By DOUGLAS MARTIN - Michel Chartrand, a firebrand Canadian labor leader whose support of leftist politics and Quebec nationalism, including its most violent permutations, provoked the Trudeau government to summarily jail him in October 1970, died on April 12 in Montreal. He was 93.
His daughter Suzanne G. Chartrand said the cause was kidney cancer.
Mr. Chartrand’s personal trajectory mirrored that of Quebec’s labor unions, from dutiful allies of the Roman Catholic Church to a militant force that supported Quebec’s independence. A big, rumpled man with a bushy mustache, he was a Trappist monk as a youth and became, by his own indisputable description, “an angry old man.”
The separatist movement became violent in the 1960s when radicals staged a series of bombings to press their demand that Quebec secede from Canada and become a sovereign state. Their aim was to exploit French Canadian feelings that the English had never given Quebec a fair shake.
When separatists kidnapped two officials during what came to be called the October Crisis in 1970, Mr. Chartrand, then chairman of Montreal’s federation of trade unions, brazenly expressed his support for them.
His stand buoyed the Front for the Liberation of Quebec, the radical separatist group that had taken responsibility for the crime, and further alienated him from a vast majority of Canadians, including Quebecers, who polls showed strongly disapproved of the group.
The crisis began on Oct. 5, when four armed men kidnapped the British trade commissioner, James Cross. They issued a communiqué saying they represented the F.L.Q. and set stiff conditions for Mr. Cross’s release.
On Oct. 10, Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s labor minister, was kidnapped. He was killed on Oct. 17. (Mr. Cross was released unharmed on Dec. 3.)
At the peak of the crisis, on Oct. 16, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, an unprecedented step in peacetime. Civil liberties were suspended, and almost 500 people were arrested, including Mr. Chartrand.
The police had no warrant and made no charges, but Mr. Chartrand had hardly hidden his sympathies. He spoke publicly of using firearms and dynamite to resist authority. At a rally at the University of Montreal, he persuaded nearly 1,000 people to sign a manifesto supporting the goals of the Front for the Liberation of Quebec.
Prosecutors settled on a charge of sedition. At his trial, in 1971, a vulgar outburst by Mr. Chartrand led to a year’s prison sentence for contempt, but all charges were ultimately dropped; he had served four months in jail awaiting trial.
Quebec went on, peacefully, to attain ever greater autonomy, as successive governments used secession as a threat.
Michel Rafael Chartrand was born in Montreal on Dec. 20, 1916, the 13th of 14 children. He attended the same secondary school as Mr. Trudeau. In 1933, he entered a monastery in Oka, Quebec, where he was known as brother Marcellin and, remarkably, kept his vow of silence for two years.
He left the order to devote his life to fighting injustice. His inspiration was the firing of his father from the Quebec Public Works Department, where the elder Mr. Chartrand had worked for 44 years, The Montreal Gazette said. He was dismissed for discovering fraud and revealing it.
Mr. Chartrand attended the University of Montreal, where he joined an officers’ training program. He left the university to protest army training documents’ being printed only in English. He later fought the military draft.
A transformative event was his helping to organize a strike of asbestos mine workers in Quebec’s Eastern Townships in 1949. Though the strike failed, historians credit it with helping to nudge Quebec out of political quiescence.
Mr. Chartrand is survived by two sons, four daughters, 12 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
His wife, Simonne Monet-Chartrand, died in 1993. They wed in 1942 against the wishes of her parents and friends. Three priests refused to marry them, and the one who finally agreed to did so only after grilling Miss Monet on whether she was ready to spend the rest of her life with “a fanatic.”