By HUBERT BAUCH - It isn't about whether the violently radical Front de Liberation du Quebec was in any way justified in its attempt to foment a popular uprising against the legitimately established Quebec government of the day by kidnapping British diplomat James Cross and the provincial labour minister, Pierre Laporte, who was killed by his abductors at the low point of the crisis.
An iron consensus has reigned in Quebec since then that violence and criminality in pursuit of political goals is altogether unacceptable. Proponents of felquiste tactics in this day are limited to blogosphere nutters with silly nicknames. No less than Jacques Lanctot, principal author of the notorious FLQ manifesto and ringleader of the cell that kidnapped Cross, put it conclusively in a Radio-Canada special on the crisis: "There is no place for an FLQ today. It was a product of its time."
But with that time now long past, and that most critical of points set in stone, controversy persists over the way governing authorities, federal, provincial and municipal, responded to the felquiste assault, notably the imposition of the War Measures Act, which essentially outlawed membership in the FLQ and any expression of support for the group or its revolutionary means and goals, and gave the police authority to arrest and detain suspects at will and hold them incommunicado without charge.
Supporters of the WMA imposition concede that it was an overly blunt instrument and somewhat clumsily wielded, but steadfastly maintain that it had the desired - and desirable -effect of becalming a potentially explosive situation, possibly violent demonstrations in support of the FLQ that could possibly result in deaths and property destruction, and possibly more kidnappings. Such fears were founded on a recent history of political street violence in Montreal, along with 200 felquiste bombings in a terror campaign that had already claimed five lives.
Opponents decry the recourse to the wartime security act, hitherto never ever invoked in peacetime, as an unpardonable violation of civil liberties and a cynical ploy by Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister of the day and prime scourge of Quebec separatists, to discredit the entire sovereignist movement, including its resolutely democratic elements, by tarring it with terrorist associations. And furthermore, they say, it was effectively useless in its stated purpose in that not a single certifiable felquiste was nabbed as a direct result of the WMA provisions.
The two sides are squared off in two duelling books on the crisis published this 40th anniversary fall that together neatly frame the enduring debate. The versions of the tale are so diametrically opposed that no resolution seems likely by even the next round-number crisis anniversary, if ever.
Pro-WMA is Octobre 1970: Dans les coulisses de la Crise (Editions Heritage) by William Tetley, a minister in Premier Robert Bourassa's cabinet at the time and now a professorof internationallawatMcGill University. (It is an expanded French version of his previously issued volume, The October Crisis, 1970: An Insider's View (McGill-Queen's University Press.) Anti-WMA is Trudeau's Darkest Hour: War Measures in Time of Peace,
October 1970 (Baraka Books) compiled by Guy Bouthillier, longtime sovereignty activist and former president of Montreal's Societe Saint-Jean Baptiste, and political scientist Edouard Cloutier.
The latter is for the most part a compendium of writings by anglophone war measures critics, most from the rest of Canada. They include former Trudeau ministers Don Jamieson and Eric Kierans, NDP leader Tommy Douglas, academics Reg Whittaker, Jack Granatstein and Ramsay Cook, and prominent writers and journalists Margaret Atwood, Robert Fulford and Peter C. Newman. It shows, said Bouthillier in an interview, that opposition to the act wasn't limited to felquiste coddling Quebec nationalists. "There were people of good conscience elsewhere, they weren't all for Mr. Trudeau."
Taken together, along with some classic-line Quebec nationalist commentary by the editors, they argue that there was insufficient or even a total lack of hard evidence that there was a state of "apprehended insurrection" in Quebec as required to justify invocation of the act; that the police had all necessary powers to deal with the situation by conventional means; that Trudeau and Marc Lalonde, his chief of staff at the time, forced the act on a reluctant Quebec government and that they deviously concocted and cynically spread the tale of a plot to supplant the Bourassa government with a provisional government incorporating prominent nationalist figures headed by Parti Quebecois leader Rene Levesque, who at the time didn't have a seat in the National Assembly.
Reg Whittaker, a distinguished political science prof and security and intelligence specialist, summarized the alleged federal scheme after extensive study of available documentation, including cabinet minutes: "The RCMP saw the crisis as requiring good, patient careful police work to solve. The Quebec ministers in Ottawa deliberately chose to escalate the political magnitude of the crisis to justify emergency powers as a means of intimidating nationalists and separatists with whom the federalist Quebecers were locked in a bitter conflict for the allegiance of Quebecers."
There were indeed no 3,000 armed terrorists poised to strike with remote-controlled bombs, as famously claimed by Trudeau's Quebec lieutenant Jean Marchand, and the supposed provisional government plot was nothing more than some loose talk started by Le Devoir editor Claude Ryan, who apparently couldn't even sell the idea to his own editorial board. Peter C. Newman, then editor of the Toronto Star, bitterly recalls being sucked into printing the story by Trudeau and Lalonde who fed him what he calls "a meticulously concocted lie."
Bouthillier suggests that the WMA imposition cast an enduring pall of shame over the sovereignty movement and wonders: "Can it be posited that this shame or guilt was, and remains to this day, the ultimate and unquestionable victory of censorship imposed under the War Measures Act?"
In an interview for the Radio-Canada anniversary broadcast, Lalonde resolutely insisted that the WMA request came from the provincial government and Montreal city hall and that it would not have been imposed otherwise; he admitted having a hand in drafting the request document but only to the extent of assuring it was clear and consistent in both cases, the city's and the provincial government's. He denied concocting the provisional government tale, insisting he got it from Lucien Saulnier, the eminently upright chairman of Montreal's executive committee, to whom Ryan had foolishly floated the idea. "It seemed more than astonishing, but I had no reason to doubt Mr. Saulnier's word, a very respected and respectable man."
His version as to who called for the act is backed up by Robert Demers, the provincial government's negotiator during the crisis, who told Radio-Canada Trudeau's initial reaction to the WMA suggestion was, "No, no, no!"
Tetley allows that grievous mistakes were made in the application of the war measures: the woefully indiscriminate raids on people's homes and arrests in the police sweeps, a blend of Keystone Kops and KGB, that hauled in many utter innocents and some celebrities with sovereignist leanings, such as poets Gaston Miron and Gerald Godin, chanteuse Pauline Julien; holding detainees too long without access to lawyers, and excessive detention of the clearly guiltless; failure by the authorities to adequately explain the WMA application to the public.
He says the latter has given rise to the pervasive myth that all civil liberties were suspended by the act when in fact political gatherings were not banned and criticism of the WMA was freely allowed; only overt support for the FLQ and political violence was proscribed. He cites a visiting European diplomat's bemusement at seeing "opponents of the regime complaining with loud cries on the national television in prime time that they had been reduced to silence by the government."
In all 497 people were arrested in the war measures roundups. Of these, only 62 were ever charged and only 18 convicted of complicity with and being accessories to the FLQ. War measures defenders tend to maintain that none suffered damage remotely comparable to that inflicted on Pierre Laporte and his
family. Complaints were subsequently heard by the provincial ombudsman and of 238 filed, 103 were found to merit compensation, up to $30,000 in some cases.
For all that went wrong, the WMA served its purpose in defusing a volatile situation that was brewing, with pro-FLQ rallies and student strikes and occupations in sympathy with the terrorists, says Tetley. "(It) prevented demonstrations and marches in favour of the FLQ, thus avoiding violent confrontations with the police as well as damage to private and public property. It was astounding how the violence ended and the confrontations planned by the FLQ and its sympathizers did not take place."
In this he's backed by Julien Giguere, who headed the Montreal police anti-terrorist squad at the time. "It put a plug on the volcano that was set to explode."
Some sovereignists, if not the movement as a whole, have good reason to feel shame about the events of that October, Tetley suggests, not because of any disrepute cast on them by the WMA, but rather their own conduct at the time which was on the whole more supportive of the terrorists than the government. He cites an open letter at the height of the crisis issued by leading PQ figures, including Levesque, prominent nationalist academics and top union leaders urging further negotiations with the kidnappers and the possible release of what they called "political prisoners" who were, in fact, convicted criminals sentenced for bombings, robberies and killings in aid of the felquiste cause.
"Those persons who acted unwisely at the time, either by supporting the FLQ or by not opposing the group until it was too late, today refrain from dealing with their own actions and those of the FLQ," he writes.
"Instead they deflect attention from themselves by talking incessantly of the War Measures Act and the 'apprehended insurrection.' " Among these he cites Montreal's ultra-sovereignist Societe Saint-Jean Baptiste, which will mark this year's crisis anniversary with the gala unveiling of a monument on its headquarters front lawn to commemorate the "prisoners of opinion" rounded up under the WMA.
Historian Jack Granatstein has the distinction of being cited in both books, in the one for his initial opposition to the act and in the other for his subsequent reversal on the issue. "I came to believe that escalating was a much more real possibility than I had thought that October," he said in an interview. "I didn't like Trudeau, never voted for him, but on this one I've come to think he was dead right, and that essentially the crazies in the sovereignist movement were tamed."
While the debate rages on, the War Measures Act is long off the books. It was replaced shortly after the crisis by the Public Order Bill in 1971 and later by the Emergencies Act of 1988. The current law allows for extraordinary measures in times of perceived emergency, but makes them subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and parliamentary approval.
Even so, that doesn't make Canada a land of unassailable civil liberties, said Bouthillier, pointing to the 1,100 people arrested during last summer's anti-summit demonstrations, many as indiscriminately as those hauled in by the WMA dragnet. "There's something unhealthy in saying (the WMA) shouldn't be talked about. If it's just forgotten, who knows if they'll do the same thing in 10 years or 20. Ask the people in Toronto what they think."
Whether it was Trudeau's darkest hour may be debatable. That it was Quebec's darkest hour in modern times is undeniable.
hbauch@montrealgazette.com

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