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You're taking this personally, which I think is clouding your view. You don't need to lecture me on the history of Quebec, I'm well aware. Harvard and Stanfor

You're taking this personally, which I think is clouding your view. You don't need to lecture me on the history of Quebec, I'm well aware. Harvard and Stanford are 'elite' schools. U. Laval is not. "Do you have any idea how big is the "circus"?" - it's somewhat less than $1 Billion revenue - which is not that huge. Desjardins? Ha ... I use Desjardins as my main account - it's backwards and the most 'behind' of any major bank in Canada. I can't get a Visa Debit - among other things. Desjardins is '#1' in stability basically - because they are like a franchise and each branch is separate bank - they have extremely low lending leverage. This gives them a high degree of 'stability' (but also underperformance). Don't be personal about it, I sense from your writing that you already know Montreal is not a 'winning city' and is not really moving in that direction. Obviously I'm not 'anti Montreal' or I wouldn't chose to live here. It's a great town, even a great town to build a startup in, but the people here have little interest in building industries, in the classical sense.

mablap 10y ago
I appreciate that I may come across as personally irritated - I am indeed a bit. Quebec bashing does get tiring, and your condescending tone and seemingly facile arguments did annoy me. I don't understand the logic of people who hold the arguments you bring forth. It's as if because you're not "elite" (whatever that means) now, you will never be. Yoshua Bengio's dream (if I may) is to make Montreal a global hotspot of AI research. That's all. Now you (and others) can bash it all you want, blame the local population, blame the language, blame the education system - whatever. To me, the fact that some people are reacting the way you are is actually confirmation that things are doing well - quite contrary to your frankly misguided assumption that I have a defeatist opinion of the city and the province in general.

mablap 10y ago

I appreciate that I may come across as personally irritated - I am indeed a bit. Quebec bashing does get tiring, and your condescending tone and seemingly facile arguments did annoy me. I don't understand the logic of people who hold the arguments you bring forth. It's as if because you're not "elite" (whatever that means) now, you will never be. Yoshua Bengio's dream (if I may) is to make Montreal a global hotspot of AI research. That's all. Now you (and others) can bash it all you want, blame the local population, blame the language, blame the education system - whatever. To me, the fact that some people are reacting the way you are is actually confirmation that things are doing well - quite contrary to your frankly misguided assumption that I have a defeatist opinion of the city and the province in general.