You would think that one of the gods of Olympus had died.
"We have lost a great man;" "He was a wonderful boss;" "He had a fantastic political flair;" "He took city on road to grandeur" -- these were just a few of the headlines that filled the press after former Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau died last week at the age of 83.
But the only thing Olympian about the real Drapeau was the monstrous debt he incurred to host the Olympic Games in 1976.
"The Olympics can no more have a debt than a man can have a baby," Mayor Drapeau confidently predicted.
A lot of men must be having babies.
The Olympics saddled Montreal with a $3.5-billion debt, that working class Montrealers are still paying off.
Of course the development corporations who built the Olympics didn't suffer. They made huge profits from the construction of "the Big Owe" -- the Olympic Stadium.
They made huge profits when the Decarie Expressway was pushed through the middle of the city, wrecking working class neighbourhoods, so that tourists could visit Expo 67.
Drapeau was an early proponent of "trickle-down" economics. He argued that if you bent over backwards to let big business make profits, then the benefits would "trickle down" to the poor and the working class.
He got it half right. He did bend over backwards to the development corporations -- who profited hugely from the Olympics, Expo 67 and all of his other mega projects.
But the only thing that trickled down was debt.
Housing and social services in Montreal were completely neglected during Drapeau's quarter of a century in the mayor's office.
The only time Drapeau paid attention to Montreal's poor was during Expo 67, when he fenced in poor areas of the city so that they wouldn't sully the picture for out of town tourists.
But the thing that Drapeau neglected most was democracy.
"It's no secret that I like discipline, hate wasting time and can't stand useless discussion" he said. "Democracy isn't a system of public participation, but a system where leaders are chosen."
He hated opposition. For most of the 1960s, he ran the city almost entirely through his hand-picked executive. Locally elected councillors had almost no say. (Many of them didn't even have an office!)
By the end of the 1960s, a real opposition did develop to Drapeau's pro-business, anti-democratic style of rule.
An organization called FRAP emerged, which by 1970 was a huge threat to his rule.
FRAP called for an end to the subservience to big business. They called for using municipal funds for social services and the poor, not to line the pockets of the rich.
Drapeau ended the threat by calling in the Canadian army.
In 1970, a radical group called the FLQ kidnapped two prominent individuals in Quebec.
Drapeau joined with Liberal premier Robert Bourassa to appeal to the federal government for assistance.
They backed up then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau when he imposed martial law, occupied Montreal with 5,000 troops, and arrested hundreds.
Conveniently, key militants of FRAP were included in the roundup, Drapeau succeeded in persuading Montreal voters that FRAP members were all terrorists, and he won a convincing re-election.
We know now what Drapeau, Bourassa and Trudeau knew then -- there was no reason to impose martial law. There was no situation of "apprehended insurrection" as Trudeau claimed.
The three simply wanted to crush dissent in the province, and they used hysterical scare tactics and the armed force of the state to intimidate and terrorize their opponents.
So remember Drapeau. Remember him as a man who kept Montreal workers poor so that businessmen could get rich. Remember him as a man who had contempt for democracy and who was perpared to call in the troops when his rule was threatened.
And remember the opposition that developed to his rule. Drapeau, Bourassa and Trudeau were able to temporarily suppress this opposition in 1970. But it exploded in the general strike of 1972 and in the great Quebec radicalization of the 1970s, and tens of thousands of workers and students rallied to the fight for socialism.