{"id":548749,"date":"2026-03-20T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T10:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/548749\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T10:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T10:00:11","slug":"drimonis-tour-guide-thom-seivewright-the-montreal-expert-introduces-locals-to-their-own-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/548749\/","title":{"rendered":"Drimonis: Tour guide Thom Seivewright, the Montreal Expert, introduces locals to their own city"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friends jokingly call me the Sud-Ouest Ambassador because I\u2019m a little obsessed with my neighbourhood, but I don\u2019t 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<\/a>, he routinely pops up on my feed with his one-minute \u201cquickie tour\u201d videos, often sharing little-known facts about a specific landmark or neighbourhood, and always ending with his signature \u201cVoil\u00e0!\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s underground. We locals often mock tourists\u2019 fascination with the \u201cunderground city,\u201d but it turns out there\u2019s more down there than meets the eye. Thom showed us fascinating historical, architectural and urban-planning elements I\u2019ve probably walked by (or under) for years, never noticing.<\/p>\n

After the tour, and over bowls of steaming pho soup in Chinatown, we chatted about our mutual love for this city.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen people ask me if I\u2019m a francophone or an anglophone, I never know what to say,\u201d he chuckles. \u201cI\u2019m both.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says he felt treated like the anglo while attending French school, and the franco in English school. \u201cI always felt like, \u2018I\u2019m not one of you, but also, I am?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

With half of his family speaking French and the other half speaking English, Thom did what many Montrealers can relate to. With his family\u2019s francophone side, he\u2019d champion \u201cthe anglophone cause.\u201d With the English speakers, he\u2019d champion \u201cthe francophone cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working in the film and hotel industries, Thom knew he\u2019d eventually become a tour guide<\/a>. \u201cI always thought I\u2019d do it when I was 65, as a retirement project,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was no longer the same person,\u201d he says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t fathom working indoors anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

He promptly took a one-year course offered by the Institut de tourisme et d\u2019h\u00f4tellerie du Qu\u00e9bec to obtain his permit and started working as a freelance guide, curating his own tours.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like to cater to people\u2019s unique interests,\u201d he says. This has led to something that\u2019s almost unheard of in the tour-guide industry: a robust local client\u00e8le.<\/p>\n

\u201cHalf the people who book my tours are from Montreal,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople who want to know very specific things. It\u2019s allowed me to get to know the city even better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Together now for 26 years with his husband and married for 19, Thom developed a tour on Montreal\u2019s queer history \u2014 a three-hour journey through the city\u2019s LGBTQ+ past, exploring pivotal moments that shaped that history from the 1960s to the 1990s. It\u2019s the tour he enjoys the most.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat one is so powerful,\u201d he says. \u201cEven though I know the stories, I can\u2019t help but be overcome with emotion almost every time I give it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thom admits to completely \u201cnerding out\u201d on Montreal trivia and loves sharing it with others. A self-professed \u201cpeople person,\u201d being isolated from human contact was, for him, the hardest thing about the pandemic.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worried Montreal could collapse during COVID,\u201d he says, \u201cbut it didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s ultimately the city\u2019s resiliency Thom loves the most.<\/p>\n

\u201cMontreal has been kicked and beaten up by politics, by weather, by our geographical position,\u201d he says. \u201cMontreal has been burned to the ground<\/a> a few times, literally and figuratively. This city is a resilient motherf\u2014er. You can knock us down, we\u2019ll suffer, but we\u2019re going to get right back up on our feet.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 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\u2019s so special deserve a little love, too.<\/p>\n

Voil\u00e0!<\/p>\n

Toula Drimonis is a Montreal journalist and the author of We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada.<\/p>\n

toulastake@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n

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