National Post (National Edition)
The October Crisis deserves an apology
It’s the 50th anniversary of the FLQ Crisis, and the House of Commons is divided on whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should apologize, on behalf of the government, for turning Montreal into a police state. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet moved a motion demanding it on Thursday. The New Democrats support it, while the Liberals and Conservatives aren’t interested. Indeed, judging by the reaction on social media, many of their partisans think the whole idea is quite silly.
That’s perhaps understandable: Pierre Trudeau is a Liberal saint, and the Conservatives like to be seen as tough on terrorism. But I wonder if they might wind up changing their minds.
The Bloc isn’t making it easy to support them. Blanchet’s multimedia demands for the apology include a Sept. 5 tweet, attached to which is a photo of him beaming beside a poster for Félix Rose’s new documentary about his father, Paul Rose, and uncle Jacques Rose, members of the FLQ cell that kidnapped Quebec deputy premier Pierre Laporte.
The poster features the iconic photo of Paul Rose, the cell’s leader convicted of Laporte’s kidnapping and murder, with his fist raised in defiance outside a Montreal courthouse.
“I saw (the film) with colleagues who were as moved as I was,” Blanchet blithely wrote.
Indeed, the film has precipitated a misty-eyed nostalgia among some in the hard-nationalist camp that’s fundamentally weird (“Remember when we really were oppressed? Those were the days!” quipped Gazette columnist Don Macpherson) and has very little time to remember the FLQ’s victims.
“The Rose brothers experienced … the same humiliation and domination as me and millions of Québécois in that period,” Bloc MP Denis Trudel Tweeted, with his own photo with the poster. On the film’s promotional Facebook page, there’s a shot of Québec Solidaire MNA Catherine Dorion raising her fist in solidarity with murderer Paul Rose.
On Thursday in the House, Bloc MPs repeatedly compared 1970s mass arrests and incarcerations to the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War — dubious, if not downright offensive, on several levels. The FLQ posed a legitimate threat. October 1970 didn’t come out of nowhere; it was the culmination of seven years of bombings that killed six people. The year before, the FLQ quite spectacularly blew up the Montreal Stock Exchange, wounding dozens.
Still, it’s not just the Bloc who think the feds should apologize. Every party in Quebec’s National Assembly agrees, though they disagree on whether other governments should apologize as well. After all, Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act at the request of Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau and Quebec’s Liberal premier Robert Bourassa. (Somewhat ironically, it’s the Quebec Liberals who want Bourassa’s and Drapeau’s successors to apologize, while the Parti Québécois is only interested in hearing from Trudeau fils. The PQ may not wish to be reminded that their leader at the time, Camille Laurin, deemed Bourassa’s request “perfectly understandable and justified in the circumstances.”)
Setting aside the substance of the issue, it seems like an odd political play. The Conservatives have lately been far more inclined to woo nationalist Quebec voters than annoy them: Even as they sell themselves in English Canada as the party of religious freedom, they promise to keep sweet on Bill 21, which (among other things) bans public school teachers from wearing hijabs or turbans. Sovereignty is a busted flush, but it’s far more useful to what’s left of the movement, which nowadays is entirely grievance-based, if Justin Trudeau doesn’t apologize than if he does.
Returning to the substance of the issue, however, an apology is entirely in order. If some Quebecers have overly romanticized the FLQ, many in the Rest of Canada have absolutely done the same with Pierre Trudeau’s response.
Just because Bourassa and Drapeau asked the prime minister to use “a cannon to kill a fly,” as Liberal cabinet minister Jean Marchand later put it, doesn’t mean the prime minister had to agree. Under the powers Trudeau granted, police conducted some 3,000 searches and rounded up nearly 500 people without warrants; they could be held without charge, and some were, for three weeks. Only 62 were ever prosecuted.
It remained Canada’s largest mass arrest for 40 years, until Toronto police chief Bill Blair — now Trudeau’s public safety minister — oversaw the new record during the G20 debacle in Toronto in 2010. It was an appalling performance, but no one spent three weeks without charge in the hoosegow. The Toronto police issued a tepid apology earlier this month.
The prime minister, meanwhile, seems downright proud of the mass civil rights violations that his father, that beacon of human rights, authorized in 1970.
On a flight in 2013, a fellow passenger passed Justin Trudeau a note asking, “Can you really beat Harper?”
“Just watch me,” the soonto-be prime minister replied, quoting his father’s famous response to a reporter asking just how far he would go to fight the FLQ. The War Measures Act was implemented three days later.
The transcript of Thursday’s debate is a fascinating journey into Canada’s two solitudes, but there are those who say a pandemic isn’t the right time to discuss the matter.
I’m not sure there’s a bad time to confront Canada’s strange and unpredictable weakness for authoritarianism — especially if it’s delivered by a handsome gentleman with a rapier wit. Canada has faced terrorist threats since, and has overreacted. It will continue to face them in the future, and need not.