the party is finished. The pandemic has endangered what was left of Quebec’s nightlife, but it will have escaped no one that the nightlife already seemed to be in its twilight before the health crisis. Victim of an aseptic and digitized era, can the party today be reborn from its ashes and give back the sacred fire to an increasingly homey youth?
“It is certain that after the pandemic, there will be a jolt. We hear a lot of people who had left the industry say that they want to reconnect with the clubs, “apprehends with optimism Mathieu Drapeau, owner of the Unity club, in the gay district of Montreal. His bet is far from won, as nightclubs have closed one after the other over the past decade in this sector of the city. And the reality is hardly rosier elsewhere.
For all of Quebec, the Corporation of Owners of Bars, Brasseries and Taverns (CPBBT) estimates that 35% of bars went out of business between 2014 and the start of the pandemic. A decline that would have started in 2006 with the ban on smoking indoors, but which would have grown with the tightening of laws against drink driving a few years later.
“Mindsets have changed, and people are much more careful. They drink as much, as we can see with the SAQ sales figures, but differently, and less in bars, ”reports Renaud Poulin, CEO of the CPBBT. This generalized calm, but which is especially noticeable among young people, is now pushing some tenants to want to close shop earlier. The CPBBT also reports that several of its members will continue to cease their activities at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m., even if the bars will regain the right to be open until 3 a.m. from the 1er November.
Universal phenomenon
How far away are the days when Quebecers made fun of Ontarians because the last call was given earlier on their side of the Ottawa River. As in many spheres, Quebec was at the time the perfect middle ground between English Canada and Europe, where some clubs used to not close until several hours after dark.
However, across the Atlantic too, nightlife is not what it was for a few years. In France, half of the nightclubs disappeared between the disco era and the appearance of COVID-19. Worse: of the 200,000 bistros that were established in the 1960s, only 40,000 remain in the land of the aperitif.
Mindsets have changed, and people are much more careful
“The main reason is an individualization of society, which was accelerated by COVID-19, but which had started before. It’s a problem with the collective, a problem with people we don’t know and who aren’t in our circle of friends. That’s why at the moment, the kind of party that works, it’s house parties, ”laments Jérémie Peltier, director of studies at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a left-wing political think tank.
In his essay The party is over ? published this fall by Éditions de l’Observatoire, he argues among other things that the omnipresence of technologies had made the party a “non-essential” activity, even before COVID-19 enshrined this expression.
“The party, before, was a condition for flirting. Now today [avec les applications de rencontre], it is no longer necessary, he continues in an interview with The duty. It was also the only way to listen to music, whereas now we can listen to it everywhere in our headphones. And third, people used to go to a nightclub to dance, but with the TikTok app, we realize that people can dance very well alone in their house. “
A “festivization” of the party
All the reasons Jérémie Peltier enumerated in his book are also valid here, according to Will Straw, a professor of communication at McGill University who has studied the nightlife extensively. The latter also points the finger at gentrification, which has brought to the central districts of Montreal a class of older and better-off citizens, but less willing to live in all the hubbub of well-watered evenings.
“Either gentrification is building condos instead of nightclubs, or the construction of condos nearby increases the number of complaints about noise”, sums up Will Straw, referring to the legendary Divan Orange, on the Plateau-Mont. -Royal, which closed in 2018 after receiving several fines for the noise pollution the shows caused.
Mr. Straw, however, is not ready to decree that the party is dead and buried, and prefers to say that the way of doing things has changed. From a weekly, even routine, activity, it has become an exceptional, circumstantial activity, he observes. “I even speak of ‘festivalisation’. Much like other art forms, like auteur films that most people only see at festivals. We must now create a special atmosphere around the party, ”he illustrates. According to him, this would explain the proliferation of electronic music festivals and parties underground before the pandemic, when several nightclubs were struggling to survive.
The tenants today nourish the hope that these years of tumult are behind them. And for good reason, hundreds of people demonstrated this weekend in Montreal for the reopening of dance floors, while Quebec is one of the last places in the world where it is forbidden to swing your hips and sing karaoke in a bar.
“Considering the few clubs that remain in Montreal, it would surprise me that they do not survive when the pandemic is over”, reasoned the DJ Mathieu Grondin of MTL 24/24, an organization which fights to save the nightlife in the metropolis.