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The following short article was written by Marcel Sévigny of La Pointe Libertaire, an anarchist collective based in the working class neighborhood of Pointe-St-Charles in Montreal’s southwest. Marcel has been a housing rights activist in the Montreal-area for four decades, including the period around the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Marcel spoke at a press conference at Montreal’s Olympics Stadium on January 31, 2008, along with Kanahus Pellkey and Dustin Johnson, two native warriors from “British Columbia�? who are active in opposing the upcoming 2010 Olympics in Vancouver/Whistler.

The Housing Scandal at the Montreal Olympics

If the Olympic Games are a party for athletes, they’re also a party for all kinds of developers who see the potential for generous financial handouts. The political and economic prestige of such events is more important than humanitarian considerations. Certain developers know this and profit to the maximum from the situation.

Clearly, the drama is provoked most among vulnerable populations, who survive difficult conditions throughout the year. That was the case in Montreal during the Olympics of 1976.

We’ve all heard about the financial scandal related to the Montreal Olympics, whose debt was finally paid in 2006. But other scandals took place. Many months before the games, the demand for housing for short-term tourists grew considerably. Almost all the landlords of hotels and rental buildings wanted to profit from the situation of “temporary shortage�? that was taking place during the summer of 1976.

In Montreal, July 1st is the traditional moving day. Just before the opening of the Olympics, many landlords refused to renew leases to families with the sole aim of renting housing to tourists who would pay 3, 4 or 5 times the regular price for a 2 month period. Moreover, in Montreal, we were at the end of a cycle where between 1960 to 1975, more than 30,000 residences, mainly in working class areas, were demolished to make way for mega urban projects (the Ville-Marie highway, the Radio-Canada complex, etc). It was under the government of the Mayor at the time, Jean Drapeau, that all of this happened.

The result : several hundred families found themselves on the street at the end of the month of June 1976. Happily, if you could put it that way, the end of the school year allowed a few hundred of the families to invade and occupy several schools while waiting for the “crisis to pass.�?

It was during one of these occupations at the Jean-Baptiste Meilleur school on Fullum street in the Centre-Sud neighborhood that a group of local activists – of which I was a part – supported the occupation (food, coverings, dishes to make collective meals, etc), and put pressure to denounce this unacceptable situation. We held a solidarity evening that brought together 600 people, and during the entire occupation we made life difficult for politicians who were trying to make political capital during this election year.

Large international events are always special opportunities for political and economic players to exploit to consolidate their power and their projects to the detriment of vulnerable populations. That was one of the lessons that I learned from the passage of the Montreal Olympics in Montreal in 1976.

- Marcel Sévigny (February 2008)

[Translated from the original french by JBS. Thanks to him.]

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