You will recall a number of weeks ago I wrote two posts (in French and English) entitled:

• 200e anniversaire de la bataille de Waterloo : Comment elle a pu façonner à jamais le Québec et le Canada (#290)
• 200th Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo:  How it shaped Québec and Canada (#289)

Those two posts received a lot of hits, and I received emails from a few people across Canada asking for more materials and asking questions out of curiosity (I guess our history books skipped over much of this?).

Here is a post on a similar topic.

A couple of weeks ago, Le Journal de Montréal newspaper published an article entitled :

Les Molson, bâtisseurs de notre patrimoine 

(click the link to read the article in French).

If you’re learning French, even at a basic level, have a try at reading the article in French (I know a good number of you are trying really hard to make strides in your learning).

This article might provide you with a very interesting topic to practice with.   Perhaps even pop it into Google Translate so you have a side-by-side reference / crutch as you read along.

Basically, the article says things like (translations of a few excepts):

The first public hospital, a bank, the first railway, and even a stadium:  The Molson family’s contribution to economic development and architectural heritage is far from being limited to its beer.

Few families can say they have built so much in Montréal in a 230 year span.

Have a read through it.

Remember, Montréal was “Canada’s city” during the golden years of the Molson family (in the sense that many of the decisions and directions taken towards building a young Canada were taken, initiated, and executed from Montréal).

As our “metropolis” of the day, Montréal’s growth and trajectory had a direct positive and lasting influence on what happened elsewhere, coast-to-coast.    It is something for all of us to be proud of, and through history, it inextricably links all of us to this part of Québec.

The next post will touch upon this very subject.

Have a good start to your week 🙂