Couche-Tard is Quebec’s leading dépanneur chain and one of Canada’s corporate success stories.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
I live in a dépanneur desert. That is, from my front door, it takes a whole block-and-a-half to reach a corner store with beer.
That almost counts as far in Montreal. Mark Twain once said that you couldn’t throw a brick in this city without breaking a church window. In many parts of the city today you can’t chuck masonry without hitting a dep.
Dépanneurs are not so different from convenience stores anywhere, except that for decades they have had the right to sell beer and wine. In their shabby approachability, they have become a beloved part of the urban fabric, particular to Montreal the way bodegas are to New York or sanctimony is to Toronto.
Some Ontarians have managed to make themselves upset by the idea of selling beer in convenience stores, which the government of Premier Doug Ford authorized earlier this month. Montrealers struggle to understand why. Buying beer at a dépanneur is as natural here as buying a $2-million fixer-upper with foundation issues in other Canadian cities.
The fleur-de-lys spangled sky has not fallen. Union membership in la belle province remains robust. Life expectancy is just a tick above 82.
What dépanneurs do is help out in a pinch. The word, unique to Quebec in this usage, comes from the French for troubleshooting. The trouble, in this case, is realizing you need beer.
Sometimes other stores are far. Sometimes other stores are closed. A good dep is open late, right up until 11 p.m., the latest they are permitted to sell alcohol. In fact, there is a dep across the street from my house, but I don’t count it because it inexplicably keeps banker’s hours.
The oft-repeated legend of how the stores got their start, credited to Judith Lussier in her book Sacré dépanneur!, begins in 1970. The owner of a Montreal corner store, Paul-Émile Maheu, took advantage of a new provincial law exempting certain small merchants from business hour restrictions. Soon the loophole was big enough to drive a Labatt 50 delivery truck through.
There are an estimated 6,000 dépanneurs in Quebec and, yes, they are essentially merchants of vice. Eighty per cent of their sales are from lottery tickets, cigarettes and beer, according to the Convenience Industry Council of Canada.
Whatever its effect on the moral fabric of the nation, the sale of alcohol is incontestably good for business. Look at the Leviathan that is Couche-Tard, Quebec’s leading dépanneur chain and one of Canada’s corporate success stories. You don’t get big enough to try and swallow 7/11 by selling cake mix and pepperoni sticks.
It’s true that a slightly higher share of Quebeckers drink than other Canadians (85 versus 75 per cent, roughly) but that is hard to attribute to deps. In any case, Quebeckers smoke less weed than any other province. You pick your poison. Ours is a six-pack of Boréale.
Deps can also can sell wine, but “dep wine” is not so much for drinking as for laying down and avoiding, to paraphrase Monty Python. Gloopy reds and vinegary whites often gather dust on a high shelf, the kangaroos and bicycling Frenchmen on their labels communing sadly among themselves.
Some dépanneurs, by contrast, have an excellent beer selection, browsable in a pleasantly chilly walk-in fridge. Bounded in a dep beer fridge, a customer can count themselves a king of infinite space, the Japanese imports and obscure local microbrews vying to determine what sort of night it’s going to be.
My go-to is a six-pack of Boréale Pale Ale des Bois, the one with the little fox on the can. It’s a beer to sip with fish tacos on a night in.
My wife and I have 10-month-old twins – we don’t drink much. But, by the same token, after a particularly chaotic bedtime we sometimes look at each other and think, we need a beer. Having both grown up in puritanical old Toronto, the luxury of walking down the street for a few oat sodas is not lost on us.
It might take us a week to make our way through a six-pack but a small part of us is grateful that, here in Quebec, a civilized sort of troubleshooting is close at hand.