Contributor Profiles
Writer
Mel Solman
For more than half a century, the most intense rivalry for bragging rights in Canada has pitted residents of Montreal against those living in Toronto, many of them children and grandchildren of ex-Montrealers who fled ‘la belle province’ in panic after the separatist Parti Québecois led by René Levesque came to power for the first time in the 1976 Quebec election.
There is no doubt that Toronto has since supplanted Montreal as the financial heart of Canada, but on a social meter measuring joie de vivre, Montreal is more than holding its own, boasting the best bagels, smoked meat, and poutine, as well as less traffic congestion, more affordable housing, and the wildest night life in Canada.
Gone but not forgotten
In the opinion of some English-language newspaper readers, the only “social win” that Toronto the Good has scored over Sin City Montreal is that it managed to filch Mel Solman, perhaps the most brilliant English-language satirical columnist in Canada.
Mel, a McGill University graduate who grew up in Montreal, is an accomplished writer, editor, and university professor who moved to Toronto more than a quarter century ago to pursue opportunities in academe.
But before he left Montreal, Mel left an indelible impression on journalism colleagues such as Warren Perley and Wesley Goldstein, co-founding publishers of the upscale Weekly Herald distributed in west-end anglophone areas of the city between 1989 and 1991. One of the first writers they recruited for the Herald was Mel, who managed to produce a witty column week after week.
In his Herald column of May 16, 1989, Mel alluded to the imprecise use of language as exemplified on Quebec licence plates that state in French, ‘Je me souviens’ (‘I remember’ in English). There is controversy as to whether those words are intended to reference the pre-1759 period (prior to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham) when what is now Quebec was a colony of France known as ‘New France’ or whether the motto refers to post-1759 and the takeover by the British who won the territory in the Seven Years War that formally ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763.
Here is a brief sample of Mel’s tongue-in-cheek take in his May 16, 1989 column concerning the controversial motto: “Souviens what? one may ask. It would seem the good old days pre-1759 when Quebec had palm trees and weather like Florida.”
Even though he now resides in Toronto and has a full schedule, perhaps we can continue to hope that Mel will one day grace us with more of his wit through BestStory.ca!