Canada's Only Watchmaking School Turned 80 Years Old

On the third floor of an elementary school in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, halfway between Montreal and Quebec City, sits the only watchmaking school in all of Canada. The École nationale d'horlogerie was founded 80 years ago after the Second World War, established specifically to help returning veterans learn a precise and patient craft that would help them reintegrate into civilian life after what many of them had endured. Today it is still there, still taking students, still surrounded by grandfather clocks and cuckoo clocks and hundreds of tiny bottles of even tinier components, and still operating with just two full-time teachers and a student population of around 30. It is quiet in a way that takes visitors by surprise, given what is on every wall, and its graduates go to work for Rolex, TAG Heuer, and Birks, among others. The school has a waiting list. In a world where most consumer goods are designed to be replaced rather than repaired, there are more people who want to learn how to fix the unfixable than the school currently has room for.

The students who find their way to Trois-Rivières tend to arrive from unexpected directions. Emma Boudet is 23, originally from France, and left a job in a food industry laboratory to study watchmaking, planning eventually to work at a high-end retailer in Montreal. Louis-Philippe Grondin works with the windows closed and holds his breath during the most delicate procedures, because some of the components he handles are paper thin and a single breath of air is too much, and he wears an 87-year-old watch on his wrist because he finds it more meaningful to maintain something than to replace it. Their teacher, Benoit Mercier, says the school will eventually need to move to a new location but does not entirely know how the hundreds of thousands of minuscule, meticulously organized components are going to make that journey with him. The school's appeal in 2026 is not hard to understand: in an era when most objects are designed to become obsolete, a community of people learning to keep things running forever is not a relic of a lost craft but an answer to something the present keeps asking.

Source:https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/canada-s-only-watchmaking-school-9.7254211