Just Watch Me

by John English

  After Laporte’s brutal murder, the FLQ continued to hold James Cross hostage in an apartment. Disgusted and angry, Cross now refused even to speak with his kidnappers. “I hated the lot of them,” he said later, “and would cheerfully have killed them if the opportunity arose.” He described them as primitive ideologues fired by the revolutionary sentiments of the sixties. He passed the time watching television, reading the literature scattered around—the writings of Pierre Vallieres, the Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and, bizarrely, Agatha Christie mysteries—until December 2. That evening the kidnappers put handcuffs on him, told him the police knew where he was and that they expected an attack. The next morning, however, a federal government negotiator appeared at the door, and they reached an agreement: the Chenier cell members would release Cross in exchange for sanctuary in Cuba. With Cross squashed between them, and accompanied by a lawyer, the kidnappers left the apartment in the battered car in which they had seized him on October 5. At the Expo 67 site on St. Helen’s Island, which had temporarily been declared a Cuban consulate, he was finally released, and from there the kidnappers were flown to Cuba. (In the late seventies, they returned to Montreal and were given very light prison sentences, most of which were then suspended.)30

  In crises, few people remain consistent, but the negotiation was arguably not a capitulation: it reflected the offer made by the federal government at the beginning of Cross’s ordeal. Trudeau always criticized governments such as Brazil and West Germany for negotiating with terrorists for the release of diplomatic or political hostages—in both those countries, he asserted, kidnappings and violence continued regardless. In Quebec at least, after October 1970, kidnappings ended. And Trudeau never deviated from his line. When Gordon Robertson asked him whether he stood firm against ransom and the release of prisoners accused of criminal offences, Trudeau promptly said yes. If Robertson himself were kidnapped, he added for emphasis, there would be no ransom. He would bargain for time, but “law and order in Canada … [would come] first.”31

  There is no doubt that Trudeau’s steely will dominated the direction the government took, although Marchand and Lalonde sometimes steered the ship. Kierans, no later admirer, wrote in 2001 about Trudeau’s Cabinet presence: “Trudeau, as usual, was calm, fully in control. Very, very impressive.”32 Turner reminisced that “[those days were] the closest I ever felt to [Trudeau]. We were like buddies in combat. I mean, when you stand beside a guy who’s eyeball-to-eyeball with danger and he doesn’t blink, you can’t help but feel admiration.” Otto Lang claimed that Trudeau’s leadership made the final decision to invoke the War Measures Act as strongly supported as any Cabinet decision he could recall. Even Gordon Robertson, whose memoir is highly critical of Trudeau’s later career, argues that “Trudeau’s firm leadership, putting the preservation of law and order above any other consideration, was probably the most important single contribution he made to the preservation of peace and democracy in Canada during his time as prime minister.”33

  A CTV poll released on November 15, 1970, revealed that only 5 percent of Canadians disapproved of Trudeau’s actions, while 87 percent supported the invocation of the War Measures Act. Jacques Parizeau, while dissenting strongly from Trudeau’s position, told his biographer in 1999 that, objectively, he admired Trudeau: he was the first French Canadian in a century who said, “I am not weak, and will never be judged by what I have said or not said because I act on things. I admire this approach, and Trudeau is not weak.”

  Power, as Parizeau recognized, was central to the drama that October. For Trudeau, democratic legitimacy rested with elected officials. The petition published in Le Devoir on October 15, which had infuriated Trudeau, Lalonde, Marchand, and Pelletier, was based on the argument that the elected government in Quebec City was weak—an opinion shared in Ottawa. However, the conclusions reached in Ottawa and by Ryan, Lévesque, and their co-signatories in Quebec were fundamentally different. Trudeau rejected the notion that there were “political prisoners”—the term employed in the petition—and deplored the signatories’ claim to speak for the broader population. Not least, his anger stemmed from the fact that fourteen of the sixteen signatories had supported the PQ in the earlier provincial election. When Ryan, who had not supported the PQ, continued to advocate negotiation even after Laporte’s death and urged that elected officials turn to others to reinforce their weakened state, Trudeau and Lalonde leaked the story about the meeting of Le Devoir’s editorial staff and Ryan’s musing about a provisional government. Peter C. Newman persuaded the Toronto Star to publish the account of that staff meeting. Trudeau, turning Lord Acton’s phrase around, famously said of Ryan: “Lack of power corrupts, but absolute lack of power corrupts absolutely.”34

  Ryan initially denied the story when it appeared, but then, in two articles at the end of October, he confirmed that on October 11, before they published the petition, he had spoken with four Le Devoir journalists about the possibility of a parallel government or a government of public safety incorporating outsiders. One of those present, the eminent journalist Michel Roy, later said that he was flabbergasted by Ryan’s comments. While admitting the meeting and the notion of an alternative, if not a provisional, government, Ryan himself said that it was “no plot, perhaps, but an idea.” Lévesque was not present at the meeting at Le Devoir, and he ridiculed the notion that there was a plan for a “provisional government.” Yet in his own 1986 memoirs, he states that Ryan and others were “even ready, it appears, to envisage the perspective of a coalition government to strengthen backbones” in Quebec City.35 In the view of Ryan and his co-petitioners, the strengthening of backbones did not mean that the provincial government should take harsh action against the FLQ. Rather, it meant that it should “defy” Trudeau and carry out its own negotiations with the FLQ.36

  The differences between the petitioners and Trudeau’s group were intellectual, political, and personal. Their bitter exchanges illustrate what Freud called the fierceness of narrow differences. Later Pelletier indicated that “Trudeau jumped too quickly on the story of the parallel Cabinet” and Lalonde was of the same mind, but while accepting the influence of “the story” on events, Lalonde emphasized the great uncertainty of the moment and the clear evidence of “deterioration.” In his excellent biography of Jacques Parizeau, then the recent PQ convert who was serving as president of the executive council of the party, Pierre Duchesne describes the mood of PQ leaders after the assassination of Laporte. Parizeau was trying to explain to those around him, especially younger party members, what was happening: “First, he explained that the crisis divided contemporaries within the Quebec society. The Marchands, Pelletiers, and Trudeaus would visit the Parizeaus, Laurins, and Lévesques. ‘We would dine together as couples. Sometimes, our wives knew each other and shopped together. We went out together socially.’” Trudeau echoed Parizeau’s comments in giving his own reaction to the October Crisis in a later interview: when MPs asked him who those “guys” were in Montreal, he replied: “They aren’t Maoists, anarchists, or Trotskyists: they’re people we know. But do you even recognize them? They probably drink their coffee in the same establishments, walk in the same streets, and attend the same shows we do. Yet we didn’t have a clue.” People like us—“notre milieu,” as he said: his students at the university, Marchand’s “brothers” in the unions, his colleagues at Cité libre, their taxi drivers, and sometimes their oldest friends. Long before, Trudeau himself had believed that Canada took political prisoners—Montreal mayor Camillien Houde, his father’s friend, had been locked up for speaking out against the war, and Trudeau had used language similar to the wording of the FLQ manifesto in 1942, when he’d denounced Mackenzie King in an angry public speech for his abuse of powers under the War Measures Act. He, too, had then spouted rhetoric that dripped with contempt and the promise of violence. In the sixties, however, he was on the other side of the barricades, denouncing his youthful and controversial mentor François Hertel f
or suggesting the use of violence, breaking with his oldest friend Pierre Vadeboncoeur for consorting too closely with the revolutionary left, and publicly ridiculing those who gave the violent separatists comfort. “Notre milieu” had shattered into fragments.37

  Parizeau agreed: October 1970 was a turning point. Before the crisis, “we could completely disagree on our positions, while maintaining the greatest respect for each other. We realize that we hold incompatible views, but we are well-mannered and good companions…. Trudeau has destroyed this.” In Trudeau’s eyes, the decorum disintegrated and civility ended when his former companions spoke of political prisoners, undermined the legitimacy of democratic government, and came close to the murderous flame of the FLQ.* To Parizeau and his colleagues, the break came with the imposition of the War Measures Act, the revelation that many PQ members were on police lists, and the arrest of numerous PQ supporters: “As soon as they begin putting our friends in jail, it’s a whole new story. They’ve become an autocracy.” In future decades both sides of the divide would cling to their separate interpretations of those mid-October events with a furious tenacity.38

  Two major issues were interpreted in fundamentally different ways by the two sides: the invocation of the War Measures Act and the impact of the actions of both the federal and the provincial governments on Quebec and Canadian history. The disputes over these matters were bitter, and the acrimony soon spread beyond Ottawa and Montreal. In the case of the War Measures Act, for example, historian Jack Granatstein addressed five thousand students crowded around the flagpole at Toronto’s newly established York University for a mid-October 1970 “rally for Canada.” Granatstein was the sole speaker at the gathering who did not endorse the federal government’s decision. A supporter of the NDP at the time, he argued, echoing Tommy Douglas, that Trudeau had used “a mallet to kill a flea” and that “this direct attack on civil liberties could be used to lock up not only FLQ activists” but also hippies and troublemakers everywhere. The crowd booed loudly. Never before had Granatstein feared “being torn limb from limb, but that day [he] was frightened.” His fellow historians at the ceremony, Ramsay Cook and Jack Saywell, cautiously supported the government. Later, Cook and Granatstein reversed their positions as Cook developed doubts about the government’s handling of the crisis and Granatstein came to believe that “Trudeau’s bold actions … moved the idea of separatism completely out of the conspiracy-charged FLQ cells and into the bright light of public debate.” Afterwards, the debate, though nasty, bitter, and long, was fought in democratic forums by elected governments and political actors.39 That, in Granatstein’s view, was Trudeau’s big achievement.

  Trudeau always criticized governments such as those of Brazil and West Germany that had negotiated with terrorists for the release of diplomatic or political hostages. In both these cases, he asserted, the kidnapping and the violence had continued. After October 1970, however, kidnappings ended in Quebec, and democratic governments of the twenty-first century are more likely to follow the pattern set out by Trudeau and his colleagues than the one recommended by his opponents in the petition of October 15. Nevertheless, the extensive discussion of those times in his memoirs betrays how very troubled Trudeau was by these events, by the alienation from old friends, and by the implications of his actions for civil liberties.

  Margaret Sinclair was with Trudeau the night Laporte was killed. Earlier, they had argued about the War Measures Act because Margaret, then a leftist student, “sympathized” with “the ‘long-haired radicals’ being persecuted.” At 1 a.m. the telephone rang. “I heard Pierre say, ‘Oh, my God.’ Then, ‘Where did they find him?’ And I knew that Laporte was dead. Pierre put down the receiver,” she recalled, and “I heard him crying…. He was a shaken man: I watched him grow old before my eyes. It was as if Laporte’s death lay on his shoulders alone: he was the one who wouldn’t negotiate, and he was the man who would now have to take responsibility for the murder of an innocent man. It gave him a new bitterness; a hard sadness I had never seen before.”40

  Trudeau was sadder and harder, but he never doubted the decision he, Marchand, Lalonde, and his colleagues took. Laporte’s death was a savage blow, but in Trudeau’s view the autopsy it provoked broke a cycle of violence that profoundly threatened democracy in Quebec and Canada.

  * Trudeau had France and “foreign” influence on his mind when he wrote to Solicitor General George McIlraith on February 18, 1969, saying he was “somewhat disturbed … at the recent events at Sir George Williams University in Montreal [a major student riot], and particularly at suggestions that agents from foreign countries may be coming to Canada with the deliberate intention of fomenting unrest and disorder.” While admitting that the administration of justice was a provincial responsibility, he thought it “prudent to have the R.C.M. Police examine the security aspects of these developments.” Such a report should indicate “such federal responsibilities as the government may have in this respect.” Ironically, one of the riot’s leaders, Anne Cools, was later a Trudeau Liberal candidate who, after defeat, received a Senate appointment. Always a renegade, she later became a Conservative. TP MG26 020, vol. 22, file 12, LAC.

  * The outrageously comic Auf der Maur said that he had joined the left to meet women and that in those lively, radical times, “all it took … to arrange a full-scale riot in Montreal was a suggestion, and a lot of beer.” He edited the radical Last Post, which took up the cause of Montreal’s taxi drivers against the airport monopoly by Murray Hill limousines. Some FLQ activists were associated with the movement. Auf der Maur became a civic politician and a supporter of Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, who had been a drinking friend in the seventies. Montreal Gazette, April 8, 1998.

  * Jacques Hébert, perhaps Trudeau’s closest male friend and key member of La Ligue des droits de l’homme, Quebec’s leading civil liberties organization, joined with other Ligue officials in calling on prisoners soon after they were arrested and pointing out their rights. He later recalled that after one long day and night of travelling from home to home, talking to prisoners’ friends and families, he called Trudeau and told him: “You’re not making my life any easier.” In August 2007, when we spoke, he shrugged off the experience, lamented the whole affair, and was personally fiercely loyal to Trudeau. The most recent discussion of the role of such organizations in the October Crisis is found in Dominique Clément, Canada’s Rights Revolution: Social Movements and Social Change 1937–82 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), chap. 6.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  REASON AND PASSION

  The artist Joyce Wieland watched Pierre Trudeau intensely as he took power in 1968: she hoped he would become the critical link to the burgeoning currents of politics, art, and nationalism that she, a patriotic Canadian artist, craved. She began to quilt—an ordinary, women’s task—and created Reason over Passion, one of the most celebrated Canadian artistic works of the sixties. She was so taken with Trudeau that she and her husband, Michael Snow, decided to organize a reception for him in their New York loft, where they were living at the time. They invited a swarm of celebrities they knew, and when Trudeau arrived with his entourage, he quickly impressed them all with his knowledge of the “various art scenes in New York”—experimental films, avant-garde dance, and jazz. When Snow introduced him to drummer Milford Graves as the “greatest drummer in jazz,” Trudeau retorted: “Oh! Well, what about Max Roach?” Snow was astounded and enthralled, as was Wieland—temporarily.

  Trudeau, too, was captured by the moment and the artist, and he bought the French version of the quilt—La Raison avant la Passion—for 24 Sussex Drive. Bilingual, populist, feminist, and ironic, “reason over passion” became a metaphor for the times. When the National Gallery later presented an exhibition on the sixties, this iconic piece was at the centre. Curator Denise Leclerc expressed its ambiguity with her comment: “Here you’re saying ‘reason over passion,’ but this is a bed we’re talking about.” She relished t
he irony of a quilt symbolizing the rule of reason: “Here’s a man who insists on placing reason over passion—and yet, the political passions he created!”1

  Some of those passions subsided rapidly as Wieland, like others who shared her views, became disillusioned with Trudeau. She later claimed that the quilt and the New York party were a “joke” on Trudeau, a view Snow clearly did not share. She confessed that, initially, she was intensely attracted to Trudeau but that the excitement disappeared as she came to the conclusion that he was cold, with too little passion and too much reason. He was a “psychopath,” she said, whose government sucked in power, ruled autocratically, and revealed its brutal core when it invoked the War Measures Act. She went on to direct a film that celebrated the authenticity of the separatist Pierre Vallières.2

  Wieland’s change of mood mirrored, in extreme form, that of others on the nationalist left for whom Trudeau had been the political embodiment of the cultural revolution of that time. He was a vessel into which many poured their political passions, hoping to create an elixir that would cure the ills of a country divided between French and English and threatened by an imperialist America. The problems persisted, and Trudeau provided but a placebo—or, as Claude Ryan wrote, “slogans that barely touched the core of the problems.”3