Friends jokingly call me the Sud-Ouest Ambassador because I’m a little obsessed with my neighbourhood, but I don’t hold a candle to real tour guides. One of my favourites is Thom Seivewright, a.k.a. Montreal Expert. With more than 72,000 followers on Instagram, he routinely pops up on my feed with his one-minute “quickie tour” videos, often sharing little-known facts about a specific landmark or neighbourhood, and always ending with his signature “Voilà!”

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Even someone like me, who prides herself on her Montreal knowledge, learned a lot when I recently tagged along on a downtown tour of the city’s underground. We locals often mock tourists’ fascination with the “underground city,” but it turns out there’s more down there than meets the eye. Thom showed us fascinating historical, architectural and urban-planning elements I’ve probably walked by (or under) for years, never noticing.

Drimonis: Tour guide Thom Seivewright, the Montreal Expert, introduces locals to their own city Back to video

After the tour, and over bowls of steaming pho soup in Chinatown, we chatted about our mutual love for this city.

Born and raised in LaSalle, with a French-speaking mom and an English-speaking dad, Thom is in many ways a typical Montrealer, having grown up perfectly bilingual.

“When people ask me if I’m a francophone or an anglophone, I never know what to say,” he chuckles. “I’m both.”

He says he felt treated like the anglo while attending French school, and the franco in English school. “I always felt like, ‘I’m not one of you, but also, I am?’”

With half of his family speaking French and the other half speaking English, Thom did what many Montrealers can relate to. With his family’s francophone side, he’d champion “the anglophone cause.” With the English speakers, he’d champion “the francophone cause.”

Working in the film and hotel industries, Thom knew he’d eventually become a tour guide. “I always thought I’d do it when I was 65, as a retirement project,” he says. But after taking a year off from his job as a hotel concierge to travel around the world, he came back a changed man.

“I was no longer the same person,” he says. “I couldn’t fathom working indoors anymore.”

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He promptly took a one-year course offered by the Institut de tourisme et d’hôtellerie du Québec to obtain his permit and started working as a freelance guide, curating his own tours.

“I like to cater to people’s unique interests,” he says. This has led to something that’s almost unheard of in the tour-guide industry: a robust local clientèle.

“Half the people who book my tours are from Montreal,” he says. “People who want to know very specific things. It’s allowed me to get to know the city even better.”

Together now for 26 years with his husband and married for 19, Thom developed a tour on Montreal’s queer history — a three-hour journey through the city’s LGBTQ+ past, exploring pivotal moments that shaped that history from the 1960s to the 1990s. It’s the tour he enjoys the most.

“That one is so powerful,” he says. “Even though I know the stories, I can’t help but be overcome with emotion almost every time I give it.”

Thom admits to completely “nerding out” on Montreal trivia and loves sharing it with others. A self-professed “people person,” being isolated from human contact was, for him, the hardest thing about the pandemic.

“I worried Montreal could collapse during COVID,” he says, “but it didn’t.”

It’s ultimately the city’s resiliency Thom loves the most.

“Montreal has been kicked and beaten up by politics, by weather, by our geographical position,” he says. “Montreal has been burned to the ground a few times, literally and figuratively. This city is a resilient motherf—er. You can knock us down, we’ll suffer, but we’re going to get right back up on our feet.”

There’s never a shortage of things to complain about, but most Montrealers have one thing in common: love for this city. Those who help remind us why it’s so special deserve a little love, too.

Toula Drimonis is a Montreal journalist and the author of We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada.

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