Montreal will let you ride naked through downtown. It will not let 600 people eat griot in a parking lot without a police escort. Every summer without fail, Montreal celebrates itself.

The naked bike ride rolls through downtown streets. Bodies everywhere. Broad daylight.

Families watching from sidewalks. Not a police cruiser in sight — unless they’re smiling at the parade. Sainte-Catherine Street during Pride fills with full nudity, body paint, and crowds that dwarf anything happening in RDP on a Saturday night.

The city funds it. The mayor shows up. The province celebrates its progressiveness on the international stage.

Jazz Fest brings hundreds of thousands of people to the Quartier des spectacles for two weeks every summer. Open containers. Packed streets.

Music until midnight. The police presence is friendly, minimal, celebratory. The terrasses on Saint-Laurent, Saint-Denis, and Bernard fill until 2am every night from May to October.

Wine. Noise. Crowds spilling onto sidewalks.

Nobody surveilling from a parking lot. This is Quebec culture. Officially protected.

Publicly funded. Enthusiastically celebrated. And then there is the other Quebec culture.

The One That Gets Watched

On July 30, 2021, L’Atelier Duo de Chef celebrated its second anniversary in Rivière-des-Prairies. Nearly 600 people came to celebrate together — the success of four restaurateurs and the spirit of community that everyone had missed. (Journal Métro) Rick-Andy Jean-Baptiste and Donald Joseph grew up in RDP. They met in 2008 in the same class at École hôtelière Calixa-Lavallée and built everything from the neighborhood up. (La Presse) They fed students at Jean-Grou High School at low prices.

They distributed free hot meals during the first COVID wave. Chef Ray said it plainly: “We grew up here, and for us it’s important to give back to the community.” (MENU) The anniversary party was exactly that. Community.

Food. Music. Families.

Young entrepreneurs like Ramzi from Chez Smoothzi showed up. Teenagers said they needed more events like this in the neighborhood. (Journal Métro) And parked around the perimeter, according to a witness who was there: police vehicles. Sitting in standby.

Watching. No incident. No threat reported.

No explanation given. Just cops. Watching a Haitian community celebration in a neighborhood parking lot on Maurice-Duplessis.

The Comparison Nobody Wants to Make Out Loud

Let’s make it out loud. Thousands of naked bodies on bicycles rolling through the Plateau — no police standby in parking lots. Hundreds of thousands at Jazz Fest drinking in public — no surveillance units watching from cruisers.

Full nudity on Sainte-Catherine for Pride — city funding, mayoral presence, international press coverage. Terrasses packed until 2am all summer across the Plateau, Mile-End, and Outremont — zero perimeter monitoring. Six hundred fully clothed Black people eating griot and celebrating four chefs from their own neighborhood — police on standby.

Same city. Same summer. Different neighborhood.

Different community. Completely different state response.

What Quebec Calls Culture

Quebec has a specific definition of culture that it will fund, protect, celebrate, and defend internationally. The Jazz Festival is culture. The naked bike ride is culture.

Pride on Sainte-Catherine is culture. The terrasse on Saint-Laurent at 1am is culture. Chef Ray described it himself: “Montreal has its own flavour.

Duo de Chef is the closest to what Montreal flavour is because we are a mixture of everything that Montreal culture is about.” (MENU) He was right. He just didn’t know that Quebec only agrees with that statement when his food is on a food blog being called a hidden gem. When a journalist from the Plateau drives to RDP once and writes about the best griot in Montreal.

When his culture is consumable by people who don’t live there. When his culture assembles on its own terms, in its own neighborhood, for its own reasons — that’s when the cruisers show up.

The Language Laws Complete the Picture

Quebec will spend enormous political capital protecting French from English. It will fine a corner store owner for a sign with the wrong font size. It will restrict which schools immigrant children can attend.

It will invoke the notwithstanding clause to override constitutional rights in the name of cultural preservation. And it will allow thousands of naked bodies to ride bicycles through downtown Montreal without a second thought. Because nakedness on a bicycle in the Plateau is Quebec culture.

A Haitian food party in RDP is something that requires monitoring. The language being protected is not French. The culture being protected is not Quebec.

What is being protected is a specific version of Quebec — the one that looks good in a tourism brochure, draws international festival coverage, and never makes the establishment uncomfortable. The griot is welcome on the food blog. The 600 people eating it together in a parking lot are a different matter entirely.

What This Is

This is not about nudity. Montreal’s freedom around bodies and expression is genuine and worth keeping. This is about the selective application of state presence.

About which gatherings get celebrated and which ones get watched. About whose joy is protected and whose joy requires a perimeter. The naked bike ride doesn’t need a police buffer because nobody in power is afraid of it.

The Duo de Chef anniversary party got one because 600 Black people celebrating themselves in RDP, loudly and joyfully and without asking permission, is apparently still something Quebec isn’t entirely comfortable with. Not comfortable enough to send police away, anyway. Quebec calls itself progressive.

It funds the Pride parade. It celebrates diversity in press releases and tourism campaigns and mayoral speeches. And then it parks cruisers in the lot on Maurice-Duplessis on a Friday night in July while the griot gets cold.

That is also Quebec culture. The part that doesn’t make the brochure. Based on firsthand account and documented sources: Journal Métro, La Presse, MENU Magazine, CACOH RDP.