The history of Montréal's night-time regulation reveals how managing nightlife expanded police power and budgets - and how burdensome effects of these changes fell disproportionately on sex workers, the queer community and hospitality industry workers.
Author
- Matthieu Caron
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, Simon Fraser University
For much of the first half of the 20th century, Montréal built a reputation as a North American nightlife capital. Tourists sought out cabarets, jazz clubs and after-hours bars, and moved through the red-light district where sex, gambling and liquor were openly available.
This permissiveness relied on a well-understood but illicit arrangement: police officers, politicians, madams, taxi drivers, performing artists and business owners all participated in a protected nighttime economy.
By the mid-1950s, however, this tolerance became the starting point for one of the largest expansions of police authority in Canadian urban history.
As I examine in my book Montreal After Dark: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City , Montréal's political leadership came to see nightlife control not as a marginal issue but as a central measure of civic order and modernity. And that shift transformed the police force.
When night became a policing problem
In the 1940s, the Montréal Police Department was already stretched thin. Officers enforced wartime blackouts, guarded industrial sites and cracked down on sexually transmitted infections among soldiers and civilians.
The Morality Squad ("Escouade de la moralité") - enlarged during wartime fears over delinquency - patrolled theatres, bars, parks and known queer or youth meeting places.
Young women were frequently arrested for "immoral" behaviour, while queer men faced entrapment and harassment. In this, Montréal's squad resembled its North American counterparts , variously labelled vice squads - or, in Toronto's case, the Morality Department , disbanded in the 1930s.
Pursuing a new urban order
Pacifique "Pax" Plante, a city prosecutor, took over the Morality Squad at this time.
He insisted that officers apply laws long ignored, raiding brothels, gambling houses and nightclubs that had operated under longstanding police protection. His crusade threatened the partnerships that sustained Montréal's nighttime economy, and this led to his dismissal in 1948.
But the damage had been done; his campaign pushed the city into the 1950-53 Caron Inquiry , which laid bare a police force deeply entangled in the very nightlife it was meant to regulate.
Cleaning up the city required more than moral zeal. Reformers pursued a new urban order which led to hiring, retraining, centralizing authority and expanding the budget. Nightlife policing became one of the clearest justifications for growth.
Building a modern police force
After the inquiry, Jean Drapeau's Civic Action League won the 1954 municipal election on a promise to restore honesty and order. But doing so required rebuilding the police. At mid-century, the force was large but demoralized, discredited by scandal and mistrusted by residents.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the city invested heavily in police professionalization. European consultants from London and Paris reorganized the department, streamlined command structures and introduced new standards of training and discipline - reforms similar to those underway in Chicago and Los Angeles. Hundreds of new officers were hired and night patrols increased. Raids on cabarets, clubs and small bars became routine.
By the late 1960s, the police budget had risen sharply. Montréal's political atmosphere - defined by protests, marches, labour disputes, dissent and fears of radical activity - gave elected officials strong incentives to keep expanding the force .
The 1969 police and firefighter strike plunged the city into chaos: looting, fires and riots. The municipal administration used the event to argue for further investment in policing, reinforcing an upward spiral in budget growth and authority.
Growing police budget
Moments of unrest were not daily occurrences, but they created a climate in which constant budget increases appeared necessary.
Tellingly, between the mid-1950s and 1970, Montréal's police budget grew from $9.6 million to $49.7 million - an increase of more than 400 per cent and far outpacing overall municipal spending.
Yet, the everyday, not the exceptional, absorbed the department's time. Officers spent their nights patrolling streets, parks, clubs and cabarets, enforcing morality laws and municipal bylaws.
They targeted sex workers, queer men and women and performing artists working after dark. Street checks, like arrests for prostitution charges , shaped the routine work of policing, linking the department's growth directly to the governance of nighttime public space.
Nighttime surveillance - from enforcing bar hours to policing street sex work - became part of a broader municipal project that linked order, cleanliness and safety to global ambitions.
Expo 67, 1976 Olympics
As Montréal formalized its place on the global stage, first during Expo 67 and later during the 1976 Olympics , the policing of nightlife intensified.
For example, fearing that Expo would attract sex workers and petty crime, the city adopted a controversial "anti-mingling" bylaw.
This forbade employees in licensed establishments from sitting, drinking or even talking with customers. Because this bylaw was designed to curb sex workers from soliciting in drinking establishments, police enforced the regulation most aggressively against women.
Dancers, singers, barmaids and hostesses were arrested for ordinary workplace interactions. The bylaw blurred the line between hospitality work and sex work, effectively criminalizing women's participation in the nighttime economy.
Anti-prostitution bylaws
By the early 1980s, the city - along with other Canadian urban centres - introduced "anti-prostitution" bylaws to expand police powers despite limits imposed by the Supreme Court of Canada. This led to a pan-Canadian review of sex work in society .
These local tools disproportionately targeted women, transgender people and racialized sex workers, who were increasingly arrested simply for being in public spaces at night.
Whose night?
By the '80s, Montréal presented itself as a global cultural hub - home to major festivals, theatres and a thriving, "respectable" nightlife. That transformation, however, rested on the continued policing of many of the people who had historically sustained the nighttime economy.
The police department had become one of the city's largest expenses, and nighttime enforcement one of its most visible activities.
The legacy is visible today. Independent venues face noise complaints , rising regulatory costs and the threat of closure.
The city's recent support fund for small venues offers some relief, but it doesn't answer the central question: who is allowed to shape Montréal and its nights, and who is pushed out in the name of order?
Seen from a nocturnal angle, Montréal's history - like the history of many cities - shows that "safety" is never neutral . From the 1940s onward, expanding police budgets rested on the idea that the night was inherently unruly and needed constant control.
Debates about rights
Rather than allocating resources toward the concerns raised by the feminist Take Back the Night movement or by emerging queer organizations , the city focused on moral regulation - a pattern that consistently targeted those living and working after dark.
As cities debate how to sustain their nighttime economies while keeping residents safe, Montréal's past reminds us that the way we govern the night determines who gets to belong in it.
For policymakers and residents today, the lesson is simple: debates about nightlife are also debates about rights, inclusion and the fair use of public space. Safer nights are built not only through policing, but through investment, participation and recognition of the communities that bring the city to life after dark.
Matthieu Caron does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
