“In 1977, Mayor Drapeau gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.”
—Mike Meyers, Canada

On 5 February 1976, the front page of Montréal-Matin featured the grisly story of three men, Yvon Duchesne, Guy Montreuil, and his brother Jean-Pierre, who were found criminally responsible for a double murder that took place at Le Dôme nightclub on Sherbrooke Street on 10 January.

The killings were framed as part of a larger violent crime spree that began plaguing Montreal in the mid-1970s and was often associated with the city’s nighttime culture. Montreal’s reputation was growing internationally as a disco-dancing destination, second only to New York City. But the city’s vibrant nightlife also implicated drugs and sexual deviance, antagonisms to a squeaky-clean civic image.

Two trans women employed in nightclubs as “female impersonators” were stabbed to death in a St. Leonard apartment on New Year’s Eve, swelling Montreal’s 1975 murder toll to a record 110. And Jean-Pierre Montreuil had apparently been canvassing Le Dôme’s clientele for rolling papers prior to shooting Ronald Turcol, the doorman, and a 28-year-old customer, Nelson Dodier, who had attempted to prevent him from leaving after Montreuil smoked a joint in the bathroom.

Also visible on Montréal-Matin’s front page is the iconic M-for-Montreal Olympic logo designed by the graphic artist Georges Huel, a personal friend of then-mayor Jean Drapeau. Doubtless, Drapeau begrudged the juxtaposition of gruesome headlines alongside the forthcoming Olympic Games that he viewed as part of his legacy to vault Montreal onto the podium of prestigious cosmopolitan cities. Increased policing of the city’s nightlife ensued with especially harsh suppression of Montreal’s queer and unhoused populations.

Still, subduing the underground is just one of the underlying currents of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat, an impressive exhibition that opened this week at the McCord Stewart Museum.

Superficially, the show marks the 50^th anniversary of Montreal hosting the Olympic Games. But the McCord Stewart’s assemblage of remarkable objects speaks less to nostalgia, metropolitan jingoism, or sport, and focusses more upon the aesthetic and political aspects of mounting the Olympics here — which is the far more interesting story. And neither does it pull any punches in its criticism of the hypocrisy, corruption, and cultural violence that swirled around the city at the time, and their reverberations today.

An extensive editorial cartoon collection from contemporaneous newspapers anchors Montreal 1976 and acts as an instructive historical throughline. While the topical humour is not immediately obvious to a generation that was not yet born in 1976, the sheer volume and acridity of satire that the Olympics produced is evidence of concurrent popular sentiment toward the Games.

The Oxford Olympics Study of 2016 found that Montreal’s was the highest cost overrun — at a staggering 720 percent — for any Olympic Games in modern history. “The Montreal Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby,” Drapeau told the CBC in 1973. But by 1974, a full two years before any medals would be awarded, The Montreal Gazette’s Aislin was parodying what the city already knew with a caricature of a pregnant Drapeau on the phone to the abortion rights activist Henry Morgentaler.

According to the Oxford study, the Games cost about $6.1 billion adjusted for 2016 inflation, an average of $1 million per athlete. It would take Montreal more than 30 years to pay off the debt incurred, lending the Olympic Stadium its “Big Owe” nickname and inspiring some questionable strategies to raise the funds.

Among them was the extension and increase in the late 1980s of a special tax on cigarettes, capitalizing on Montreal’s repute as North America’s ashtray. It is toxic irony that encouraging tobacco consumption mitigated the government’s fiscal hangover for the advancement of sport.

The McCord Stewart exhibition also highlights the sartorial and graphic elements that helped to identify the Olympics, featuring posters designed by Michael Snow, François Dallaire and Clermont Malenfant, and the famous marijuana button-emblazoned jean jacket conceived by Raymond Bellemare.

A display of costumes that the officials wore, as well as Radio-Canada’s loud outerwear, is a rich time capsule of kitschy mid-1970s trends and offers a yardstick against which to measure fashion’s cyclical inclinations. A blue t-shirt and white wide-legged rainbow-belted pant combination would not look out of place on today’s runway.

While visual art was lauded for branding the Games, another scandal that would come to be considered the worst occurrence of art censorship in Canadian history tarnished the Olympics. The Corridart dans la rue Sherbrooke, a public installation of 22 juried artworks stretching from Atwater to Pie IX, was organized by the artist-architect Melvin Charney and coordinated by André Ménard of the Arts and Culture program of the Comité organisateur des jeux olympiques. A grant for $386,000 from the Ministère des Affaires culturelles du Québec provided funding.

Corridart was conceived to showcase works from prominent local artists including Françoise Sullivan and Pierre Ayot, and an open call to all Quebec artists received more than 300 submissions. A vernissage at the UQAM gallery was held on 7 July 1976 to celebrate Corridart’s opening, and the installation was scheduled to be on display until the 31^st.

However, a number of the artworks were vandalized and several artists whose works were not included in the exhibition staged public protests against the granting process. Mayor Drapeau on 13 July ordered the exhibition to be dismantled and most of the pieces were damaged or destroyed.

Officially, Drapeau cited public safety. But many of the works contained veiled allegations against the government and alluded to outright corruption. Michael Haslam’s installation entitled The Teletron, for instance, consisted of a series of telephone booths that were programmed to play prerecorded messages — among them financial figures for how much the Games cost and speculation over where the money was actually going.

In the wake of the Corridart fracas, a dozen artists filed a civil lawsuit against the City of Montreal for $350,000. Litigation lasted more than a decade and resulted in a settlement in 1988 awarding each artist a paltry $3,000.

The McCord Stewart exhibition ultimately tells a story of the 1976 Summer Olympics in which sport is a supporting actor in the Games’ sociocultural cast. Selling Montreal on the world stage came at an astronomical cost and arguably benefited the political players of the day more than the athletes or the public who cheered them on. A cruel twist is that Canada was shut out of the Gold Medal category for the competition’s entirety, the only host country in the Olympic record to do so.

There are elements to Montreal 1976 that will appeal to sports-lovers and families, tourists and casual cultural observers. But the McCord Stewart collection is delightfully nuanced, paying tribute to our history by offering an unvarnished and still-under-construction Olympic vision that honours Montreal’s complex and contradictory character.

Commemorating a half-century of the city’s Olympic legacy should celebrate both the highs and lows, recounting the crackdowns on nightlife and the destruction of important works of art, the corruption and cronyism, alongside the glory of victory.◼︎

Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat runs through 7 September 2026 at McCord Stewart Museum, 690 Sherbrooke Street West.

_{Cover image: Gallery view of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat. Photographed for NicheMTL.}