As Montréal celebrates the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Olympics, the Games are being remembered as a defining moment in the city’s history. But Montréal ’76 was also shaped by major political struggles that Local 514 is spotlighting for a special two-part series.
One of the most significant was the African-led boycott of the Games, sparked by the International Olympic Committee’s refusal to sanction New Zealand after its rugby team toured apartheid South Africa. More than two dozen African countries ultimately withdrew from the Olympics in protest.
For this episode of Local 514, we speak with former Olympian, scholar and anti-apartheid activist Bruce Kidd about the political organizing surrounding Montréal ’76 and why this history deserves a more prominent place in how the Games are remembered.

Ensemble Montreal City Councillor Claude Pinard has announced a new plan to revitalize Montreal’s Chinatown, including the possible development of affordable housing on the vacant lot at Saint-Laurent and René-Lévesque. But what kind of affordable housing does the neighbourhood actually need?

Local 514 speaks with researcher and community organizer Wawa Li about Chinatown’s rooming houses, one of the city’s few remaining sources of deeply affordable, low-barrier housing. We discuss who depends on them, why they are disappearing, and how Montreal can improve living conditions without displacing tenants into homelessness.

As Montréal approaches the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Olympics, much of the city’s attention is turning back to the Games’ legacy, in a surprisingly positive light. Much of the conversation in the decades since has centred on the Games’ enormous cost, but the lead-up to Montréal ’76 also included an aggressive social campaign to “clean up” the city for an international audience.In the years before the Olympics, police intensified raids on gay bars, bathhouses and other queer spaces, part of a wider crackdown on communities seen as undesirable or embarrassing to the city’s image. These raids caused a critical shift in the queer community. People rallied together to resist the violence of police by mobilizing like they never had before.For this episode of Local 514, we speak with longtime activist and historian Ross Higgins about that history, the queer resistance it helped galvanize for decades that led to the shift in social opinion, and what Montréal leaves out when it remembers the Olympics of 1976.