Haunted for half a century
The 50th anniversary of the October Crisis is a chance to reflect on the challenges to that special place Quebec occupies in the national identity.
(IF THE PQ) OWED ITS BIRTH TO THE TURMOIL OF THE LATE 1960S, IT PROBABLY OWED ITS EVENTUAL SUCCESS TO THE DISSIPA TION OF THAT TURMOIL IN THE MID-1970S. — HISTORIAN SUSAN MANN TROFIMENKOFF
Other things were happening during the October Crisis. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Canada formally recognized “Red China.”
But for Canadians, the early days of October 1970, were a singular moment, the greatest crisis of identity in two centuries, since the British defeated the French on the Plains of Abraham, the high ground of Canadian national myth.
With its armed kidnappings and political murder, an escalation from a yearslong campaign of bombings against government and military targets, the October Crisis belied Canada’s sense of its own reputation for peace, order and good government. Memories were still fresh of Expo 67, that mid- century festival of optimism at Canada’s official centennial, which took place a short walk from the St. Lambert home of Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s deputy premier.
Laporte’s kidnapping and murder, and the hostage ordeal of British diplomat James Cross, suddenly placed Canada squarely in the club of countries whose troubles go all the way down to bedrock, all the way back to a disputed colonial origin. Never mind official bilingualism, enshrined in law the year before. In October, 1970, Canada became a country that deploys its military against itself, suspending the rights of accused citizens and conducting sweeping raids to put down an “apprehended insurrection.”
This was deeply contradictory for Canada, in which national unity was brokered rather than won on the battlefield. “We French, we English, never lost our civil war, / endure it still, a bloodless civil bore,” wrote the poet Earle Birney in 1962. “No wounded lying about, no Whitman wanted. / It’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted.”
That’s the kind of thinking that jinxes peace. Sure enough, a few years later, Canadian history stopped being so boring. Today, Canada has been haunted for half a century by Laporte’s body in the trunk of a car at a Montreal airport.
A cabinet minister taken from his home and murdered. A diplomat’s kidnappers given safe passage to Cuba, on the far side of a civilizational Cold War wall. The failure of insurrection before it began in earnest. Fifty years of uncertainty about how and whether Quebec fits with the rest of Canada.
The 50th anniversary of the October Crisis is a chance to reflect on the challenges to that special place Quebec occupies in the national identity, through the prism of this rare moment of violent extremism. How is Quebec still special?
No province plays such a role in constitutional law, as the exception, the outlier, the dissident, the holdout, the special case.
As the home of one of Canada’s founding peoples, Quebec seems to be, in the words of University of Toronto political scientist Peter Russell, commenting in a 2011 essay on the reasoning of Supreme Court judges, “not a province like the rest, and should not have its powers or place in Confederation altered without the consent of its government. In the face of Canadian history going back to Confederation, that is not an easy principle to deny.”
And yet, to this day, Quebec has not formally endorsed the patriation of Canada’s constitution in 1982, although the Supreme Court decided Quebec did not hold a veto over constitutional amendments that affect the
powers of its own national assembly, so this is mostly symbolic.
Quebec has even participated in a constitutional amendment, in 1997, when it reorganized its school boards according to language rather than religion. But it is still somehow on the outside, notwithstanding the constitutional calamities of Meech Lake and Charlottetown and the 2006 acknowledgment by the House of Commons that “the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.”
The anniversary of the October Crisis is a reminder that constitutional contradictions do not disappear, even when the historical violence settles into mere politics.
This has led to awkward
poses, most recently in September when the new leader of the federal Conservatives, Erin O’toole, pledged not to meddle with a Quebec secularism law that at best infringes on religious freedoms of public servants, and at worst discriminates openly against religiously observant immigrants in a post- Catholic secular society. The Liberals have similarly ignored the ruling.
Quebec is not the only province that squirms in Canada. There is an incipient separatist movement in Alberta, based on similar grievances about exploitation.
Newfoundland and Labrador has a tricolour flag of independence. As the most recent province to join Canada, it has also been the sub
ject of the most constitutional amendments, three about schools and one about its name.
There have been similar rumblings in other provinces, tracking the vagaries of interprovincial transfer payments and the ups and downs of commodities markets, with proposals for provinces to join America either on their own or as a bloc.
But it seems hard to imagine today anything like the national panic that arose on October 5, 1970, when armed men took British diplomat James Cross, prompting the separatist leader of the newly formed Parti Québécois René Lévesque to call the kidnappers “sewer rats” and anarchists, lest his cause suffer by association.
On October 6, police were
guarding public buildings and foreign missions. On the night of October 8, the manifesto of the Front de Liberation du Quebec was read out on CBC, and published in newspapers: “The Front de Liberation du Quebec is not a messiah, nor a modern-day Robin Hood. It is a group of Quebec workers who have decided to use all means to make sure that the people of Quebec take control of their destiny.”
The Quebec Liberal Party had won the election the previous April, taking 72 seats in what had been newly renamed the National Assembly. This “rigged” victory, according to the manifesto, showed “democracy in Quebec is nothing but the democracy of the rich.”
As a result, the FLQ proposed to arm and organize Quebec’s workers, demanding “the total independence of Quebeckers, united in a free society, purged forever of the clique of voracious sharks, the patronizing ‘ big bosses’ and their henchmen who have made Quebec their hunting preserve for ‘cheap labour’ and unscrupulous exploitation.”
The next day a note was sent to a radio station, left under a hallway carpet, in Cross’s handwriting. As proof he was still alive, it included a sentence directed to Cross’s wife Barbara: “It is now five days since I left and I want you to know darling, that I miss you every minute.” The kidnappers demanded freedom and safe passage to Cuba for 23 convicted criminals.
On Sunday the 11th, just after 5 p. m., deputy premier and Labour Minister Pierre Laporte was at his home on the south shore while his son and nephew played football outside. He had joined them, dressed up to go out for dinner as usual with his family, when he was grabbed by two men with guns in nylon masks, wearing gloves and business suits, who took him away in a Chevrolet, according to next day press reports.
Tuesday the 13th saw prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s famous “Just watch me” line, in reply to a reporter’s incredulity about how far he would go to put down the uprising. Three days later the War Measures Act was in force to quell the “apprehended insurrection.” More than 3,000 raids and 497 arrests followed in short order. The legal right to habeas corpus was suspended, and people could be held for seven days with no charge or legal representation.
Writing in the Mcgill Law Journal in 1972, scholar J. N. Lyon argued “the judiciary was reduced to the role of timekeeper, keeping track of who attended what meetings and spoke or communicated what statements on behalf of an association.”
It did not achieve its goal of independence, but the October Crisis reinforced a sense of alienation about whose side the federal government was on.
It was a strategic lesson learned for Quebec separatism, which became increasingly and democratically influential. No one was kidnapped or murdered again. Rather, the province elected separatist governments and twice sovereignty was put to an actual vote, famously close in 1995.
The Parti Québécois had been formed in 1968 and went on to form several governments, in pursuit of sovereignty, as Quebec followed the revolutionary mood of the 1960s by shrugging off the Catholic church’s societal influence.
The historian Susan Mann Trofimenkoff wrote in 2002 in The Dream of a Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec that if the PQ “owed its birth to the turmoil of the late 1960s, it probably owed its eventual success to the dissipation of that turmoil in the mid-1970s.”
“The October Crisis marked the end of violent revolutionary protest in the province,” wrote Dominique Clément, a sociologist of human rights at the University of Alberta, in the Journal of Canadian Studies.
“The long- term impact of the October Crisis was to strengthen the democratic elements within the independence movement in Quebec. It also strengthened the human rights movement in Canada with the creation of new advocacy groups. But in many other respects the aftermath of the crisis produced disturbing precedents for restricting human rights.”