Cool, cool Canada

From Quebec City to Toronto by train

MAY 2025

In this story we fly from Manchester to Quebec City (via Toronto). Then we travel by train to Montreal, Ottawa, and back to Toronto over ten days.

I’ve always been intrigued by French Canada. This huge piece of land squeezed into an even huger continent, with a language and culture all its own and the world’s second largest French-speaking city. So why not go and see it? And also nail another question, which I shall come to in a bit.

The simplest way to get to Quebec from our neck of the woods is to fly direct from Manchester to Toronto, and then fly back on yourself to reach the province. Air Transat is the outfit that does the first bit, and despite some people reckoning it’s like Ryanair but without the trimmings, it was absolutely fine. The oddest thing was that we flew transatlantic on a single aisle airliner, which in a way was a throwback to how it would have been in the sixties.

We started the trip proper in Quebec City, the provincial capital. Canada was enduring the coldest spring in years, and the cloudy skies, frequent rain and decidedly cool temperatures were a shock after the weeks of unseasonably warm sunny weather Britain had been enjoying. Glad we brought layers.

The first morning we went out in search of a nice café for breakfast and I had my first opportunity to ask for something in my very basic, faltering French. “Bonjour. Deux flat whites et deux croissants s’il vous plait.” (I assume the French don’t say ‘plateaux blanc’ by the way.) In reply there came a fusillade of words that flattered me because the woman behind the till thought I would understand them, but were in fact baffling. After the “pardon, mais je ne parle pas francaise” bit, she explained that the credit card reader was playing up and we could eat our breakfast and pay for it afterwards.

Following settlement in the area by the French from 1535, Quebec City was established in 1608. The original town sits below an escarpment next to the St Lawrence River. To improve defences the French, and then the Brits, built a walled city at the top.

A section of the walls overlooks the waterway and there are lots of old cannons poised to repel any potential invaders (presumably these days Canada has a few warships and jets to help). You can walk along a fine promenade with excellent views of what is an impressively wide river. Half way along is a 1,400 ft long ramp, put there in 1879. In winter people can toboggan down this slide getting up to about 40 mph before hopefully slithering to an eventual injury-free stop on the flat bit at the bottom.

Overlooking the prom and the river is an enormous hotel called the Chateau Frontenac (Welcome to Fairmont Le Château Frontenac). It was opened by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1893 and took over a hundred years to completely finish. In spite of its gigantic scale the lobby area was rather disappointing. I expected a vast hall, full of beams and chandeliers and stuffed reindeer jutting out of the walls. Instead, it had more of a cosy, clubby feel. In fact, as we found, Canadian hotels don’t really go in for impressive lobbies which I think is a pity given the general scale of the country.

There’s a very good contemporary art gallery (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec – MNBAQ | MNBAQ), which had an impressive space for indigenous art, the detail of which was often remarkable. For instance, a walrus skull had been carved to produce a dog team, sled and handler running down one tusk and a polar bear confronting a walrus on the other. By contrast in Place Royale, the little square in the heart of the original village next to the river, there is the Museum of Bad Art (MABA, in the tradition of MOMA, etc.). Clustered together are about thirty staggeringly awful paintings picked up in car boot sales and thrift shops – and even donated by the proud artists. Here there was no fine line between competence and genius, it was a chasm.

The route back to Toronto would be by rail, and so we embarked on the first leg at Quebec’s Gare du Palais station (VIA Rail Canada: Train travel in Canada). We were soon to discover that Canadian trains are comfortable (lots of leg room), only have occasional trolley service, and are pretty slow. But never mind, the scenery is fantastic. No it isn’t – this end of Canada is as flat as a billiards table.

I was keen to observe from the train the Quebec Bridge. This notorious crossing was the scene of two dreadful accidents. It is a cantilever bridge over the river (similar in concept to the Forth rail bridge). The original design was inadequate and during construction in 1907, one of the main sections collapsed under its own weight costing 74 lives. Work resumed and in 1916, the central truss section was raised from the river to be connected into place. Alas, a stirrup linked to one of the lifting cables broke and eleven more men plunged to their deaths. I expected to grab some photos from the carriage window for my doomed projects collection, but imagine my horror when the train rounded a curve and actually took us across this accursed structure. I crossed my fingers all the way!

We rolled into Gare Centrale in Montreal, where like in so many north American stations you alight into the stygian gloom of a train cave and ascend to a grand hall. Gare Centrale has all the usual accoutrements (note the French word there, folks) of a rail terminus like cafes and bookstalls, but also – rather surprisingly – has a large furniture shop. It must be a job getting a sofa down on to the 12:37 to Drummondville. The presence of this store might be something to do with the huge network of underground arcades that spread out from the station beneath the entire city centre. They are lined with all kinds of shops and casual eateries, and generally enable you to pop up (or down) in a shopping mall or office building. Apparently, there are almost 20 miles of them and they enable Montrealers to stay warm in the harsh winters.

Even further down is the Montreal Metro, which opened in the early 1960s. To give it a distinctive Gallic feel the trains run on rubber tyres, as they do on some lines in Paris. The system has grown over the decades, and one particular spurt was to serve Expo 67, the world’s fair that the city hosted in, er, 1967. It was originally destined for Moscow, but the Russians pulled out leaving Montreal (runners up in the bidding) just four years to build the show. What they achieved was astonishing – not just parks and pavilions, but highways, bridges, and fancy transport systems. And all this on two islands in the St Lawrence river – one of them created from scratch, in part using spoil from building those Metro tunnels.

Little of the Expo park remains, although several of the pavilions survive (one as a casino). Most distinctive is the geodesic dome which housed the American displays, designed by Buckmaster Fuller. The almost spherical structure was based on a steel frame, filled in with translucent acrylic panels. The dome caught fire in 1978 and the panels melted in fifteen minutes – thankfully the place was empty. So now the interior is open to the sky, but the structure still has a distinctive grandeur.

One other survivor of the expo is Habitat 67. This bizarre housing complex was dreamed up by Moshe Safdie, a star student at McGill University and now one of the world’s most renowned architects (Habitat ’67). In the heady optimism of the Expo adventure, he was given the multi-million dollar chance to make real his PhD thesis on urban living whilst still in his mid-twenties.

It’s a bit remote, well away from the city centre at the end of a peninsular pointing into the river. Essentially, it’s three haphazard piles of pre-fabricated shoe box shapes (curiously called ‘cubes’), joined by avenues and skywalks, and served by lifts which – for some odd reason – do not serve every level. So awkward if you’re dealing with a pushchair or – as was happening when we went round – trying to get an outdoor barbeque unit up to one of the flats. And privacy is limited unless you live towards the top, where you can casually stare down through everyone else’s full height windows.

The idea was you could start out with a one cube flat, get together and progress to a two cube flat, start a family in a three cube flat, maybe grow into a four cube flat, and then downsize as desired. Spend your adult life within the complex. Safdie got a double-decker penthouse, painstakingly preserved, which we were able to look round. The rooms are not that big, so when he had President De Gaulle and a few friends round for dinner it must have been a squeeze.

Montreal’s success with Expo 67, which welcomed fifty million visitors, probably led to an attack of hubris. There was certainly unjustified over-confidence when the city landed the 1976 Olympic Games. The budget overrun surpassed 700% and the city was still paying off the debts thirty years later. The main stadium (nicknamed the ‘Big O’) is worth a visit though. After languishing for years, work was under way to do it up properly when we visited. The basic shape is like a giant flying saucer, with a massive leaning tower looming above the arena. At one time you could take a ride in a glass lift up to the top of it for what must be pretty spectacular views, but not that day.

Instead, we headed over the road to the city’s botanical gardens, which are extensive. I’m no plantsman but most of the flora looked at least half familiar. I wondered at how such delicate looking plants could survive winter temperatures that can drop to minus 30 Celsius. I was also taken by the birds landing on branches and singing in the trees. Exotic creatures with bright coloured plumage and strange calls. I thought I’d better try and take some photos of these odd rarities, only to discover later that they were as commonplace as robins at home.

The big drawback with the botanical gardens was the absence of any catering. Such places in Britain make a good chunk of their income from feeding and watering their patrons and other people who couldn’t care less about horticulture. This raises a depressing point about Canada – it is difficult and sometimes impossible to get anything decent to eat. We had to traipse several blocks outside the gardens to find a roadside joint where the scoff was barely edible. Finding somewhere selling a baguette sandwich with say tomato, lettuce and mozzarella would almost bring forth tears of elation. On the positive side though, in the eleven years since I last sampled them, Canadian wines have gone from atrocious to really not bad at all.

Downtown Montreal may be the French capital of north America but it’s actually not all that French. No corner boulangeries, no cosy bistros, no chic little side streets. And Vieux Montreal looks far from ancient. However, that part of town did contain one extraordinary gem, which is the Basilique Notre-Dame-de-Montreal. The exterior is that of a pretty ordinary large early nineteenth century church, but inside… my word! The interior was reworked in the 1870s into an extraordinary combination of sumptuously decorated cathedral and massive variety theatre. The nave has a sloping floor down towards the altar and holds 3,000 seats. Surrounding it are two tiers of balconies with room for hundreds more. A giant reredos behind the altar sits beneath a richly adorned ceiling in deep blue. Awe inspiringly spiritual or wildly overblown – it is hard to decide which.

One jarring aspect is a painting in a side chapel of a nun teaching two indigenous children. Until barely fifty years ago thousands of children were forcibly taken from their families to be inculcated into what was judged to be civilised society in religious and secular boarding schools. Now these very communities are teaching us invaluable insights learned over centuries into how to manage our faltering environment and ecosystems.

The flat centre of Montreal sits behind Mont Royale, which at 767 feet to the top scarcely counts as a mont. 555 steps take you up to the top from where there is a wide panorama of the city, and it is here that one of Montreal’s biggest problems becomes apparent. There is a local law that says that no building can surpass the height of Mont Royale. Naturally the city is full of skyscrapers but it is as if these buildings were built as high as anyone liked and then a spiteful giant came along with a great big knife and sliced all the tops off at 767 feet. The result is a dreary skyline of identically tall buildings, made squat and bulky to make up for not being able to go super high. One feature relieves the tedium though – look carefully and you can spot a twelve-storey high mural of local hero Leonard Cohen.

We got into the Wednesday night half price offer at the Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts | MMFA), where there was an excellent show about a Parisian art dealer called Berthe Weill, who helped launch the careers of such notables as Picasso and Matisse. As they got more successful, they largely forsook her for dealers with richer clients, but when they discovered that she had hit hard times after the second world war, with other artists they put together an auction of their donated work that generated enough cash for her to live in comfortable retirement until she died. Given that Picasso in particular had a reputation for being pretty ruthless, that’s nice to know. But there was acute disappointment when we turned up at the highly anticipated Museum of Contemporary Art only to find it had been demolished! A replacement is promised.

Better get the train to Ottawa then. The city station is on the edge of town and has the feel of a small provincial airport. A new light rail system whisked us into the centre and our hotel. Ottawa lies on the provincial border between Quebec and Ontario. It is one of those geographical quirks where you cross the river to go west into Quebec and come back east to get into Ontario, whereas generally speaking Ontario is to the west of Quebec. The Quebec bit used to be called Hull, but is now called Gatineau – which is a bit more French, non?

To be honest, as capitals go, Ottawa is not super-exciting, even though the imminent arrival of King Charles the day after we left put it centre stage at least temporarily. Its location was a compromise between the English and French contingents, although its remoteness from the western provinces still causes tensions.

The main parliament building overlooks the Ottawa river and is a rather over-symmetrical salute to the Houses of Parliament in London. Like so much in Canada, it was being renovated (although thankfully not demolished).
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Ottawa is the Rideau canal. In the early nineteenth century, the British colonists were fearful of an American invasion which would cut off access to the St Lawrence seaway from Lake Ontario. Sound familiar? In 1826, Colonel John By was given the task of creating a canal to utilise the river Rideau, which drained into the lake, and connect it to the Ottawa river, thus bypassing the threat. This 126-mile waterway was a massive undertaking which he achieved in just six years. He exceeded the inadequate budget he was given and was hauled back to London to be censured by his superiors and dismissed – ending his life in disgrace. At least they named a street after him in Ottawa.

We spent most of one Saturday nosing round the National Gallery (designed by Moshe Safdie as it happens). It was full of wondrous treasures (National Gallery of Canada). One particular treat was the interior of the Rideau Street chapel, transplanted into the building after the convent that contained it was razed. As you wandered inside it you went past forty speakers, from each of which came the voice of one of forty singers who sang a motet by the 16th century composer Thomas Tallis originally recorded in Salisbury cathedral.

Last train ride: Ottawa to Toronto. You are only admitted on to the platform at the last minute in Canada, so I sneaked round the front of the station to see if I could get a snap of the train. It looked rather odd. The locomotive was the usual hefty-looking piece of motive power, but the coaches seemed much, much lower. As we sauntered through southern Ontario I looked up the Via Rail fleet to discover our coaches were the remnants of a fleet of advanced tilting trains built in the early 1980s. Considering how straight the tracks were, and how slow the trains are for much of the time anyway, all that tilting technology seemed a bit pointless.

Toronto was going to be the tail end of the trip, nothing special as we’d been there before and up the CN Tower, etc. Do a couple of things, and get ready for home. Then the sun came out! And we discovered Toronto has an energy and drive that outshone everywhere we had been.

Uninhibited by a Mont Royale, the city’s skyscrapers sprout in abundance to create a dancing skyline – and most of them look good. As the city centre expands, these towers push into old neighbourhoods so there is the curious sight of a giant skyscraper next door to a run of old-fashioned barbers, fast-food joints and cannabis outlets (plenty of them, dude).

We were lacking some live entertainment and I had read about Cameron House – described by Lonely Planet as a veteran venue serving jazz, R&B and alternative music. We were obviously there on alternative night. Arriving early at this street corner bar with a stage, we watched as seven musicians trooped in, and imagined their day jobs – school teacher, dental receptionist, accountant, van driver – a pretty respectable looking crowd who greeted each other warmly and sorted out things like amp leads and a broken guitar string. Then they set off. Their leader launched into an attack of screaming madness with the band pushing the boundaries of whatever racket it was possible to make on their poor instruments. Even an audience of hardcore Weimar era Berlin Dadaists would have described it as seriously weird. We survived half an hour.

Unlike the deep level Metro in Montreal, Toronto’s subway was built right under the main streets so is quick to get into and out of. No tickets, just use your bank card. Flat fare as far as you want to go. There is nothing cosy about the trains either – all shiny metal and hard seats.

We took it to see Casa Loma. This colossal mansion was put up by Henry Pellatt, a local boy made good, starting in 1911. He had amassed his fortune as a stockbroker, land investor, hydro-electric pioneer and much else, and this place soaked up all of it and then some. He was a passionate anglophile and built it with a royal visit in mind (Home – Casa Loma).

It has the entrance hall the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec lacked, three storeys high with flags, suits of armour, candelabra and the whole shebang. At a time when the city had a total of 200 telephones, Casa Loma had fifty of them – one in every room to summon servants or call ministers. There are 98 rooms, secret passages to private vaults, an 800 yard-long tunnel to the stables, and two towers you can climb to the top of through attics and up tortuous spiral stairways.

In the end Pellatt’s empire fell apart and his mansion was not finished in his lifetime. Bankrupted and widowed, he ended up in a small suburban house not far away. In spite of his downfall, he was still admired for his sheer audacity and enjoyed a huge party for his eightieth birthday, shortly before he died.

Now, at last, we come to nailing that question I mentioned at the start. Which is: “What has happened to my bus?” Briefly, when I was working at Leyland in the 1980s, I convinced the top management that I was the person to have a go at breaking into the North American bus market. I had a demonstrator bus built in 1984, to tour cities and show off the potential for double deckers -our speciality. This handsome Leyland Olympian went to Washington DC, Dallas, Vancouver and several other places (Olympian odyssey – Zavanak). But the market wasn’t ready and anyway Leyland as a company was rapidly running out of steam. Investigations revealed my bus had found its way to Victoria, British Columbia and then Brampton, a satellite of Toronto where it ran in regular service for a bit. It went on to a sightseeing firm in Niagara, and latterly to City Sightseeing of Toronto where it remains.

The people at the company were kind enough to let me visit their depot and have a bit of a reunion with my old buddy. It had lost its roof and its sightseeing days ended a while ago. Now it was squashed in at the back of the yard among several other retired buses. I squeezed inside to discover its present role as an equipment storage facility – i.e. a good place to put lots of random stuff. Clambering over some of this I sat on the dusty driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel for an emotional journey to nowhere. Whether it will ever hit the road again seems unlikely, but who knows. Anyway, it was great to see it’s still around, forty years on. My question answered, we walked back down the dusty lane from the yard to catch a modern Toronto bus back into town to enjoy some outstanding work at the ceramics gallery (Gardiner Museum).

A spot of flaneuring round downtown Toronto is not time wasted and we sampled the restored St Lawrence food market, the Allan Gardens conservatories housing lots of tropical flowers (and particularly popular in the winter), and the harbourside area beneath the CN Tower. We also went into the Eaton centre, which is one of the largest malls in north America. It vividly illustrates the changes in shopping habits which are familiar in Britain too. It was developed by Eatons, a huge department store chain, in the 1970s. It collapsed in 1999 – its slice of the mall now taken by global brand outlets like H&M. At the far end of the mall were the last knockings of the Hudson Bay Company (founded in 1670) which was finally closing the doors of its once largest store. Maybe if they’d stuck to fur skins they’d still be around.

On our last day we were very generously taken to lunch by friends of friends. Originally from Ireland they had met many moons ago in Canada and had lived in Toronto for decades. We hadn’t talked about the tensions with the United States before – definitely a sensitive topic. However we saw plenty of ‘Canada is not for sale’ tee-shirts and ‘No 51st state’ coffee mugs. Not to mention TV adverts bending over backwards to push the Canadian credentials of various products. They told us that many older Canadians had traditionally bought places in Florida to winter at but were now selling up as they didn’t feel so welcome. And shockingly they related how one couple they knew had been refused service in an American restaurant simply because they were Canadian. Oh dear.

The Art Gallery of Ontario (Home | Art Gallery of Ontario) provided a pleasant end of trip experience, and contained lots of arty goodies. One was an extraordinary painting by Monet done on the door of a cabinet in the hotel he was staying in. We’ve all heard of seventies rock bands trashing the furniture in hotels, and this seems decidedly more civilised.

Then it was time to say goodbye (au revoir?) to Canada. We had got a few golden oldie discounts as we went round, but the best one was half price on the UP train that took us swiftly from Union station to Pearson airport, and the welcoming embrace of Air Transat. Reflecting on the plane back, Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa had been decidedly cool, but the coolest place was definitely Toronto in the sunshine.

How to find Leonard. Imagine the photo is eight blocks wide and six blocks tall. Starting at the bottom right, he is one block in and two and a half blocks up.