No reason for an apology

Canada had barely shaken off the happy hangover of Centennial year when the country was rocked by events that most thought could never happen here.

In the October Crisis of1970, 50 years ago this month, British diplomat James Cross was kidnapped by members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). Provincial minister Pierre Laporte was snatched five days later and subsequently found murdered.

Most of English Canada had paid scant attention to the rising temperature in Quebec, had largely missed the Quiet Revolution, the growing separatist mood, the string of bombings and bank robberies by the FLQ through the 1960s.

Even the federal government led by then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau was caught off-guard when Cross and Laporte were kidnapped.

“We were completely stunned,” Trudeau later wrote. “Nothing like it had ever happened in Canadian history.”

So, for only the third time, the others coming during world wars, the federal government invoked the War Measures Act, putting the army in the streets and suspending civil liberties as the terrorists of the FLQ were hunted down.

Subsequent investigations, and the benefit of hindsight, have produced a consensus that the War Measures Act was probably unnecessary — “a sledgehammer to crack a peanut,” said former NDP leader Tommy Douglas. Its sweeping powers were used to arrest almost 500 people without warrant and hold them without charge.

Now the Bloc Québécois, with its eye on the current electoral calendar, is demanding that the current prime minister, Pierre Trudeau’s son, formally apologize for this breach of civil rights.

It’s one apology that Justin Trudeau can properly decline to make.

That the exercise is largely a round of political theatrics by the Bloc is evident in the recitation by its MPs of the names of those arrested, as if on par with, say, those killed in battle.

The Bloc ignores the pertinent fact that Ottawa invoked the War Measures Act at the urgent request of both the Quebec and Montreal governments. To the end of his life, Pierre Trudeau remained unapologetic. “Was I wrong in acceding to the reasons they presented to me?” Trudeau asked in his 1993 memoirs. “I don’t think so. I am certain that, had I not declared the War Measures Act when I did, I would be accused today of having played ‘the Big Brother in Ottawa’.”

To the country’s leadership at the time, the threat of insurrection seemed remote, but it was impossible to rule out the possibility that the FLQ was as well-organized, armed and ruthless as it claimed.

Had Ottawa capitulated, moreover, to the FLQ’s demands that its members convicted of murder, armed robbery and bombings be released, Trudeau said, “they would have no reason to hesitate to murder, rob and bomb again.”

It’s also difficult to accept the proposition that most Quebecers were grievously offended by how the Trudeau government of the day handled the events of1970. They had multiple opportunities to cast a verdict on Pierre Trudeau and his party — in the federal elections of 1972, 1974, 1979 and 1980.

Every time Quebecers, including francophones, handed Trudeau Sr. smashing majorities in his home province. If most of them harboured deep resentment over how he handled the October Crisis, it wasn’t apparent from how they actually voted.

And if, as the Bloc argues, the War Measures Act was intended primarily to crush the nascent separatist movement, it would seem to have been a very poor attempt indeed.

Legitimate nationalist and separatist organizations flourished in the following years as Quebec increasingly asserted its nationhood.

In 1976, Quebecers elected a Parti Québécois government, which was re-elected in 1981. In 1980 and 1995, PQ governments held referendums on splitting from Canada. Then the Bloc itself came into being as an avowedly separatist federal party and at one point formed the official opposition in Ottawa.

Largely due to Pierre Trudeau’s decisiveness, political violence ended in Quebec and debate about the province’s status in Canada was waged in the appropriate democratic forums by elected political actors.

There’s nothing to apologize for in that.

Largely due to Pierre Trudeau’s decisiveness, political violence ended in Quebec