I hate the casual use of styrofoam here too. I even avoid buying vegetarian fast food because most likely it will end up packaged in styrofoam. What I do collect end ups in a small stash that I take to Toronto to recycle when I visit family.

Canada Day is a major disappointment if you’re patriotic. Even the downtown annual parade is small with little fanfare. The St. Patrick’s Day parade is probably 50 times more popular. I recommend going to a very federalist area like Cote Saint-Luc if you want to celebrate Canada Day.

As for Remembrance Day, well I don’t think it’s been a holiday in Ontario for over 25 years either. I was surprised to learned it was still a holiday in BC when I had a job doing telephone sales targetting BC a couple of years ago.

You still see lots of young people smoking on the sidewalks downtown, but it’s not nearly as bad as ten years ago, when smoking was permitted all over the corridors of most shopping malls and at the concessions at the Bell Centre. You are also coming from the BC which has the lowest smoking rate in the country.

As far as the good thing, Montreal is a very affordable city, particularly if you rent. It’s also relatively safe and still a good public transportation system fo the central parts of the city.