The crisis that shook Canada
October Crisis cemented democracy in Quebec
pierre trudeau deluged quebec with money and grew the french language.
SEWAGE SAMPLING ISN’T DESTINED TO DROP OUT OF SIGHT IF AND WHEN THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS DOES. — COLBY COSH
This week is the 50th anniversary of the October Crisis, the greatest political crisis in Canadian history, at least since the Northwest Rebellion in 1885. An official of the British trade mission in Montreal, James Cross, was kidnapped by a cell of the extreme separatist Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). Quebec’s labour minister and the senior member of Robert Bourassa’s government, Pierre Laporte, was also kidnapped and murdered by another cell of the same organization. Between the two events, at the urgent request of the governments of Quebec and of Montreal, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s federal government invoked the War Measures Act, the only recourse immediately available. A state of martial law was imposed on Montreal, Quebec City and other parts of the province, as well as parts of the Ottawa area. Local police departments, the Sûreté du Québec and the RCMP were supplemented by 10,000 members of the Canadian Armed Forces to provide additional security for designated individuals and potential terrorist targets. Approximately 500 suspects were rounded up in the middle of the night without a warrant and detained without benefit of counsel at the pleasure of the attorney general of Canada, John Turner. So unaccustomed was Canada to such emergencies that among the homes ransacked was that of Gérard Pelletier, a prominent minister in the federal government and former editor of La Presse, whom the authorities had deemed a subversive decades before. He had voted for cabinet’s assertion of the War Measures Act, as Pelletier’s son attempted to explain to his visitors at 5 a. m. on Oct. 16, 1970. None of the 500 was charged and all were released within a few weeks, and none claimed mistreatment.
This was the unforeseen culmination of the parallel growth of both the democratic and illegal separatist movements in Quebec. French- Canadians had been effectively abandoned by the French at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. Under the Quebec Act of 1774, New France pledged loyalty to the British Crown in exchange for the British government’s guarantee of the religious and linguistic rights and civil law of French Canada. French- Canadians faithfully assisted in the repulse of the Americans in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. And when, after the Rebellions of 1837-1838, the British, on the hare- brained advice of Gov. Lord Durham, united Upper and Lower Canada ( Ontario and Quebec), in order to relieve the French- Canadians of what was assumed to be the burden of being French in 1840, Canada’s mainstream political leaders, Louis-hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin, joined to secure autonomy for Canada in everything except foreign and military affairs in 1848, and GeorgeÉtienne Cartier joined with John A. Macdonald and George Brown to establish the substantially sovereign Canadian Confederation in 1867. There was considerable enthusiasm in Quebec for the alternative of trying to declare the independence of Quebec, but it was generally accepted that without a partnership with English Canada and without the protection of the British Empire, French- Canadians would eventually be assimilated by the overwhelming majority of English- speaking people in North America. For a century, most of the nationalist political leaders of Quebec — A.A. Dorion, Henri Bourassa, Lionel Groulx and Maurice Duplessis — were conservative and the centre- left of Quebec was liberal and unambiguously federalist.
Duplessis and his Union Nationale party ( 1935-1959) managed the considerable feat of getting the conservatives and the nationalists to vote together. His chosen successors, Paul Sauvé and Daniel Johnson, had learned the technique from him but both died early in their premierships. Duplessis exploited the paranoia of the Catholic bishops and kept clerical personnel in the schools and hospitals at low wages, and consecrated almost all the provincial budget to modernizing schools and building universities and infrastructure and Quebec made great strides in living standards and education levels compared to English Canada. But Quebec could not continue indefinitely being a priest-ridden society, and the so-called Quiet Revolution with the Liberal Jean Lesage, following the death of Sauvé in 1960, secularized the province but increased taxes and the costs of services, including electricity from the provincially owned Hydro- Québec. Daniel Johnson brought the Union Nationale back in 1966 in a reaction against aspects of the Quiet Revolution, and recruited French President Charles de Gaulle to endorse Quebec nationalism in a famous address from the balcony of Montreal’s city hall in 1967. But Johnson died in 1968 and the nationalist torch passed to the left, to the chief liberal nationalist René Lévesque, who bolted the Liberal party and established the Parti Québécois, which pledged a referendum to negotiate sovereignty with continued association with Canada. Lévesque’s new party won the 1976 election.
The violent separatist option represented by the FLQ never had any significant level of support in Quebec opinion and after the murder of Laporte it was reviled by over 95 per cent of Quebecers. The whole concept was criminal nonsense, as Quebec’s leading nationalists understood that they could win democratically and not even the most militant federalists, including Trudeau, denied that if they won a substantial majority to secede on a clear question Quebec would have that right. The significance of the FLQ and a few other terrorist operations in Quebec was not that they ever had any chance of generating a violent “anti-colonial” revolt. It was that Quebec was something of a world leader in these terrorist organizations. Between 1962 and 1970 the militant separatists planted over 200 bombs in Quebec, which killed six people. The hero of the time was Robert Côté, head of Montreal’s small and under- equipped bomb disposal squad. He disassembled scores of bombs and saved countless lives. The FLQ was the precursor of the Red Brigades of Italy, the Weatherman of the United States and the Red Army Faction in West Germany.
The combination of the barbarous fiasco of the FLQ’S antics in October 1970 and the steady rise of the Parti Québécois concentrated all nationalist ambitions in the democratic electoral option. But in steadily constraining the rights of the English- speaking 20 per cent of Quebecers and in renouncing the Catholic traditions of Quebec, which had preserved the French language and maintained a high birthrate, Quebec drove hundreds of thousands of non- French out of the province and attempted to replace them with a large flow of ostensibly French- speaking immigration from Haiti, Lebanon and North Africa, who have no interest in Quebec nationalism and generally consider that they have moved to Canada and North America rather than to a nationalist Quebec. Pierre Trudeau deluged Quebec with federal money and elevated the practical status of the French language throughout Canada. His formula was essentially successful. In both the 1980 referendum, which Lévesque lost to Trudeau 60-40, and in 1995, when the separatists only lost by one per cent, the issue was a trick question that sought authority to negotiate sovereignty while retaining association: eat the cake and still have it in front of them. As long as the federal government stays out of the hands of rednecks, it should be possible to maintain a functioning Confederation. The outright separatist vote does not seem ever to have surpassed about onethird of the electorate.
The October Crisis was a shocking event but its principal effect was to bury any enthusiasm Quebec would have for a violent political future. Whatever its limitations, Canada is unshakably an electoral democracy.