Canada has its own domestic terrorism
It's not just U.S. that endures acts of political violence, writes Robert Smol.
Canadian public reaction to the recent news about a foiled kidnapping of Michigan's Democratic governor by right-wing extremists has been somewhat predictable.
How can they (the United States) allow such ideological extremism to fester at such a potentially explosive level, such as kidnapping one of their own democratically elected politicians? How can such ideologically motivated terrorism fester in the U.S.? We ask these questions with veiled condescending scorn, under the assumption that acts of domestic terrorism are not part of the Canadian fabric.
Time for an historical reality check.
As uncomfortable and as unCanadian it might seem, given our placid, mythological “peacekeeping nation” self-image, we have a rich and storied history of homegrown, politically motivated bombings, shootings, armed insurrection and, yes, kidnappings and assassination, all in the name of political extremism.
Equally uncomfortable to some might be the overtly violent and sometimes arbitrary manner in which Canadian politicians have responded to homegrown acts of politically motivated violence.
Indeed, the Michigan plot comes on the 50th anniversary of Canada's
FLQ crisis, which, relative to the Michigan saga, proved far more successful at attacking and disrupting democratic government.
Although the October Crisis has been largely sanitized of its terrorism profile, the reality is that homegrown, armed, Canadian ideological (Marxist-separatist) extremists from Quebec kidnapped British diplomat James Cross, then subsequently kidnapped and murdered prominent Quebec politician Pierre Laporte. These actions came at the end of an almost decade-long streak of high-profile bombings of public institutions, bank robberies, and raids on defence installations. Among the most prominent of these FLQ terrorist attacks was the February 1969 bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange and the May
1963 mailbox bombings in Westmount, which seriously disabled a Canadian Army bomb disposal expert, Sgt.Maj. Walter Leja.
Meanwhile, some might remember the attempted bombing of Parliament in 1966 by an angry westerner (Paul Joseph Chartier) who wanted to get back at politicians but ended up accidentally blowing himself up in the parliamentary washroom.
We shouldn't forget the foiled terrorist plot in 2006 by the so-called “Toronto
18,” who were training and plotting to murder our thenprime minister, among other public figures.
More recently, there was the October 2014 rifle attack on the military guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa by radicalized Canadian Muslim extremist Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who then attacked the Centre Block on Parliament Hill and was eventually gunned down inside. (This took place only a short walking distance from the spot where, in 1868, the popular Canadian politician and Father of Confederation Thomas D'Arcy McGee was assassinated, execution-style, allegedly by an Irish republican nationalist.)
And there was the May 2020 attempted armed incursion onto the grounds of Rideau Hall by a heavily armed Canadian reserve army member with known ultra right-wing sympathies. The outcome of that case is not yet determined.
These are known acts aimed at our federal government and Parliament.
At the provincial level, we could include the 1984 sub-machine-gun attack on the Quebec National Assembly by Canadian Forces Master-Cpl. Denis Lortie, whose anti-Parti Québécois rampage with his Canadian Army-issue weapon resulted in the deaths of three civil servants and injured 13.
Less costly in terms of human life would be the
1995 bombing of the Prince Edward Island Legislature by Roger Bell, who, like the 1966 would-be terrorist, wanted to get back at government.
Canada, a peaceful, non-terrorism-prone nation? You decide.
Equally defiling to our gentle, peacemaker self-image is the response by government to violent threats to our institutions. As an eight-year-old boy growing up in a suburb of Montreal, my most vivid memory of the 1970 October Crisis was the Canadian Army coming into our neighbourhood and searching homes while soldiers stood by with rifles and machine-guns at the ready. Almost concurrent with the deployment of the military in Quebec was then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act, 50 years ago today, which temporarily suspended civil liberties.
The FLQ's actions, and Trudeau's response, were only one in a long line of swift and arbitrary reactions on the part of Canadian government to internal threats. Going further into our past, we can include the army's indiscriminate shooting of anti-conscription protesters in Quebec City in April 1918, killing four civilians (including a 14-year-old boy) and wounding many more. Go even further back and there was John A. Macdonald's government violently suppressing the Métis/ Indigenous uprising in the Northwest in 1885 and subsequently executing leader Louis Riel.
The Michigan kidnapping plot, from an American perspective, might be a lesson that acts of domestic terrorism and political violence like those that have happened in Canada can happen south of the border too!
Likewise, just as the legacies of Macdonald and Trudeau are tarnished by the severity of their responses to violent internal threats, American politicians should be wary of how their wholesale responses might be perceived when the history books are written.