Again the Board of Trade looks far and wide. Apart from its present trade working relations between South Africa and Mexico it is looking for a larger and most interesting exchange of business, for a year ago an Imperial Royal Commission sat in the board’s rooms taking evidence regarding the trade between Canada and the West Indies.
By its internal constitution, as we have noticed, the Board of Trade is ever on the alert watching Dominion, Provincial and Civic legislation.
In the municipal life of the city it has urged improvements in the fire service, the water supply, the lighting service and the betterment of streets and interested itself in various other spheres of municipal government reform, among them the securing of the great modern amendment of the city charter which has necessitated the reduction of the number of aldermen to one for each ward, and the creation of a board of five commissioners for the disbursement of money, the awarding of contracts and the purchase of material.
It would be tedious to enumerate further the home activities of the Board of Trade, but this feature should not be omitted, viz.: that its work has made this city a manufacturing center of ever increasing possibilities. Montreal, as a manufacturing center, is hardly sufficiently advertised; Montreal should be made known not only as a gateway for export and import transportation, but also as the busy center of headquarters of numerous and constantly growing industries of its own. It is a distributing source of cheap power, light and heat. All that goes towards the making of a great and successful commercial metropolis has been planned by the merchants of modern Montreal, whose predecessors began humbly in 1822, and ever conscious of the future destiny of their city, were always led by visions of its future greatness as the commercial metropolis of Canada.
It has made representations to the Dominion and Provincial governments on the subject of industrial and technical education for the workers and has taken a lofty and ideal stand in more recent philanthropical and civic betterment schemes.
The Board since 1893 has occupied quarters in its own building, though the first building was destroyed by fire on the 23d of January, 1901. The present building which was entered into in May, 1903, while built on the same site and on a similar plan to the first, is of fireproof construction and, like the former building, faces on four streets. The board occupies the greater portion of the fourth floor, its premises consisting of a handsome exchange hall, branch association room, reading room, secretary’s office, council chamber and committee room. It has a membership of 1,400 and there are daily gatherings of various of its affiliated commercial associations.
In addition to being the center of the commercial life of Montreal, the building has been the locale of several important social functions, the most notable being its inauguration of the evening of 17th August, 1903, by the Rt. Hon. Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, G.C.M.G., which was attended by the members of the board and the delegates to the Fifth Congress of Chambers of Commerce of the Empire (which was held in Montreal that year) and the president of the congress, the Rt. Hon. Lord Brassey, K.C.B.; the reception of Their Excellencies the Rt. Hon. Earl Grey, G.C.M.G., and the Countess Grey on the evening of the 24th of January, 1905, to welcome them on their arrival in this country, which, attended by over twelve hundred guests, was pronounced one of the most brilliant social functions in the history of the city.
CHAMBRE DE COMMERCE
(1887)
The next great commercial association was the “Chambre de Commerce,” of French business men. Up to 1886 the Board of Trade had been alone, though with individual French citizens, as at present, among its members, but in this year Mr. J.X. Perrault, not without opposition even among his compatriots, took the initiative of forming a second board to group together French-speaking citizens. An act of incorporation was applied for from the government at Ottawa and was granted on January 1, 1887. On February 2, 1887, the first reunion of French business representatives took place under the chairmanship of Mr. Jacques Grenier, the mayor of the city, and then president of “La Banque du Peuple,” in the offices of G.W. Parent, at the corner of St. Lambert and St. James streets. Its few hundreds of members have now surpassed a thousand. Its activities are similar to those of the Board of Trade with which there is mutual cooperation in points of common, civic, provincial and federal import. It has taken a great interest in the future commercial education of the merchant by promoting the “Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales” recently erected.