxi drivers, bar staff, musicians). 

Caron notes that this new nighttime legislation tended to be those that required the regulation of women’s bodies and sexuality, while also disproportionately impacting (via targeted and over-policing) those of marginalized communities, including the working class, racialized, and queer populations that once held relatively safe positions within Montreal’s nightlife. 

The grime of Montreal’s ‘moral decay’ was also scrubbed away by new regulations and bylaws that targeted everything from pornography to lewd or countercultural artwork to pinball machines and tarot readers—anything that might be considered offensive to or in poor taste by the international community that Drapeau was hoping to entice. 

Drapeau remains a somewhat contentious figure within Canadian politics generally and the politics of Montreal specifically, the result of his legacy and the overall impact it had on the city, whether positive or negative or somewhere in between, remaining a point of debate.

For his part, Caron, a postdoctoral fellow at SFU, approaches these subjects with the academic rigour, thoroughly extensive citations, and (mostly) objective voice that one might expect of a historian with his credentials. I say ‘mostly’ objective here because Caron seems quite open about his stance on the legacy of Drapeau and on approaching this topic largely from the perspective of and with sympathies for the marginalized populations that often suffered the most from the various nighttime regulations discussed. 

Writing engaging history can be difficult, particularly when that history is about the nitty-gritty of city-specific municipal politics, but Caron (with a little help from primary source material where the voices of those who lived through these changes are directly centred, as well as some excellent photos from the period) effectively places the reader in the shoes of those who experienced the various noteworthy events being discussed (including Montreal’s 1969 police strike and the ‘night of terror’ that followed and the 1974 firefighter strike). 

A compelling case study, not just of the history of Montreal specifically, but more broadly of how the forces of urbanization, modernity, and globalization impacted—and continue to impact—many cities during the twentieth century (though for better or for worse will, of course, depend on your point of view).

Logan Macnair is a novelist and college instructor based in Burnaby. His academic research is primarily focused on the online narrative, recruitment, and propaganda campaigns of various political extremist movements. His second novel Troll (Now Or Never Publishing, 2023) is a fictionalized account based on his many years of studying online extremist groups. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon reviewed Logan’s Troll in BRC. Logan has reviewed Taryn Hubbard, Tamas Dobozy, Andrew Battershill, Kate Black, Kawika Guillermo, and James Hoggan with Grania Litwin for BCR.]

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
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Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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