Is it heritage or not?

In all, Quebec currently has 594 heritage buildings « classified » in the Répertoire du patrimoine culturel, such as the old Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc mill in Lac-Saint-Jean, the Adolphe-Gagnon barn in Saint-Fabien, in Bas-Saint-Laurent, or Christ-Roi Cathedral in Gaspé. Quebec municipalities have « cited » 955 buildings in the same directory, such as the former presbytery of Saint-Germain-de-Grantham, near Drummondville, the regional CEGEP of Lanaudière or the Mont-Castor ski center in Matane .

But 594 + 955 gives 1,549. Why does the Directory of Cultural Heritage have 16,074 buildings, then? Simply because the government of Quebec and the municipalities also “declare”, “classify” or “cite” 382 sites, which contain an average of 38 buildings. The small ones have three or four, like the institutional complex of the Sisters of Providence in Saint-André-Avellin, in the Outaouais, or the Domaine-Howard park in Sherbrooke (three Victorian pavilions and a root cellar). But there are hundreds of them in large sites such as Île d’Orléans, Old Quebec, Old Montreal and Arvida. However, most of the buildings on these sites, if they have a heritage value, are only “inventoried”, without being neither classified nor quoted for all that.

It makes you wonder what heritage really is.

It was in 1922 that Quebec adopted its first protection law in this area — 56 years before adopting the motto “I remember”. And since then, the very idea of ​​heritage has constantly evolved over the decades. This first law, of French inspiration, saw heritage as a monument or a museum piece of national value. Nowadays, we have extended the real estate heritage to the notion of a whole, such as the whole of Île d’Orléans or entire city districts that include hundreds of buildings. Yesterday, we were in heritage as a painting; today, we are more in the experience.

According to the law, a house, a factory, a district or an island can be considered heritage, for 11 different reasons: archaeological, architectural, artistic, emblematic, ethnological, historical, landscape, scientific, social, urban planning or technological. « And the portrait is constantly changing, because what is not heritage today will undoubtedly become so tomorrow, » says Lucie K. Morisset, professor in the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies at the School of Management Sciences. from UQAM and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Urban Heritage.

“Quebec society is diversifying and the definition of what is heritage will eventually encompass other meanings,” she predicts. In Sept-Îles, there is intense debate on the heritage value of the town hall, built in 1960 and designed by the great architect Guy Desbarats. Tomorrow, we may be looking at the Olympic Stadium (1976) or the Saint-Laurent borough mosque (1965), after Montreal’s Chinatown, which became a heritage site in January 2022. « There will always be a problem of definition, because heritage is what we identify with, and nothing else. And as Quebec society changes, so does heritage. »

The legal designation of what is heritage is hardly more helpful. The system is even frankly Byzantine. A heritage building or site can either be “declared” by the government, or “classified” by the Minister of Culture and Communications, or “cited” by a municipality. The « declaration », the « classification » or the « citation » amounts to affirming that such building or site is a jewel of public interest at the level of Quebec as a whole or of the municipality, accompanied by a certain number of obligations of protection for the owner and the authorities.

As if it weren’t complicated enough, a municipality can also assign a heritage value to a sector or a neighborhood as part of a site planning and architectural integration plan (PIIA) under another law. : the Law on land use planning and development. A PIIA can also designate, for example, facades on many streets in Plateau-Mont-Royal, in Montreal, or buildings along Chemin du Roy in Deschambault, between Trois-Rivières and Quebec.

The new Cultural Heritage Act mandates that all inventories must list pre-1940 buildings, but Martin Dubois, president of Patri-Arch, a heritage management consulting firm, believes that date should be relaxed because some regions have a rather recent history. In Nord-du-Québec, Chibougamau was still only a mining camp in 1940, and in Abitibi, we were barely out of the Far West.