A committee led by Terry Fong has been formed to bring the 85th Worldcon to Montréal, Québec, Canada in 2027. Here is today’s press release:
The 67th Worldcon in 2009 in Montréal was the last Canadian Worldcon and Montrealers will be happy to see it return. We are bidding to bring the convention to the Palais des Congrès from September 2-6, 2027.
The bid is led by Terry Fong, a Montréal native and a veteran of several Worldcon organizing committees. The bid proposes to use the Palais des Congrès, the same venue that hosted the successful 67th Worldcon in 2009 as the main convention site.
Montréal is the largest city in Québec and the second-largest in Canada, with a population of over four million people. It is a bilingual and multicultural city, with French and English as the official languages, and a rich history and culture that reflects its diverse origins. Montréal is known for its festivals, arts, cuisine, nightlife, and attractions, such as Old Montreal, Notre-Dame Basilica, Mont-Royal Park, Olympic Stadium, and the Montréal Botanical Garden. Montréal is also a hub for science fiction and fantasy, with several authors, publishers, conventions, and fan groups based in the city.
The vote for the 2027 Worldcon will be held at the 2025 Worldcon, in Seattle, WA, USA, which will be held from August 13-17, 2025.
The Montréal 2027 bid committee invites all interested parties to visit our website, follow us on social media, and support our bid. The bid committee will also be present at various conventions and events to promote the bid and answer questions.
The bid will be at its first event at Boskone 61 in Boston, MA, USA, from February 9-11, 2024.
More information can be found on our website or by contacting us at [email protected].
There is one other announced bid for 2027 — WorldCon 2027 in Tel Aviv, Israel.
[Based on a press release.]
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Great news!!
Exciting news.
I believe we will see more cities bidding for annual Worldcon.
I would love to go to Israel but Montreal has the virtue of being on the same continent I live on.
If Montreal wins, I’m apt to take the train there, as I did in 2009. (Reno-Chicago-Schenectady-Montreal, although you have to stop overnight at Schenectady because the eastbound-to-northbound connection doesn’t work there.)
The Tel Aviv bid has been overtaken by events IMHO and is no longer realistic. Montreal sounds great.
I’d love to see bids from plausible countries that have never had a Worldcon before–someplace in Mexico, for example. South Africa? There are certainly a lot of Nigerian and Nigerian diaspora writers, but I don’t know if Nigeria is ready to host a Worldcon.
Doctor Science: It’s illegal to be gay or trans in Nigeria. I’d say that’s a big no.
Montreal is a lovely city I’ve been to, once, and would love an excuse to visit again.
@Cally: I didn’t know that. I agree, that knocks Nigeria out for the foreseeable future.
Is it usual for attending membership level pre-supports to come with “we will pay your voting fee and vote your token for you” and I hadn’t noticed before when I’ve pre-supported other bids?
Kat: Is it usual for attending membership level pre-supports to come with “we will pay your voting fee and vote your token for you”
I don’t think so. My understanding of the WSFS Constitution is that this sort of proxy voting is NOT permitted.
Mike writes: “A committee led by Terry Fong has been formed to bring the 85th Worldcon to Montréal, Québec, Canada in 2027.”
I had a great time in Montreal in 2009 (admittedly, being the TAFF delegate gave the trip an extra bounce), but I did find it rather strange to have a convention venue devoid of bars.
Doctor Science writes: “I’d love to see bids from plausible countries that have never had a Worldcon before–someplace in Mexico, for example.”
Might I suggest CartelCon for the title?
Steve Green,
Finding a bar or restaurant within walking distance of the Palais de Congres is easy.
Steve Green- Your suggestion is disgusting.
I’d like to know more about the committee. Especially given Chengdu, and the disaster in Winnipeg, I’d like to know more up front about who’s involved,
This is good news. Although, WTF with the voting token?
I don’t know if I’ll have the money, but I’ve always wanted to visit Montreal.
@Doctor Science: Besides being rabidly anti-LGBTQ, the facility in Uganda has only stairs and doesn’t allow service animals. Both these leave out a substantial percentage of Worldcon attendees.
@Steve Green: I guess you really loved that terrible GBBO episode about Mexico? Complaining about a lack of bars and throwing around racist stereotypes; you’re not winning for Britain.
Just found out this week that for the first time in decades, the US has imported more goods from Mexico than from China. Hooray for good neighbors, both north and south.
Lurkertype: WTF with the voting token?
I guess they figured if Chengdu was allowed to bring in briefcases full of voted ballots with no provenance, they should be able to do so as well. And I hate to say this, but… really, they’re not wrong.
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I am curious as to why this bid is for the American Labor Day Weekend, which causes issues for both parents/children dealing with the start of school and regular Dragon Con attendees, and not a date earlier in August, as Glasgow, Seattle, and Los Angeles have done. I’d also like to know more about who’s on the bid committee.
That being said, I’d welcome the excuse to visit Montréal — I’ve never been to the city proper, but I did pass close by on a family road trip to Québec City when I was in high school. I have very fond memories of that road trip.
Labour Day in Canada is the same as the US Labor Day weekend, so it is a long holiday weekend in both countries.
I expect to see further development of the bid website in due course, including the bid committee members. From what I understand, the bid prioritized having a site that could collect pre-supporting memberships first, and wanted to have it up before formally launching at Boskone.
Wait a minute. You might forget there are Chinese fans and you might not be winning for the USA.
Labor Day is the traditional date for Worldcon. Admittedly the tradition hasn’t been followed for a decade or two . Or three.
Considering our balance of trade is completely screwed and our elections are too, we are definitely NOT winning anything.
And everyone loves Canadians — Montreal is not and has never been in the United States. Heck, they’re barely even in Canada. 🙂
The vote for this con will be held in the US, and we like our neighbors. It sure beats going to Tel Aviv; so many more people will be able to attend from all over the world.
All this and poutine too!
If they’re going to name a pre-support level “Saw-Whet”, they need to include an owl ribbon.
The $350 level with the line about the voting token sounds like an elaborate joke. I hope.
I suppose I want to know more about the committee, but if they’re the only bid beside Tel Aviv, I’ll vote for them.
A Mexican WorldCon might be CanCon.
@Kat – that kind of proxy voting is not allowed. If I didn’t have any membership in Seattle, they could buy me a WSFS membership in Seattle, and a voting token, and vote that membership as “no preference.” Which would be a dumb thing to do in a contested bid. And if I have a membership already, if they buy me another one only my original one would be the only one with voting rights.
I’m really impressed that this team has managed to make me EVEN LESS confident in their ability to run a good Worldcon.
I’m excited that Montreal is making this bid for 2027. The tone of the whole page with the “vote your token for you” language is glib and peppy:
https://bid.montreal2027.ca/
I’m inclined to think that’s why the wording is misstating what is allowed. This is extremely early in the process. The bid is still walking on Bambi legs.
@Steve Green: There is a bar/cafe in the convention center. It’s on the lower level and facing the street. Excellent local beer.
rcade said:
And you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Implying that they will happily violate the constitution for you – when we’re just coming off of a voting scandal – seems to lack the attention to detail and public perception that a modern Worldcon needs.
I never thought I’d be saying “Yay, a North American Worldcon bid!” But Yay!
Indeed.
Tammy Coxen said:
I might be in the minority, but I prefer any shenanigans be out in the open. I’m not certain what the Montreal bid team is up to, but there’s lots of time to find out. This would be in stark contrast to Chengdu, where lots of us expressed concerns that were dismissed on various grounds (racism was my favorite), and it turns out to have been not only at least as bad as the imagined doom, but also accompanied by smugness and self-certainty, along with a lot of apologia and consequences that were not severe enough to match the stunning damage done to Worldcon/WSFS.
Compared to arbitrary decisions by the Hugo administrator, numbers that apparently came out of a Yahtzee game, deliberate obfuscation of the complete cockup the Chengdu committee had been a party to, and the continuing refusal to acknowledge just how comprehensively bad this all was? Yeah, Montreal can vote my site selection token, because it’s all now been rendered as meaningful as a bingo game.
I’m not sure there’s anywhere in Montreal, at least on island, that’s more than a block from a bar, pub, restaurant, or all three.
Mm….whilst I am Irish, these views are my own and, I emphasise, not necessarily those of any of the Dublin 2029 bid people. I’m now glad to see an alt bid for 2027 from Montreal (and voted on at confirmed, 2025/Seattle). Otherwise the proposed Ath Cliath (Dublin) bid for 2029 would have had to have been be made at the (then) only bid for that year: controversial 2027/Tel Aviv. IMO, we have had enough issues re 2023/Chengdu without another one coming along, a bit later..! (Tho this itself does raise the question re 2029: will Dublin, again as in 2017, be the only bid, this time ??)..best wishes…
I see the line about voting your token has been removed.
Glad to hear that.
The WSFS constitution has no reference to voting tokens. It says that only members who are natural persons may vote. I do not think that precludes a bid from offering supporters, “We will buy a membership for you in your name, and with your authorization, pay the voting fee and submit a ballot for you supporting us.” It would cause an uproar and backlash but would be within the rules, as long as the natural person has authorized them to perform these duties in the person’s name. In general practice, people have others buy things and fill out forms for them all the time, and unless this is specifically forbidden (as it is, say, for national elections) it’s allowed.
Worse, it’s not that expensive. Say there was a year with two strong bidders and you are able to look at membership totals and guess that one will get 400 votes and the other 600 votes. You could pay for 1,000 memberships this way as long as you have 1,000 natural persons willing to authorize it. If supportings are $50, this would cost you $100,000. However, once you won, you would receive $100,000 in voting fees for your new 2,000 supporting members, so it costs you nothing. The only time this wouldn’t work would be if somebody else were trying to also overwhelm the site selection with big numbers, and you could not exceed their total. Most conventions publish regular PRs with total memberships and supportings so you can make some guesses but last-minute memberships can make that very wrong. If you can corrupt one member of the site-selection committee at the current convention with a modest bribe, you could do much better. In the above example, if you learned that 600 is the number to beat, and you sent in 700, you would spend $70,000 and receive $85,000, leaving a good bribe budget. And then you have a Worldcon. (You also send $35K to $50K to the current worldcon in supportings, which won’t make them too upset, though they might be quite upset at having been the mechanism for this.)
I am in no way suggesting that this sort of thinking is present in Montreal, I shouldn’t have to say. Just pointing out a loophole in the rules.
The initial wording the result of a misunderstanding. There was a rush to get things running before the first appearance of the bid in public at Boskone, which created a hard deadline. The bid did ask me to review it (I have been asked to be on the bid committee and accepted), but I’d gone to bed and didn’t see the invitation until the next day; by then, it was too late.
We need to remember that the current WSFS membership/attending supplement terminology is still new and lots of people still don’t understand how it works or what it means. And while as Brad says above, and based on precedent in 2021, such a process might have been technically legal, it wasn’t the intent.
The idea was that Montreal would pay your Advance WSFS membership (voting fee) in the 2027 site selection, and also pledge to add the attending supplement should Montreal win. The person would still have to join the 2025 Worldcon in order to be eligible to cast that vote, and they would still need to actually cast their ballot.
Expect a slightly different but wordier description soon that adheres more closely to the current WSFS terminology.