I'm not sure exactly what this says about the culture and business norms of Montreal, but while there for PyCon, I noticed that the number of police seemed to have increased at least 10x from last year at the same time.
There is a great deal of political upheaval centered at UQAM, apparently mostly related to issues of pension promises broken for public workers. This is the ostensible reason to have so many more police and police substations, but I have to believe that it has other cultural effects as well.
What's particularly striking about this picture, if you'll pardon the pun, is that the cop is wearing stickers that are protesting the same austerity that the students are protesting with their red velvet squares. Cops are not allowed to strike (i.e. not work), so they wear stickers instead.
Howard Zinn's final chapter of his famous book comes to mind: "The Coming Revolt of the Guards". A system that separates people into prisoners and guards and pits them against each other, despite their common cause:
As to what this all says about police in Montréal, I don't know either. I've lived here for nearly eight years and have never had any unpleasant interaction with the police. The students are very leftist, though, and with such a large student population (four major universities, two Francophone, two Anglophone, plus several other research and education centres), the students' attitudes just amplify themselves.
"I've lived here for nearly eight years and have never had any unpleasant interaction with the police. "
This is a tangent from your original post but I've noticed that Montreal cops seem much more relax than the ones I've dealt with in the US.
This is completely anecdotal but I feel like cops in the US are somewhat more prone to talk and act aggressively when they start interaction with people. I'm wondering if that's a side effect of their training. In general I've had the opposite impression from the Montreal and Canadian cops in general. (Also border patrol in both country are night and day in how they interact with you).
It could just be risk? I don't have numbers on the comparative risk between Canadian cops vs. American cops, but I know that America isn't the safest place to be a cop, and it's well-understood that a cop who does not feel at risk is a friendlier cop.
There is a great deal of political upheaval centered at UQAM, apparently mostly related to issues of pension promises broken for public workers. This is the ostensible reason to have so many more police and police substations, but I have to believe that it has other cultural effects as well.