by Conrad Black
The Quebec election of April 29, 1970, signalled the beginning of a sea change in the province. Jean-Jacques Bertrand, a profoundly decent man but a political journeyman now out of touch with the evolving Quebec (the son-in-law of one of Duplessis’s early backers, Louis A. Giroux), suffered not only a severe loss of his nationalist base to Lévesque’s Parti Québécois (PQ) but a chunk of rural conservatives to the Créditistes, who returned as a provincial party for the first time since Duplessis battered them into insensibility in 1952. Robert Bourassa’s Liberals won 45 per cent of the vote, down from 47 in 1966, but rose from 50 to 72 constituencies, as the Union Nationale descended from 41 to 20 per cent and from 56 to 17 members. Lévesque’s PQ took 23 per cent of the vote and 7 members (Lévesque was not one of them), and the Créditistes took 11 per cent of the vote and 12 seats. It was a massive mandate for Bourassa, but the Péquiste (this was the agreed adjective in reference to the PQ) threat could now finally be seen vividly.
The rule of thumb was that the Quebec electorate was divided into five approximately equal blocs: (1) the outright French-speaking, rouge, federalists and (2) the non-French, and these two groups were practically en bloc Liberal; (3) the conservative bleus, still Union Nationale, (4) the nationalists, now PQ, and (5) the floating vote. The Liberals should have been able to pick up most of the bleus, but the growth of the 9 per cent separatist vote in 1966 to 24 per cent was startling. Even though the sovereignty-association flim-flam muddied the waters slightly, the goal of the PQ was an independent republic, and that was the burden of all their interminable and repetitive oratory and polemics about “liberated counties,” self-determination, and so forth. Quebec was headed to a rendezvous with the silent aspiration of the centuries when, as Drapeau had said to de Gaulle, the habitants had hung their culture on the barnyard door.
Bourassa had promised “100,000 jobs” and was soon running a young, lookalike (except for a few Lesage holdovers such as labour minister Pierre Laporte), and rather clichéd government, and was not presuming to argue much with Trudeau, when the political climate changed dramatically with the abduction from his Montreal home of the British trade commissioner in Montreal, James Cross, on the morning of October 5, 1970, by four young men of what they called the Liberation Cell of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). The cell declared that Cross would be executed unless seven demands were met, including the payment of half a million dollars in gold and the release of twenty-three designated political prisoners who had been convicted of complicity in bombing incidents (one of which resulted in a fatality in 1963). The police were only able to identify and release the name of one of the kidnappers, Jacques Lanctôt. The Canadian and Quebec governments rejected the demands but did engage in negotiations and made the concession of having the FLQ’s extremely inflammatory manifesto read on the French-language national news. In a considerable feat of self-control, Radio-Canada’s chief newsreader, Gaétan Montreuil, expressionlessly read the manifesto’s attacks on business and finance, references to Québécois as “a society of terrorized slaves … jeered at and repressed on [their] own territory,” and its description of Trudeau as a “tapette” (“faggot” – he was at this point a bachelor, but had had many relationships with women*
).
Negotiations and investigations continued, and the FLQ said that the threat on the life of Cross had been “temporarily suspended” on October 8 (and they secured the medicine he needed for his blood pressure), but they set a “final deadline” for 6 p.m. on October 10. Bourassa, in a display of normalcy, had gone to a pre-scheduled series of meetings in New York, and the Quebec minister of justice, Jérôme Choquette, announced that he would reply at 5:30 p.m. on that day. He revealed to Mitchell Sharp, acting prime minister, his plan to release five of the prisoners and the promise of a “ministry of social peace.” Sharp was very unhappy with this and eventually told Choquette, after consultations, that this would cause the federal government to “dissociate” itself from the Quebec government. Trudeau spoke to Bourassa, who prevailed on Choquette to hold the line as Trudeau, Sharp, and the federal justice minister, John Turner, had asked. By the time of Choquette’s speech, the stakes had already been raised sharply by the abduction on October 10 of labour minister Laporte, effectively the second most important figure in Bourassa’s government, while he was playing touch football with his nephew outside his house in the South Shore suburb of Saint-Lambert. These kidnappers described themselves as the Chenier Cell of the FLQ. René Lévesque and the editor of Le Devoir, Claude Ryan, urged the release of some prisoners in exchange for the release of the two captives. (Trudeau later dismissed this in an adaptation of Lord Acton’s maxim that originated with writer Kildare Dobbs: “Lack of power corrupts and absolute lack of power corrupts absolutely.”) There was some public support for the FLQ and a rally of three thousand students, unionists, and other militants took place at the Paul Sauvé Arena on October 15. Both Trudeau and Bourassa had concluded that there could be no further indulgence of the FLQ and that drastic measures would have to be taken. The only instrument at hand was the War Measures Act, dating from 1914, a draconian statute to deal with war, invasion, or real or apprehended insurrection, which had only been invoked during the two world wars. (Its provisions had stampeded Duplessis into his catastrophic election call in 1939.)
While the FLQ sympathizers were fulminating at the Paul Sauvé Arena, the federal cabinet voted to impose the War Measures Act, which took effect and was publicly declared at 4 a.m. on October 16. Almost five hundred suspects of potentially seditious behaviour were rounded up for interrogation and subject to detention for up to ninety days. Habeas corpus was suspended, political rallies were banned, and membership in the FLQ was declared to be a criminal offence. Trudeau announced all this in a temperately worded and presented statement in both languages on all radio and television stations. He said, “These measures are as offensive to me as I am sure they are to you” and pledged that all issues would be resolved “in the calm atmosphere of Canadian court rooms.” It was an excellent message perfectly delivered.
On October 17, the FLQ directed police to the Canadian Forces air base at Saint-Hubert, where Laporte’s body was found in the trunk of a Chevrolet; he had been strangled to death by his own gold neck chain. This was revealed on October 18. Trudeau again spoke very appropriately, of the deceased and of the monstrous crime that had occurred, and stated that “the FLQ has sown the seeds of its own destruction.”7 There was a massive state funeral at Notre-Dame Basilica in Place d’Armes amid immense security, including tanks. All surviving members of the National Assembly, Trudeau, and all of Quebec’s political leadership at all levels attended. The rest of October and November passed as police combed the Montreal area and searched for the culprits and the Liberation Cell. They found them on December 2 on Rue des Récollets in North Montreal. Safe conduct to Cuba was arranged for the Liberation Cell in exchange for the release of Cross, unharmed. Two members of the Chenier Cell, Francis Simard and Bernard Lortie, were soon arrested, and the other two, Paul and Jacques Rose, were arrested in a farmhouse south of Montreal. The Laporte murderers were sentenced to eight years, twenty years, and, in two cases, life in prison. The Liberation Cell was not happy in Cuba and moved on to France, and after eight or nine years three of them returned to Quebec and each served less than two years in prison. Terrorism never caught on in Quebec again. Trudeau handled the crisis with great tactical skill and strength of character, which was universally admired in Canada and gained him much respect in the world. He took direct charge of the response, and while some of his reflections to the press – including a gratuitous reference to “weak-kneed bleeding hearts,” as if the civil rights concerns that were raised were mere cowardice – were excessive, he earned a status as a single combat warrior.
Only a few of the nearly five hundred people arrested under the War Measures Act were prosecuted, and just a handful were convicted of trivial offences. Huff and puff as they might from time to time, French Ca
nadians were not much more motivated to armed revolt than other Canadians were, and even most separatists were just as opposed to kidnapping and murder as less politically energetic Canadians were. It must be added that the performance of the police was more farcical than, if not as lethal as, that of the revolutionaries. They stormed into the home of poet Gérald Godin and the chansonnière Pauline Julien, a gaminish and very vocal separatist (of the Édith Piaf café school, but with a less husky voice, longer hair, and an overbite) but far from a terrorist, flicked on the lights, and said, “Put your clothes on, Pauline Julien, you’re coming with us.” (The couple was released after eight days without charges.) So absurd was the list of insurrectionist suspects devised by the Montreal and provincial police that Gérard Pelletier’s son had great difficulty dissuading the police from continuing for more than two hours to ransack his father’s home in Montreal looking for FLQ literature, although Pelletier was the secretary of state of Canada and had entered Parliament in 1965 with Trudeau and Marchand to promote federalism in Quebec, and had, albeit reluctantly, voted with the cabinet to impose the War Measures Act the day before.8 Not at all comical but equally indicative of official ineptitude, the soldier assigned to protect the finance minister, Edgar Benson, accidentally killed himself with his own rifle, and Trudeau had to start day one of the War Measures regime comforting the minister.9
The initial briefing to the cabinet by the RCMP lasted two hours on October 19, and it was obvious even to the most unworldly of them that the police had not the remotest idea what they were doing. The ministers were shocked by the amateurism and ignorance of the federal police. The best that can be said is that they demonstrated what foreign territory this kind of activity was in Canada. It was not until the release in March 1979 of the Royal Commission report of Alberta justice David McDonald that the public got a serious glimpse of what a shambles the whole affair had really been. What came principally to light was that the prime minister had ordered not just a definitive rooting out of terrorists and political lawlessness, but – in a pioneering initiative that went well beyond anything Duplessis had ever attempted – an official, surreptitious, and in fact illegal attack on separatism. Trudeau sincerely believed that separatism was not far from sedition, even though Lévesque never encouraged violence. Lévesque did, however, leave no one in any doubt that he sympathized with the “frustrations” that propelled people to violence. He was very slow to criticize the FLQ until Laporte, with whom he had served in the senior Quebec media and then in Lesage’s government, was murdered, and he routinely explained away bombings as understandable if lamentable. But it was un-Canadian and a severe breach of precedented powers for the federal government to conduct a lengthy harassment of a political movement that was operating within the law and was, by the time the Royal Commission report was released, the duly elected government of Quebec.
The international climate was one of Che Guevara, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Chicago Seven, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in West Germany, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the student and general strike in France, Tariq Ali and others in Britain – but Guevara was caught and summarily executed in Bolivia, the Cultural Revolution was a disaster, most of the Baader-Meinhof Gang committed suicide in custody, and the others were all surmounted and routed by legitimate recourse to the weight of democratic opinion backed by law enforcement, by Nixon with his silent majority, de Gaulle, and others, and there was no need or justification for Trudeau to go to the extremes he did. Between December 1970 and July 1975, the Disruptive Tactics section of the Montreal RCMP broke into the office of the Toronto left-wing group Praxis; stole documents and committed arson; circulated a fraudulent FLQ communique urging violence that the RCMP had in fact composed; recruited FLQ informers by what was admitted to be “force and pressure”; urged cabinet to blackball twenty-one civil servants as members of “non-parliamentary opposition,” though nothing more serious than voting NDP was actually found against any of them; burned down a barn in rural Quebec that belonged to an unoffending person to prevent a meeting of the FLQ with the American black radical organization the Black Panthers; broke into the office of the left-wing Agence de Presse Libre du Québec in Montreal and stole two hundred files; broke into the so-called Permanence Nationale of the Parti Québécois and stole the entire computerized PQ membership list; and screened federal government job applicants to weed out separatist sympathizers.
This is all a bit tawdry by Canadian standards, but it is still pretty tame compared with the heavy-handed antics of other countries, such as the American police simply murdering Black Panthers in their home in the dead of night in Chicago in December 1969. Trudeau spread money around Quebec with a figurative steamroller, but the licence the separatists felt they had to use federal government grants for their own anti-federal purposes was annoying. The whole affair was made more distasteful because Canadians, French and English, so overwhelmingly support the police whatever they do. Polling showed 85 per cent were in favour of the use of the War Measures Act, and a heavy majority in both cultural parts of Canada favoured continuation of the War Measures regime long after the crisis had passed. This was because the powers were so little abused; reaction would certainly have been different if the federal police and the army had been routinely shooting demonstrators or torturing those whom they interrogated. And there was a good deal of inflammatory and violent rhetoric from the more militant secessionists. On balance, given that the breakup of the country was under discussion, it was all fairly civilized. And Trudeau was sincere and passionate in his view that it was his task to maintain the integrity of the federal state, and he was not under any illusions about how disdainful of the traditional concepts of individual rights many of the extreme Quebec nationalists were. It is the nature of even relatively restrained revolutions that the originators are the Kerenskys and the Mirabeaus and matters move to the left and the more inflexible in method (unless it is not a social revolution but, like the American Revolution, the displacement of a foreign bourgeoisie by a local one). On balance, Trudeau was impressive and intellectually rigorous, and his concerns about where separatism could lead, though they caused him to authorize some actions that are not defensible, were far from unfounded. At least the federal police ceased to be Keystone Kops improvisers and developed a limited aptitude for internal security matters. The proof that Trudeau did not stifle democracy is the partial success of Lévesque’s party in the subsequent twenty-five years.
In June 1971, in Victoria, Trudeau and the premiers came tantalizingly close to agreeing on a formula for amending the Constitution, succeeding that of Davie Fulton and Guy Favreau, and permitting the completion of its patriation to Canada. To block any amendment, Ontario and Quebec would have a full veto and British Columbia in effect a half-veto, and the other provinces would have to provide a basic majority. This was concerted on a moonlight cruise, where the host, long-serving B.C. premier W.A.C. Bennett, banned alcohol, but some of the official entourages brought their own and an atmosphere of jocular horse-trading ensued. The provinces would also have some say in the nomination of Supreme Court judges, and Trudeau would have his Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the agreed status of the English and French languages, and a recognition of the durable distribution of constitutional powers. All was agreed, but in subsequent weeks Robert Bourassa’s capable and influential health minister, Claude Castonguay, and his insidious intergovernmental deputy minister, Claude Morin, as well as the editor of Le Devoir, Claude Ryan, now an advocate of special status for Quebec, all persuaded Bourassa he could not proceed without control of social policy. Trudeau should have conceded social policy on the cruise, as he did it a couple of years later anyway, and it was quite clearly a provincial domain. This agreement would probably have been reopened later, but it would have been an important milestone and spared the country immense friction and official tortuosity that has continued ever since.
There really wasn’t much else to show for Trudeau’s first term as prime minister other than the stead
ily increasing flow of money to Quebec, with a trickle to other have-not provinces, and the dramatic episode of October 1970. There was an endless number of white papers and committees and commissions and internal reforms, and Michael Pitfield, the clerk of the Privy Council, devised new ministries, such as Urban Affairs and Science and Technology, but the ministries were ineffectual, ephemeral, and a waste of money, and none of the rest of it amounted to anything, as is almost always the case with such enterprises. Trudeau and his inner entourage had that blasé flippancy of people who have never really done anything but are swept by an esoteric tide of events into positions of great influence, confirming them in their overconfidence that all they need do where others have failed is to implement the conventional wisdom of decades, as if this were a revelation that has been vouchsafed to them alone. Trudeau is frequently billed by his supporters as a philosopher king, but he had a very unoriginal mind. He had a good knowledge of French and English literature from a solid education in the humanities, but his claims to being a lawyer and an economist were tenuous. His father was a wealthy man who had died when Pierre was not yet an adult and left him comfortably off for life. Pierre Trudeau was a traditional French bourgeois tightwad, and it killed him to spend anything. He had a simplistic and contrarian view of almost everything but was a devout Roman Catholic – though he had objected to Cardinal Villeneuve’s enthusiasm for the war effort in the Second World War and was a secularizer in the Duplessis and Lesage years. His answer to everything was to throw public sector money at it with the cavalier disregard for the origins of that money of someone who has never had to earn much himself. Trudeau entered politics to make his federalist arguments at his leisure and had to be persuaded by Jean Marchand to accept to be Lester Pearson’s parliamentary assistant, as he did not wish to alter his rather relaxed and self-indulgent style of living. He only gradually came to see the potential to succeed Pearson when his legal reforms won him the favour of the Liberals’ reform wing, and his resistance to Daniel Johnson’s call for increased provincial rights brought him to the front of the federalist column at a decisive time. The Liberals alternated French and English leaders, Marchand did not speak English well and as a labour leader was an unlikely choice (and wasn’t interested anyway), and Pearson, aged seventy, accident-prone and exhausted after flying by the seat of his pants through such heavy weather that the plane was shuddering, had to retire. The music stopped and all eyes were on Trudeau. But what very few commentators or even Trudeau biographers have remotely grasped is that nothing counted except the battle with the separatists, and in this one area Trudeau was in some ways perfect.