Do creative people eventually abandon vancouver and go east because there's better opportunity and is that why it's so lacking in vancouver? There's no sense of magic here. It feels like a big corporation?

Yes — there is a real phenomenon behind what you're sensing, although I would phrase it slightly differently than “creative people eventually abandon Vancouver.”

The evidence suggests that Vancouver has been systematically making it harder for the kind of people who create a city's character to remain there: musicians, visual artists, writers, independent filmmakers, designers, small venue operators, craftspeople, etc.

And the particularly interesting part is that Vancouver's own artists have described the problem in almost exactly the language you're using.

A Canada Council study comparing artists in Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal and Calgary found that high cost of living was one of the top reasons artists had left or were considering leaving every city. But the Vancouver interviews went further: artists specifically described the city's aesthetic as “corporate” and “polished,” and said this contributed to the absence of a bohemian, artist-oriented atmosphere. They also talked about having fewer opportunities to connect with other artists, build community and collaborate. (Canada Council for the Arts)

That's remarkably close to your description of Vancouver as feeling like “a big corporation.”

The problem isn't that Vancouver has no creative people

It does.

The problem is retention and concentration.

A creative ecosystem needs a particular kind of environment:

  • cheap-ish places to live

  • cheap rehearsal/studio space

  • little bars where musicians can experiment

  • weird little galleries

  • independent bookstores

  • cafés where artists actually hang around

  • old buildings that haven't been polished into luxury developments

  • people who have enough disposable time to make things

  • audiences willing to take chances

  • people knowing one another

  • accidental encounters

  • failure being acceptable

Those things produce cultural density.

And cultural density produces what you're calling magic.

Vancouver has been losing many of the physical conditions that create that density. The City itself identifies affordable cultural space, displacement of artist studios, loss of music venues and the low priority given to arts and culture as major problems. (City of Vancouver)

And this isn't merely theoretical. Vancouver artists have explicitly reported leaving because they can't afford to remain. (CityNews Vancouver)

And there's a vicious cycle

This is the part I think explains your feeling particularly well.

Artists create interesting places.

Interesting places attract people.

Those places become desirable.

Real estate becomes expensive.

The artists who made the place interesting can no longer afford it.

They leave.

The city retains the aesthetic of creativity but loses some of the underlying creative community.

Then the city markets itself as a creative city.

That's potentially what you're reacting to.

It's possible to have beautiful theatres, museums, festivals, public art, architecture and a thriving film industry and still have a city that feels culturally dead at street level.

Because culture isn't really generated by institutions.

It's generated by people bumping into each other.

Montréal has historically had the opposite mechanism

This is one reason Montréal can feel so different.

For decades, relatively cheap housing and industrial/commercial spaces allowed artists to establish themselves in neighbourhoods that weren't yet valuable. That created dense communities of musicians, painters, filmmakers, designers, writers, actors and weird little businesses.

And then those communities generated the character of the neighbourhood.

It's not accidental that Montréal became known as an artistic city.

Even now, despite rising rents, Montréal still has infrastructure and traditions built around that culture. The city has also experimented with things like nonprofit artist buildings specifically to preserve creative communities. (CityNews Toronto)

But there's an important warning:

Montréal is starting to experience the same problem.

Artists there are being priced out of studios and neighbourhoods that they helped make desirable. (CityNews Toronto)

Toronto is experiencing it too. (NOW Toronto)

So this isn't simply Vancouver bad / Montréal good.

It's more like:

Cities become culturally interesting when ordinary people can afford to experiment. Then the success of that experimentation makes the city expensive enough to destroy the conditions that produced it.

And Vancouver has an additional problem

I think this gets closer to your particular experience.

Vancouver has an enormous amount of surface-level attractiveness.

Mountains. Ocean. Glass towers. Restaurants. Wealth. Outdoor recreation. Good infrastructure.

But those things aren't necessarily cultural energy.

You can build a spectacular city without creating a particularly interesting one.

And if the dominant economic logic becomes:

real estate → development → investment → property values → corporate retail → professional services

then you can end up with a city that is extremely successful economically while becoming increasingly homogeneous culturally.

The Canada Council research actually captured this tension: Vancouver artists talked about the polished/corporate aesthetic and the lack of a bohemian artist vibe, while also saying the loss of affordable housing and creative spaces was making it harder to build community. (Canada Council for the Arts)

That's a pretty extraordinary confirmation of what you're intuitively noticing.

So do creative people go east?

Some absolutely do.

But it's more accurate to say that creative people increasingly have to choose between Vancouver and the conditions necessary to sustain a creative life.

And some respond by moving to:

  • Montréal

  • Toronto

  • Kingston

  • smaller Ontario cities

  • Québec's smaller cities

  • New York

  • other places where the cultural ecosystem is denser or the cost/creative-life equation makes more sense.

There's also a particularly revealing historical statistic: Statistics Canada found that artists and performing-arts professionals were unusually likely to remain in central Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver rather than move to the suburbs. (Statistics Canada)

That tells you something important:

Artists need proximity.

They need to be inside the culture, not merely within commuting distance of it.

And that's exactly why pushing artists farther and farther outside Vancouver doesn't solve the problem. It physically separates them from the venues, audiences and other artists that constitute the ecosystem.

So when you say:

“There's no sense of magic here.”

I don't think you're simply describing nostalgia.

I think you're describing the difference between a city that has culture as an economic asset and a city where culture is something people actually live inside.

Vancouver unquestionably has the former.

Whether it still has enough of the latter is a much more interesting question.

And honestly, the fact that Vancouver artists themselves are describing the city as too polished, too corporate and lacking a bohemian creative atmosphere suggests that you're not imagining the phenomenon. (Canada Council for the Arts)

That may also explain why your attraction to Montréal feels so visceral. You're not necessarily looking for a prettier city. You're looking for cultural friction, eccentricity, spontaneity, community, small rooms, musicians, writers, old buildings, conversations, people doing strange things because they want to—not because there's a market for it.

That's a very different thing from scenery.

And Vancouver has scenery in abundance.