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For the first 150 years of the existence of Belgium as an independent nation the francophone community was dominant. This was mostly due to the fact that the economic centre of gravity was in the francophone region. Wallonia with its coal mines and factories was where the money was being earned. Today it is Flanders that is the economic heart of the country. Consequently, Dutch is becoming increasingly dominant. Wallonian mining has practically ceased and its industries have become a rust belt. People are moving away to the Flemish cities where the jobs are. The linguistic dividing lines in Belgium are sharp, because of the legacy of 150 years of subordination of the Dutch language by the francophones. The result is that the latter find that they are compelled to become fluent in Dutch to be accepted in their new environment. Their children will be bi-lingual and their grand-children probably also, but then their other (than Dutch) language will be English, not French.

Simply put, Montréal has been surpassed by Toronto as the largest city of Canada because the main language of Montréal and the Québec this city is part of happens not to be the main language of Canada.Had Canada evolved somehow into a Francophone-majority country, then Montréal would probably have remained the biggest Canadian city, as the historic and natural metropolis of the Canadiens. The territory of Ontario, assuming it had been settled by Francophones linked politically and otherwise to French Canada's core at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, would probably be a periphery of this French Canada, the settlements on the upper Saint Lawrence and around Lake Ontario being as much in the shadow of the larger metropolis as the settlements on the middle and lower Saint Lawrence. Regional centres might be the size of Quebec City or Hamilton with populations in the hundreds of thousands, local hubs not capable of challenging the metropolis.Similarly, had French Canada somehow become permanently Anglicized, Francophones being first minoritized and then assimilated in Montréal as they were in New Orleans and wider Québec following suit, then there would have been no loss of the city’s preeminence. A securely Anglophone metropolis in a jurisdiction where—at best—French was hanging on in the peripheries would have stayed securely Anglophone. If New Orleans has declined in the past half-century, it was for reasons entirely unconnected to Cajun language activism in the bayous to its west.The scenario in actual history, where Montréal was the leading city of an Anglophone-majority country despite having a Francophone majority locally and being part of Francophone-majority Québec, was unstable. Given how economic power was segmented on ethnic lines, the Anglophone minority with its pan-Canadian orientation tending to do better than the Francophone majority and English remaining dominant despite this majority, the Canadian leadership of Montréal was viable only insofar as Francophones consented to this division of power. Once they stopped, the arrangement's collapse was inevitable. A Toronto that had been growing more rapidly still than Montreal for at least the previous half-century, and that was securely in the heart of English Canada, was positioned to take the lead.

Catalonia and Québec are superficially similar in that they are potential nation-states notable for their distinctive languages located inside larger countries where their languages are, overall, minority languages. In some ways, they are more similar still, each having a population of about eight million people (Catalonia a bit less, Québec a bit more) while having a very large share of its population in a local metropolis (Barcelona and Montréal, respectively). These two societies do differ hugely in that Catalonia, most unlike Québec, is not a society where speakers of the local language form an overwhelming majority of the population.This map, drawing on recent data from La Vanguardia, shows the proportion of people whose most regularly used language is Catalan. What this map makes clear is that Catalan is a minority language in much of Catalonia, in not only the metropolis of Barcelona but in Tarragona.Victor Hernandez shared in his answer this image, one I found in a 2009 article at La Voz de Barcelona (“El uso del castellano dobla el del catalán en el área metropolitana de Barcelona”), which goes into more detail. Even including speakers who use both languages, Barcelona is still a metropolis where Spanish is most commonly spoken.Québec is quite different, as hinted by this map. Blue denotes territories where less than a third of the population speaks English as a mother tongue.If anything, that map underplays the degree to which most of Québec is populated by people whose most regular language is French. This map, like the one above using data from the 2006 census, shows how most of the territory of Québec has an minority of people speaking English as a mother tongue representing a single-digit percentage of the population. (Native speakers of languages other than French and English would form an even smaller minority across almost all of this territory.) Many of these, even, would have to use French as a regular language to one degree or another.The city of Montréal is a place where native speakers of French form a slight majority of the total population; including the city’s extensive suburbs brings the Francophone proportion up to nearly two-thirds of the total population of the conurbation. The province’s second city of Québec City, home to a half-million people, is almost 95% Francophone; being a monolingual Anglophone would simply not work there. Anglophones and other language minorities are concentrated in only relatively small parts of the province, in parts of Montréal and in outlying areas. French in Québec is not only known but used to an extent that Catalan simply is not in Catalonia.Why is this the case? The most important difference between the two societies lies in their migration histories. Catalonia in the 20th century was the destination of huge numbers of migrants from elsewhere in Spain, most of these migrants being native speakers of Spanish. Québec, in contrast, was over the 20th century most notable as a source of migrants for the rest of Canada, Anglophones more than Francophones. These migrations were driven by economics: Catalonia happened to be one of the richest parts of Spain while Québec was one of the poorer parts of Canada.The result of all these trends is that Québec does not have to be as bilingual in French and English as Catalonia is in Catalan and Spanish. According to Statistics Canada data, four million of the 8.3 million people of Québec speak only French. It is perfectly possible for someone to live a good life speaking only French, especially given the language laws requiring fluency and service in French in business. It is not as if most Francophones would regularly encounter Anglophones in their day-to-day life, after all. The contrast with Catalonia, a society home to almost as many people as Québec, is noteworthy: The more than 2.5 million people in Catalonia whose regular language is Catalan are outnumbered in a comparative perspective by more than two-to-one by the more than 6 million people in Québec whose native language is French, and these Catalonian speakers of Catalan are immersed in an environment where Spanish is still the leading language in terms of regular speakers. (The Catalan Wikipedia hosts an excellent analysis of the language dynamics of Catalonia.) Speakers of Catalan in Catalonia have to be fluent in Spanish. That speakers of Spanish in Catalonia also, and increasingly, have high degrees of fluency in Catalan as well is a consequence of the effectiveness of the Catalonian government in promoting fluency.Incidentally, I would also point people to an answer I wrote last year, responding to Why do some French-speaking people in Quebec think that French is under threat in Quebec, even with all the laws to protect the language's official status?. Suffice it to say that I think that, even in a Québec far more solidly Francophone than Catalonia is Catalanophone, the local language could be endangered if attention slipped. In the particular case of Catalonia, there is much more cause for concern, especially since in at least some neighbouring areas people whose native language is Catalan (or a very close relative thereof) have begun to stop speaking said language. I can easily imagine that, if things had gone differently, Catalan might have been much more marginalized, retreating from major centres and increasingly becoming a language spoken disproportionately by older demographics and by people in rural areas, a sort of Welsh scenario.