Tenant Activism and the Demise of Urban Renewal: Tenants,Governance,and the Struggle for Recognition at Habitations Jeanne-Mance in Montreal

The Founding of Comité des locataires de Habitations Jeanne-Mance

The first public record of a tenants’ movement within HJM began with a five-sentence paragraph in the Journal de Montreal on January 22, 1966. ²⁰ Declaring the formation of the Comité des locataires de Habitations Jeanne-Mance (Comité), tenants announced the election of Gérard Dufort as their president. Occurring without much public awareness, this indifference changed on February 3, 1966. Publishing a press release outlining tenant conditions, the Comité sent the communiqué to every media outlet in Montreal. The statement also landed on the desk of Lucien Saulnier, the President of the Executive Committee of Montreal and the second most powerful politician in the city behind the mayor, Jean Drapeau.

The press release was in response to a local television report on January 10, 1966, regarding HJM and Paul Dozois, the project’s original backer and provincial politician for the neighborhood. Highlighting thirty-two punitive clauses in the rental contract, the Comité outlined the injustices of the rent scale, CHJM hiring practices, and the surveillance of tenants by maintenance workers. Publicly airing examples of systemic corruption by Léopold Rogers, the administrator, the Comité revealed how daily life resembled a feudal manor. ²¹ For under Rogers, sudden evictions with a five-day notice for alleged political activities or behavioral infractions were routinely common. Legally enforced through the federally mandated rental contract, Rogers was one of the many administrators within North America in the 1960s who would later claim to be merely following the rules. ²²

Rogers, of course, took notice of the press release. A close friend of Saulnier, he attached a short letter of defiance to the statement on Saulnier’s desk. Referring to Napoléan Saint-André, the tenant organizer and writer of the manifesto, as a “social and political parasite” and “[the] most undesirable case that we have had to endure in the last 6 years,” Rogers informed Saulnier that his lease had been “terminated.” ²³ For Rogers, evicting Saint-André was not controversial. Trained as civil servant within the Quebec Labour department, he became a social reformer after his appointment to be the first HJM administrator in 1959. As an atypical example of Canadian public housing management during urban renewal, where 64 percent of administrators had either a civil service or real estate background, Rogers’s paternalism similarly mirrored the general consensus among reformers in North America regarding low-income people. ²⁴

For Canadian reformers, this consensus rested on a conviction to eliminate the “slum-dweller” within Canadian cities. Internalized as a threat to public order, from 1900 to the 1960s reformers framed public housing within a position that saw the slum-dweller as being un-Canadian or incapable of achieving middle-class norms. ²⁵ From this point of view, housing the urban poor was in large measure a campaign to end the Victorian-era pathology. Originally two separate political causes, these ideas on public housing merged with the 1954 NHA. Officially tying public housing to municipal slum clearance, Canadian housing policy had finally, in the reformers’ view, mirrored their North American networks as a tool to sanitize urban space and manage the poor. ²⁶

How to manage tenants of the Dozois Plan, the original project name for HJM, was outlined in CMHC Housing Handbook of 1959 and within the Families Allowance Act of 1944. Within these two rubrics, complete discretion was given to the CHJM in defining the federal guidelines. Given unchecked extralegal powers, the CHJM upheld the rental contract and its federal rent scale—which was geared to the total gross family income of each household—through surveillance and evictions. The scale, originally devised by Humphrey Carver and Elizabeth Hopwood for Regent Park in 1948, was enforced through household searches. Demanding tenants forfeit tax returns “at least” once a year to determine whether their income exceeded the maximum allowed, the CMHC contract normalized surveillance within public housing projects in Canada. ²⁷

Predictably, this newfound power also extended beyond rent. Enforcing punitive social codes with a 9 pm curfew, Rogers routinely admonished social habits such as public drinking and sunbathing. But his surveillance also extended beyond HJM. Developing a surveillance network, Rogers allegedly bribed Gérard Lalonde, the head priest at Saint Jacques Catholic Church—where the majority Catholic population went to worship—to disclose their weekly confessions. Later justifying these practices within the discourse of eliminating the slum-dweller, Rogers’s public image was carefully crafted to demonstrate how HJM was improving the lives of the poor. Criticizing tenants in the press or internally with newsletters, absent within this coverage was how Rogers upheld these views through evictions. While frequently evicting tenants over rent, one of the more egregious cases was the eviction of a resident for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. ²⁸

Yet without the Comité press release in 1966, Rogers’s practices would have never been aired. In confronting federal statutes by expressing a demand for rights, the Comité’s declaration was their first collective act against the slum-dweller discourse, policies of urban renewal, and power within Montreal. And unfortunately for Rogers, this newfound power was forcibly shown during Expo ’67, the World’s Fair.

Crashing the Party: The Widowers’ Eviction Crisis of 1967

For many residents of Montreal, Expo ’67 was the highlight of their lives. Held to celebrate Canada’s centennial, Expo was the largest attended World’s Fair on record. But the event also marked a new era in Montreal planning. Starting with Expo and ending with the financially disastrous Summer Olympics of 1976, Jean Drapeau promoted international events as a catalyst for massive infrastructure spending in remaking the city. Promoting urban renewal to address postwar economic restructuring, between 1948 and 1969, the city of Montreal received 30.62 million of the 226 million dollars allocated by Ottawa, the most of any city in Canada. ²⁹ Politically a nationalist and conservative populist, Drapeau justified these plans by connecting with the changing Quebec society. Starting in 1960s, when the majority French Canadian population embraced a more interventionist, secular, and nationalist state over the long-held authoritarian dominance of the Catholic Church, Drapeau championed urban renewal to promote a French-speaking city and a rising francophone petite bourgeoisie. ³⁰

Yet the way Drapeau governed Montreal during this so-called “Quiet Revolution” was not much different than the authoritarianism Quebecers were seeking to shed. Rarely granting interviews, holding council sessions, and governing without an opposition between 1960 and 1974, Drapeau effectively ruled the city as his personal kingdom. Governing within the “constitutional monarchy” structure of Montreal—where mayors, since the province took control of the city in the 1920s, cede day-to-day powers to the President of the Executive Committee—Drapeau overrode this structure through personal loyalty and domination. Controlling what Civic Party councilors said in public, the party solely consisted of business leaders who paid Drapeau to join. ³¹ Dominated by local elites, for the majority of Montreal residents, Drapeau’s politics of the spectacle viscerally contrasted with their daily reality.

With Drapeau indifferent to issues of everyday life, citywide housing politics splintered during Expo from HJM tenant activism. Facing a temporary housing shortage for tourists and displaced residents during the construction of the Little Burgundy housing project in the southwest of Montreal, the CHJM threatened to evict thirty widowers over violating tenure guidelines. As social reformers soon realized, the eviction threat fundamentally altered local housing politics. Becoming a catastrophic crisis for the CHJM, for tenants, the moment led to unheralded media and political power. Securing a lasting link with the Montreal Left, the fallout saw the end of the gendered rental tenure definition by 1970, Léopold Rogers as administrator, and the start of a new era in Montreal housing politics.

As the Comité stated in 1966, the rental contract simply defined HJM as a project. Issues concerning tenancy, therefore, were rather paramount. In the 1960s, what defined tenancy was the definition of a family clause in the contract. Defining what type of “family” the tenant selection committee could select, tenancy decisions conformed to the heteronormative “natural” family outlined within the Families Allowance Act of 1944. ³² As stated in the contract, a “natural family” consisted of a male breadwinner with “one or more” individuals by “blood, marriage or adoption” living together. Households comprised of “a group of unrelated persons living together, [or] residents [and] people living alone” could not qualify. ³³ Furthermore, the death of a partner immediately caused an eviction, as it fell under “people living alone.” ³⁴

Beyond the internal tenant demands to stop evictions, the widowers’ crisis also confronted the changing HJM demographics and the shifting Montreal politics on urban renewal. Increasingly comprised of pensioners or families on social assistance, the anti-eviction campaign was organized by the Mouvement pour Justice Sociale (MJS). Founded by Dufort, HJM tenant Jules Boudreault, ex-CHJM employee Roger Goulet, and Jean Grenier, a social worker, the MJS was the first community-based political group within HJM. Formed in a partnership with Grenier, who was employed by the Projet de réaménagement social et urban (PRSU), the MJS was the first tenant alliance with the Montreal Left. As the first social activist to organize with tenants, Grenier had only become aware of HJM through the Comité statement in 1966. Later becoming a prominent anti-capitalist through his activities with tenants, Grenier was a ground-level activist connected to the Catholic and Protestant social agencies within Montreal. Seeking to address the shortcomings of the Quiet Revolution, these agencies began efforts to “socially animate” low-income residents left out from policies enacted by the Quebec government of Jean Lesage from 1961 to 1965. ³⁵ Focused on organizing by language—which was understood ethnically and racially—within a principle of participatory democracy, their efforts gave public legitimacy to the concerns of low-income people. ³⁶

Interest into HJM affairs also extended to the media. As the only project in Montreal, the widowers’ crisis reframed the debate on public housing. On August 7, 1967, these increasingly negative criticisms reached a crescendo after an MJS letter on the evictions was published in Le Devoir. The CHJM, in response to the allegations, went into crisis management. “We have never ousted one person unless there were occurrences of scandal or harmful behaviour,” said Rogers in clarifying HJM tenure policies. Explaining how the clause defined tenure and how evictions enforced the contract, Rogers concluded, “we have never forced the hands of single [people] to leave their homes . . . [and] we have never put anyone in the street.” ³⁷

The media attention for Rogers, which never directly questioned his governing practices, was simply too much. Accustomed to his benevolent reformer image, the crisis was the first Montreal collapse of the urban renewal façade. ³⁸ With internal policies being discussed in every city newspaper, HJM began to justify any position anyone had on public housing. Rogers, however, kept pleading his innocence. Cracking under pressure, he placed the blame on the Comité and the project of urban renewal. “This is not funny,” he said, “of being placed in a situation where I have to decide whether [a tenant] is going to die or will live.” ³⁹ Contending only he was capable of leading tenants out of a condition “created by a previous social humanity,” Rogers blamed activists like Dufort and Grenier. Through their activism, the Comité and the MJS had “stirred up unnecessary changes” and “deprived [tenants] of the only support on which these elderly people can count on, the spirit of stability and security.” ⁴⁰

Clearly aware of the ensuing media fallout, the social agencies that backed HJM were losing their patience. Not only incensed with HJM internal policies, executive directors were beginning to worry about how the eviction crisis threatened the project of urban renewal. Noting the “recent newspaper publicity, regarding the concerns expressed by the residents,” wrote Patricia Morrison, the executive director of The University Settlement of Montreal to Saulnier on September 29, 1967. “Over the past several years it would appear to us that the cause of complaints arises from policies and regulations which do not recognize the residents as having the ordinary rights of tenants,” said Morrison. Taken together, the regulations did not “allow for the fact that the Housing Project [as written] was designed for people with a low income.” ⁴¹

Pressured internally and publicly, Rogers capitulated. Resigning in September 1967 to take an executive position with Société d’Habitation du Québec (SHQ), the provincial housing authority, Rogers was tasked with overseeing the commission on implementing a universal Quebec rent scale for Little Burgundy, the first housing project for the SHQ. ⁴² Upon resigning, Rogers appointed Daniel Marsan as the next administrator. At the age of twenty-one years, Marsan had spent the previous eight years as the official accountant for HJM. ⁴³ Before leaving, Rogers also fired Georges Jasmin, a social worker on the tenant selection committee. Kept on the payroll for “charity purposes,” Jasmin fought against Rogers’s era tenant regulations. ⁴⁴ The vindictive firing of Jasmin—who died a pauper a few months later from an illness—would be Rogers’s worst administrative decision. Housing politics in Montreal would also never be the same.

The Politics of Organizing Against the “Prison of the Poor”

With the firing of Jasmin, Gérard Dufort sensed an opportunity. Calling for a press conference in his living room on September 26, 1967, the event saw a journalist from every city newspaper cover the proceedings. Detailing the extent of criminality within HJM, Dufort used the spotlight to focus on the surveillance of tenants by maintenance workers. Those workers, Dufort believed, were “kind of [a] secret police.” With twenty-five tenants present, Dufort also reframed HJM as a prison, an experience he knew quite well. “We are not free here,” he said. “It’s a prison of the poor.” ⁴⁵ Having spent one year in Montreal’s Bordeaux Prison for a burglary conviction as a teenager in 1946—and also having a son in prison—the invocation was personal. The absence of tenant rights within HJM was to reexperience his prison life. ⁴⁶

In detailing their living conditions to the media, the press conference reinforced the power tenants had in reshaping Montreal housing politics. Now focused on its internal affairs and design, the increased media scrutiny led to viewing HJM as a “failed” project in both conception and practice from across the political spectrum. Whether referring to HJM as a “concentration camp,” ⁴⁷ or reappropriating Dufort’s prison invocation to modernist planning, for the Montreal New Left, these anti-HJM positions became reliable currency in framing its internationally famous anti-urban renewal politics. Mirroring the anti-renewal positions seen in Europe and North America, largely ignored in the histories on the collapse of urban renewal is how tenants, when allowed to collectively speak, countered the increasingly entrenched New Left perspectives on design.

For Montreal, the divergence began in Dufort’s living room. In focusing on rights, the Comité unleashed a unique schism between the top-down planners who placed more emphasis on the design of buildings and tenant activists who emphasized social rights. For design-focused planners, as most prominently framed by Montreal-born architect Oscar Newman, their non-tenant and increasingly middle-class voices led to locally framing public housing within anti-HJM imaginary in the following decades. ⁴⁸ But for tenant and labor activists, the Comité charted a new political line that emerged within the Front d’action Politique (FRAP) for the municipal election of 1970 and the Montreal Citizens’ Movement (MCM) in 1974. Centering housing demands with rights, the Comité effectively developed an alternative perspective to housing that countered the New Left-conservative consensus on the pathologies of public housing design. ⁴⁹

How tenants built this alternative was through class politics. Rejecting the territorialized “ghetto” discourse of the New Left, the Comité framed their politics to governance. Politically reimagining the tower block as a neighborhood “organizational base,” as shown by tenants in the United States, the Comité organized for the creation of a community clinic and children recreational spaces. ⁵⁰ Predictably, these efforts to secure rights in a district where 16,000 residents lacked hot water, 4,500 residents did not have access to a shower or bath, and where the tuberculosis mortality rate was ten times higher than the city average were causing those in power to panic. ⁵¹ As J.W. Frei, the executive director of the Montreal Council of Social Agencies (MCSA), wrote in a scathing letter to Saulnier on October 3, 1967, the elite panic was becoming widespread. Identifying as a “representative of one of the groups responsible for the creation” of HJM, Frei lambasted HJM internal practices and its rent clauses as “manifestly unfair.” ⁵²

Frei, of course, had a reason to worry. While privately denouncing HJM practices, both the MCSA and the Comité were entangled in a larger project that sought to correct the policy failures of the Quiet Revolution and sustain urban renewal. As shown through Grenier, HJM tenants were connected to the “social renovation” efforts of the late 1960s. Initiated in 1965 by the Conseil des Ouvres, the Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN), and MCSA, this elite-driven project, directed from above by executives like Frei, saw a divergence on its purpose emerge at the neighborhood level. ⁵³ With executives viewing social animation as a vehicle to advance technocratic policies, the social workers employed by the agencies saw organizing residents into citizen committees as the beginning of a more bottom-up and democratic future. While these positions were clearly untenable, the era of social animation politically changed Montreal. Focused on social rights, residents who formed committees later became life-long activists. Embracing the increasingly anti-capitalist politics within Montreal, these individuals built community structures that continue to outline labor, social, and housing organizing within the city. ⁵⁴

How the citizens broke with the MCSA partly originates from within HJM. Founding the Comité de Citoyens de Saint-Jacques (CCSJ) in 1968, the committee, formed by HJM tenants, ideologically shifted in 1969. Renaming itself the Comité d’Action Politique de Saint-Jacques, the new group sought to challenge power in the city on a platform to unite every citizen committee. This aim was achieved with the founding of the Front d’action Politique (FRAP), a tenuous municipal workers’ party with the CSN for the 1970 municipal election. Considered the lodestar for the Montreal Left, FRAP was centered on uniting francophone and anglophone workers within an anti-capitalist movement. Imploding due to the October Crisis, which saw the election held under Canadian military occupation with FRAP candidates imprisoned under the War Measures Act, the anti-capitalist and labour-citizen committee orientation of FRAP has never been politically repeated. ⁵⁵

With the contours of FRAP flowing through HJM, their activist legacy reiterates how tenants were not focused on design or politically isolated. Of course, not every tenant liked HJM, but these reasons were rarely about modernist planning. Indeed, if the stigma of design was ever invoked, the view originated from social workers. “Everyone knows it’s public housing, it’s not integrated into the community, it’s a ghetto and everyone knows it,” said Peter Katadotis, the lead organizer and co-founder of the CCSJ. Understanding the democratic deficit of HJM through design, Katadotis echoed the New Left-Drapeau consensus. Tenants, however, had a different perspective. “It’s the guys who are just one rung up,” said a tenant in criticizing the CHJM. “They’re the ones who enjoy telling us we’re no good anyway and should be grateful for what we’ve got.” ⁵⁶

In developing class-consciousness, the escalating power shown by tenants began to alter how governance politically viewed the project. This perception was especially realized after the MJS proclaimed itself as a movement in a letter to Saulnier on September 28, 1967. Alleging CHJM criminality, Saulnier ordered a police investigation. Not focused on finding evidence, the report sent to Saulnier merely profiled tenant leaders and social workers. Ignoring tenant claims of having criminal evidence against the CHJM, the investigator reiterated how tenants sought a democratic voice within HJM. For the officer, the solution to HJM only required “a sociologist.” ⁵⁷

If evidence had indeed been aired, it is doubtful charges would have been brought on the CHJM, an entire city department. Instead, the investigation signified that Saulnier, who with Drapeau used the police to spy on political rivals, was surveilling HJM. ⁵⁸ Being labeled a threat to power was not lost on the Comité. As the eviction crisis showed, democratizing HJM could never arrive from press coverage. In demanding recognition, tenants realized that material gains were never achieved with public pleas. Realizing this, the Comité decided to confront their landlord, city hall.

“We Demand to Be Heard”: Fighting for Political Recognition at City Hall

On December 7, 1967, the Comité visited their landlord. Protesting their lack of rights, twenty-five tenants and social activists unfurled a banner with the phrase “We Demand to Be Heard” from the rafters during the city council session. ⁵⁹ Shouting down politicians on the floor, tenants halted proceedings for over two hours. It was a calamitous scene.

Why the Comité disrupted the session was to protest the reappointment of the HJM board of directors and its lack of tenant representation. Their landlords, however, had other ideas. As Drapeau shouted at police officers to confiscate the banner and subdue the crowd, Saulnier, for his first and only time, turned to the tenants in the chamber’s balcony. Addressing Comité members, he described tenant representation as an affront to democracy and blackmail. “While I am also sensitive to the agitation because I am an elected representative of the people,” said Saulnier, “I do not sing.” ⁶⁰ For Saulnier, recognizing tenants would be a call to induce mass anarchy.

Saulnier’s anti-democratic response was a rather common Canadian elite refrain in the 1960s. Locally confronted by municipal New Left movements centered on participatory democracy, tying efforts to democratize society to anarchy was standard practice. ⁶¹ When these efforts intersected with tenant rights, however, it was Saulnier who defined the view of Canadian elites. A reader of Lewis Mumford, Saulnier was not a democrat. Privately known as the “Black Pope” and an “authoritarian liberal” within city hall, he was famously denounced as “the recognized dictator of Montreal” by the police union during a police strike in 1968. ⁶² Authoritarian in practice, his dictatorial stance similarly applied to tenant rights. Coldly reflecting on tenant representation in 1970, Saulnier was alleged to have said “never, but never, will we give up our power” when privately addressed on the issue within a national context. ⁶³

How Saulnier arrived at this conviction was due to the rise of the Montreal Left. While no variant of the Left was organized at the municipal level until FRAP in 1970, the action nonetheless forced the Civic Party to publicly address HJM conditions. As a result, the tenants were momentarily a unified opposition to Drapeau. While this aspect was not lost in the media coverage, there was nothing particularly unique about the direct action within the context of Montreal in the 1960s—where workers, students, and other groups protested, marched, or went on strike. What made the Comité protest unique primarily rested with who was articulating the demands—in this case, low-income public housing tenants. Unfortunately for the Comité, their demands only led to staged political theater.

The theatrics began with Hyman Brock, a local industrialist and Civic Party councilor. A resolute conservative, Brock addressed tenant criticisms by proposing that the number of years an individual sat on the board should not be the sole criteria for reappointment. Speaking after Brock, Jacques Brisebois revealed a slight moment of dissension. A centrist outlier within the Civic Party, he reframed participatory democracy as public accountability overseen by elected officials. Acknowledging how the city was the landlord, Brisebois suggested that only city councilors should sit on the board. He also believed the city should investigate the Comité’s claims regarding HJM.

Roland Bourret thought Brisebois was getting ahead of himself. Returning to the specter of participatory democracy as anarchy, the Civic Party counselor echoed the familiar refrain. “[If] we created a precedent this evening, [it] can become dangerous,” said Bourret. “If all citizens covered in each of the articles adopted at the council were to manifest, it would be an impossible situation.” ⁶⁴ Expressed through Bourret, the Civic Party, which controlled nearly every seat on council, understood efforts to democratize Montreal within Cold War, anti-communist, and anti-youth politics. Immediately speaking after Bourret, Saulnier reaffirmed this view. Publicly acknowledging the previously unknown MJS report, he foreclosed any discussion on reform. “In the circumstances and the result of [the MJS] investigation,” said Saulnier, “my word is as good as these guys and I have no hesitation in recommending the appointment of [the] directors to another term.” Effectively squashing the Comité and their hopes for recognition, the board was reappointed to another two-year term. ⁶⁵

For the Comité, the night clearly did not proceed as planned. Believing their action would produce a new era in tenant–landlord relations, Dufort telegrammed Saulnier before the session seeking a delay and a meeting. “The committee believes that the renewal of this mandate will perpetuate a situation of intolerable injustice,” wrote Dufort. “We ask that these appointments be delayed to allow time for members to meet you.” ⁶⁶ The proposed meeting never occurred. Resigning to become the President of the Montreal Urban Community in 1970, the regional body of the Island of Montreal, Saulnier officially never met the Comité. Lionized as Montreal’s greatest “champion” for public housing, his views on HJM were absent within his resignation coverage. ⁶⁷

In contrast, Lucien Saulnier had a long-standing public record of loathing HJM, public housing, and tenant rights. Failing to halt construction in 1958, Saulnier believed HJM symbolized anglophone aggression against the francophone east end. Advocating instead for rent subsidies to “lure” residents from blighted areas, his hatred exploded in 1962. Referring to HJM as an “out of date” idea, he believed “the original concept of fighting slums by erecting public or city-owned low-rental developments [did] not conform with the requirements of human beings.” ⁶⁸ But it is on tenant rights where he was completely disingenuous. Framing his anti-tenant positions to public accountability, Saulnier did not officially live in Montreal, but was a resident of a west Island suburb. ⁶⁹

In the end, Saulnier was only accountable to the city’s landlords, SHQ, and CMHC. As tenants were reminded after their protest, tenant associations in Montreal were illegal in the 1960s due to an unwritten rental contract clause. If Saulnier had recognized the Comité, other tenants in Montreal—where 80.2 percent of residents were renters by 1971—would demand the same recognition. ⁷⁰ Furthermore, recognition also meant acknowledging public housing tenants in Montreal, Quebec, or Canada. The Comité, therefore, had to be crushed. “[Those] who had anything to do with the tenants association,” wrote Sheila Arnopoulous in The Montreal Star in 1969, “which went to City Hall in 1967 to make grievances known—were violated.” ⁷¹ Forced to disassociate or be evicted, for some tenants, these threats materialized into violence—as one tenant had their car torched by an unknown assailant. But the crackdown went further. Effectively outlawing social groups—even those run by charities—meetings had to now be preapproved with the minutes submitted directly to Marsan. ⁷² Forcibly ending activism within HJM, tenants looked to the neighborhood.

Scaffolding Socialists: Organizing Beyond the Tower Block

Predictably, the crackdown went beyond HJM. Mirroring the surveillance tactics of Rogers, curtailment was aimed at leaders like Dufort, who were increasingly identified with the Montreal Left. Orchestrating a backlash to his leadership at the CCSJ, the Saint Jacques Catholic Church, where the committee held its meetings, tried to disrupt Dufort’s clinic campaign in the spring of 1968. Denounced during a sermon by Gérard Lalonde, the priest who spied on tenants for Rogers, Dufort had had enough. ⁷³ Standing up from the pews, he chastised Lalonde for not connecting with the liberation theology focused Catholic Left. ⁷⁴ It was Lalonde, he believed, who was out of step with the parishioners.

In 1968, Dufort’s liberation views were a reflection of the Catholic Left. Publicly supporting Montreal Left movements that embraced Fanon, Black Power, and “Third World” national liberation struggles, liberation theology also shaped its housing politics. Starting with the Second Front in 1968, a report by CSN leader Marcel Pepin, the union sought to expand tenant rights and build social and cooperative housing for the “liberation” of the Quebec working class. Working with the Catholic Left, the CSN organized neighborhood teach-ins for tenant rights in Montreal. ⁷⁵ These efforts contrasted with Gérard Lalonde, a Vatican II reformer, urban renewal, and social animation proponent. ⁷⁶ And as a result, Lalonde publicly and privately redbaited Dufort.

Being redbaited was effectively the final straw for the tenant leader. Resigning as president of the CCSJ after the fight with Lalonde, Dufort denied he was a revolutionary or a communist by invoking his association with the Knights of Columbus, the world’s largest Catholic fraternal order. Publishing his resignation letter in L’est Central, the neighborhood newspaper, he reiterated his dream of the clinic. “One day,” said Dufort, “we will have our clinic of ours.” ⁷⁷ Established shortly after he resigned, Dufort has never received the historical credit for the clinic. Fellow MSJ member, Jean Boudreault, the second president of the CCSJ, is still erroneously credited as its founder. ⁷⁸

Yet in resigning, Dufort left quite a mark on advancing Canadian social rights. As one of the first clinics in Montreal, the Saint Jacques clinic was nationally famous. Eventually absorbed into the technocratic Centres Locaux de Services Communautaries provincial network in 1972, the CCSJ, internally led by MJS leaders, was documented in National Film Board documentaries by Bonnie Sherr Klein. In these Challenge for Change documentaries, residents are shown organizing in Opération Boule de Neige and VTR St-Jacques in 1969, which focused on forming the CCSJ, and in La Clinque des Citoyens in 1970, which focused on the clinic. Dufort’s resignation also shifted the politics within Saint Jacques. Becoming firmly under Grenier’s control in May 1969, the CCSJ published an anti-capitalist manifesto. “The Citizens Committee Saint-Jacques,” read the statement, “has set a goal to participate in the awakening of the conscience of Quebecers and to engage resolutely in revolutionary political action.” ⁷⁹

In the 1960s, these demands within the Canadian New Left were unique. As the first citizens’ committee to reframe its politics to the state, the shift from reformism to anti-capitalist politics was nationally uncommon. ⁸⁰ Instead, Canadian New Left organizers typically sought to organize low-income people into the orbit of the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP). ⁸¹ In Montreal, however, where the NDP did not have a political base, the factions within the Left that shifted to anti-capitalist organizing largely did so from the demands of low-income people in 1969. ⁸²

With the CCSJ at the forefront of this shift, the response by Saulnier and the police was immediate. Raiding the clinic “for documents” on July 2, 1969, as the clinic administered measles shots, the local police precinct coordinated a “harassment operation” centered on street checks, carding, and arresting CCSJ members and residents without cause. ⁸³ Targeted for “political reasons,” the CCSJ developed a neighborhood anti-police brutality education campaign. ⁸⁴ Focused on informing residents of their rights, the effect of the police altered the history of the clinic. Becoming a “people’s cooperative” and relocating to the adjacent Plateau-Mont Royal neighborhood in 1970, the CCSJ became a center for Marxist-Leninist organizing until 1980. Yet the clinic’s evolution reveals how the Montreal Left was shaped by the demands and desires of low-income people. ⁸⁵ Unlike elsewhere in Canada, social workers or students were clearly not the sole instigators for organizing low-income people in the 1960s. ⁸⁶ Indeed, without the founding of the Comité in 1966, or Dufort’s campaign against the city for the community clinic, the activism that followed would have never materialized.

In being displaced to the Plateau, the clinic no longer became associated with its tenant founders. Focused on revolutionary politics, activists like Grenier, who allegedly sought FRAP to publicly support the Front de Libération du Québec during the October Crisis, were also not the only group to lose interest in HJM. ⁸⁷ After the city hall protest, tenants only spoke anonymously to the press, if interviewed at all. According to Logos, an anarchist newspaper, this was due to a citywide HJM blackout in 1968. ⁸⁸ Suppressed and disbanded, the Comité nonetheless achieved its aims after Ottawa finally noticed the national trend in the summer of 1968.

Lines in the Snow: Defining the Politics of Recognition and Tenant Rights

If calls for rights were shifting in the halls of power, the Trudeau government solidified these perceptions on July 17, 1968. Initiating the Hellyer Task Force to study urban renewal, Robert Hellyer, the federal transportation minister, spent the last months of 1968 touring Canadian public housing projects. Meeting with local business executives, developers, and city officials—but rarely tenants—Hellyer visited HJM on October 21, 1968. Meeting fifteen tenants in a strictly controlled event, the low turnout was not unexpected. Privately vetting attendees, Marsan had failed to publicize the event, and the majority of tenants were unaware of the visit. ⁸⁹

Published on January 22, 1969, the Hellyer Report officially marked the end of urban renewal in Canada. Solidifying elites’ long-held hostility to public housing in contending Canadians had a “philosophy of ownership,” ⁹⁰ housing conditions were not entirely blamed on design, but on the structures that ran them. Acknowledging that tenants deserved representation, Hellyer thought the opposite had occurred in practice. Instead, urban renewal was shown to be a “successful example of neither public dialogue nor participatory democracy.” ⁹¹ Refusing to define specifics, Ottawa’s opaqueness on rights had been foretold. On October 20, 1968, the CMHC Advisory Board organized the first national housing conference in Canadian history. Scandalously calling the event “The Right to Housing,” tenant issues were supposedly a major focus. Organized by Carver and Toronto activist Harold Clark, the conference also invited tenants. ⁹² Allowed to speak, tenants present lambasted officials for suggesting elites took housing rights seriously. As John Wheeler wrote during the proceeding, “the right to housing, it was pointed out, was meaningless unless there was an adequate supply of housing in the first place and the conditions for governing were clearly enshrined in law.” ⁹³

Enshrining tenant rights, however, was a step too far for the Trudeau government. As the following decade showed, Ottawa’s refusal to override anti-tenant provincial officials led to rights or representation to be largely determined by activism from within individual projects or through associations at the provincial level. ⁹⁴ As a result, defining tenant rights varied across Canada and similarly reflected the local viewpoints of the 1960s struggles for recognition. While the Comité never articulated a vision on representation, the Montreal perspective on rights in the 1960s involved recognizing tenants similarly to workers in unions with the governance of projects completely under “citizen control” via general assemblies. ⁹⁵ Together, both positions solidified a democratic “co-partnership” role in placing tenants on the HJM board. But as the city hall protest revealed, these demands were non-negotiable for the Civic Party.

Yet if federal tenant rights were indeed off the table, the Hellyer Report nonetheless forced municipalities to acknowledge some form of representation. For Saulnier, acknowledgment was a means to curtail tenant activism. Announcing the nomination of Raymonde Dulude on March 17, 1969, as the first tenant representative on the HJM board, Saulnier sought to co-opt tenant power in “provid[ing] tenant representation, which responds to [the tenants’] request.” While an HJM resident, Dulude was not connected to the Comité. Rejecting Saulnier’s new position, HJM tenants, citywide housing activists, and the few anti-Drapeau counselors present lambasted the maneuver. Contending the nomination failed to “ensure participatory democracy,” anti-Drapeau councilors sought guarantees that future nominations would consult tenants. Their motion, however, had little chance of passing. Demonstrating the power of the Civic Party, the pro-tenant motion failed on a 42 to 3 vote and Dulude became the first tenant representative. ⁹⁶ In a final act of antagonism, Saulnier’s post-Hellyer position outlined the parameters of tenant–landlord relations within HJM until 1985.

While the nomination effectively ended the Comité-era recognition efforts, the appointment nevertheless crystallized the path that lay ahead. As “Mrs. X” told The Montreal Star in 1969, it was time to reject city hall paternalism, CHJM eviction threats, and form an association. “It’s time We [as written] rose up en masse and fought our own wars,” Mrs. X concluded. “Until we have a large organization of people who are not afraid of reprisals from the administration, we might as well forget the whole thing.” ⁹⁷

Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy of the 1960s on Canadian Housing Activism

As the history of HJM reveals, the shifting Canadian landscape on urban renewal and tenant rights flowed through the living rooms of public housing tenants in the 1960s. Demanding recognition, the limits to what Ottawa would tolerate were finalized on June 19, 1970, during a workshop between activists, federal, and provincial officials in Pointe-Claire, Quebec. With provincial officials reasserting the Saulnier line, the Trudeau government, acting as a federal arbitrator, signaled it would privately side with the provinces while publicly promoting rights. Undeterred by this doublespeak, the activists present realized that if gains were to be achieved, it had to arrive through associations organizing against the state. As Linda Martin, Chairwoman of the Tenants’ Union of Prince Edward Island, told the attendees, “the only way you can get anything done is to organize in large numbers, set up your committee, and send your committee to your government. This is the way we solve our problems.” ⁹⁸ Effectively, the strategy Martin expressed was the model HJM tenants had set in the 1960s.

Unknown to those present in Pointe-Claire, this strategy would be hard to replicate. Forming their own association in 1975, tenants led successful campaigns in shaping rights and housing policies in Montreal. Prominently connected to the MCM, tenants were organizing for representation into the 1980s. In 1985, these efforts materialized in securing two democratically elected tenant representatives on the board. Now firmly in control of the board through the elected tenants and MCM-appointed community activists, tenants effectively controlled HJM from 1985 to 1994. Wielding power, tenants secured renovation funding in the late 1980s and halted plans to partially demolish HJM for a social mix project centered on building UQAM student dormitories by their former MCM allies in 1992.

Their outlier success, however, also reflected the emerging politics of whiteness within the Montreal Left. With the 1960s framed within a class politics expressed by a majority white francophone population, these positions were eventually absorbed into the politics of Quebec nationalism. This shift was exemplified in 1981, a few months after the failed first referendum for Quebec sovereignty in 1980. Using whiteness as strategy to confront CHJM attempts to co-opt tenant power, the association, through its general assembly, demanded the tenant selection committee limit the “internationalization” of HJM to 25 percent of the population. Argued within an ahistorical claim that the formerly immigrant neighborhood should retain its French Canadian “heritage,” the positions of the association mirrored those of the Montreal Left. ⁹⁹ Still focused on rights, the politics of race and nationalism became far more fundamental in shaping HJM and Montreal planning decisions in the 1980s than the purely class politics of the 1960s and 1970s.

But in the 1960s, HJM tenants reflected the Canadian experience of public housing tenants in articulating a localized demand that was nationally felt. With this activism directly leading to the demise of urban renewal, their struggles demonstrate how powerful tenant activism has been to the evolution of Canadian housing policy. Their collective efforts, which continue to define the contours of post-1960s housing activism in Canada, should finally be recognized.