
Library and Archives Canada
The combination of creativity and a Mayor – Jean Drapeau – who wasn’t afraid to put Montreal on the world stage resulted in one of the most successful World’s fairs ever.
In 1962, the Soviet Union backed out of the 1967 World Exhibition,leaving the field open to Canada, which two years earlier had lost its bid to hold the ’67 event in Montreal. In November, Mayor Jean Drapeau flew to Paris with a proposal by Blanche and Daniel van Ginkel in his pocket – and Expo 67 was on.
“When the matter of an exhibition was broached, everybody assumed that it was going to be somewhere on the outskirts of the city, because the nearest international show of that kind (the 1964 World Exhibition) in New York, was on Flushing Meadows,” van Ginkel remembers.
“We weren’t going to have any of that.”
Will Montreal ever see anything like that again? One can only hope!!
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