by Nino Ricci
Perhaps reporters devoted so much attention to Trudeau’s social life because he failed to be especially controversial in his political one. At the conference, in the usual Canadian way, he set the tone for a constructive and peaceful discussion on the then tricky Rhodesia question, which had threatened to divide the conference on racial lines; and he reaffirmed Canada’s strong commitment to the Commonwealth, though he had earlier called it an anachronism. There was a complaint from one delegate that he had been a disappointment after the high expectations people had of him and that he had done more observing than intervening; there was also a complaint from Canadian students he had met with that he put off several of their questions by saying he would have to consult with his ministers before reaching a decision. The divide between the image and the reality was starting to show: beneath his panache lurked a typical Canadian politician. A year or so into his first term an interviewer said to him that after the great changes people had hoped for from him, his government didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. “I guess we’re not doing anything if you call running the country not doing anything,” Trudeau snapped back. The remark was less flippant than it sounded. For all his high talk about participatory democracy during the election and about “new guys with new ideas,” Trudeau had some fairly basic, traditional notions about how government worked and about what it should do. As prime minister he was simply following the position he had always taken during his years at Cité libre, that it was much more important for government to tend to bread-and-butter issues than waste its energies on “revolution.”
To the charge that his social activities cut into his political ones he might have answered as he had at Brébeuf: “The truth is that I work.” Those who knew him on Parliament Hill, from his cabinet ministers, to his advisers, to his house staff at 24 Sussex, always attested, as his teachers had, to his discipline. It was well known that he liked his sleep and that he never arrived at the office early or left late. But he never went home without a package of work, and woe to the minister who arrived at a meeting the next day without having prepared for it as thoroughly as Trudeau himself had.
Unlike many of the prime ministers who preceded him, Trudeau required that all substantial issues come before the entire Cabinet for discussion rather than being simply presented as a fait accompli by the responsible ministry. The measure ensured a greater level of Cabinet involvement in major decisions, even if it meant not only more work for Cabinet members but a slower pace of decision-making and a burgeoning bureaucracy, as each department struggled to keep on top of issues from other departments. As it had been at the Commonwealth conference, Trudeau’s preference was to observe discussion rather than dominate it and then to draw from what had emerged, a consensus style at odds with the common image of him as a man of set opinions with little tolerance for opposing views. Despite its drawbacks, Trudeau’s system not only held true to his promise to make government more democratic but made a great deal of sense, allowing the accumulated experience and expertise of the government’s senior members to be brought to bear on major questions. Since Trudeau’s time most prime ministers have reverted to the close-fisted style of old, keeping a much tighter rein on decision making.
Only halfway into his first term, Trudeau, in what became known as the October Crisis, faced perhaps the most formidable challenge of his entire political career, and one that came to define him in the eyes of Canadians in terms much different from his previous “swinger” image. On October 5, 1970, British diplomat James Cross was kidnapped from his home in Montreal by the separatist Front de libération du Québec. Five days later, only hours after the Quebec government turned down the demands of Cross’s captors, the FLQ struck again, kidnapping Trudeau’s old schoolmate Pierre Laporte, now provincial labour minister in the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa, while he was playing football with his family on his front lawn. This second kidnapping, described in an FLQ communiqué as an act of retaliation for the government’s intransigence, gave the impression of a high level of organization and sparked fears that the FLQ had embarked on a wideranging terror campaign.
The FLQ had been active in Quebec since 1963. Mainly a loose collection of “cells” that formed from time to time to carry out specific actions, it had no clear central leadership and an ideology that shifted through its various waves, at times narrowly nationalist and at others more broadly Marxist and revolutionary. One of its major figures, Pierre Vallières, had actually served as the editor of Cité libre in the early 1960s, as part of an effort to bring in a younger generation; Vallières had repaid the gesture by mocking the journal’s founders and calling for revolution. By the mid-1960s Vallières had joined the FLQ and had been implicated in several bombings; his memoir White Niggers of America, written while he was in prison, had become the bible of the FLQ movement. Since its formation, the FLQ had been implicated in six deaths and in more than two hundred bombings in Quebec, including one in the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1969 that blew out a wall of the building and left twenty-seven injured. The kidnappings of Cross and Laporte in October 1970, the first use of this tactic, suggested that the FLQ had graduated to a more sophisticated level of terrorism.
Less than a year earlier, Prime Minister Trudeau had met with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, at their request, as part of their Crusade for Peace tour. After the meeting, Lennon concluded, “If all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau, there would be world peace.” The October Crisis, however, would transform Trudeau’s image in many people’s minds from that of peace-loving hippie wannabe to one of cold, uncompromising autocrat. Much of that shift went back to a single twenty-second television clip in which young CBC reporter Tim Ralfe, eight days into the crisis, was seen confronting Trudeau on the steps of the Parliament Buildings, asking him about the sudden military presence on the Hill.
“There’s a lot bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns,” Trudeau said to him. “All I can say is go on and bleed. It’s more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weakkneed people who don’t like the looks of—”
“At any cost?” Ralfe interjected. “At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?”
Trudeau responded with the phrase that he would most be remembered for.
“Well, just watch me.”
Three days later, the man who had been praised by John Lennon for his peaceful ways invoked the War Measures Act and turned the country into a virtual police state, suspending civil liberties and sending tanks and thousands of troops into the streets of Montreal. Quebec police initiated an immediate crackdown, arresting without charge hundreds of supposed FLQ sympathizers—including well-known writers, entertainers, labour leaders, and members of the Parti Québécois—the vast majority of whom turned out to have no link to the crisis. The day after the measures were introduced, as if in direct retaliation for them, Pierre Laporte was discovered strangled to death in Montreal in the trunk of a car after an anonymous call to a local radio station.
At the time, there was overwhelming support in both Quebec and the rest of Canada for Trudeau’s hard-line stance, though in the following months and years, particularly as information began to emerge about police abuses not only at the time but both before and after the crisis, public attitudes began to shift, especially in Quebec. Most damning were the revelations that the RCMP had carried out a number of actions after the crisis to indicate continuing FLQ activity, including issuing false FLQ communiqués, stealing dynamite, and infamously burning down a barn that belonged to an imprisoned FLQ member’s mother, in an incident that was to become a symbol of RCMP perfidy. Given that anti-terrorist police had so infiltrated the FLQ by that point as to constitute virtually its only members, the RCMP activities seemed aimed not at terrorism but at discrediting the separatist movement as a whole and in particular the Parti Québécois, whose membership lists the RCMP stole in 1973 from the party offices in an action they called Operation H
am.
Trudeau correctly predicted that the murder of Pierre Laporte would be the death knell of the FLQ, which in fact completely lost public support afterwards. But the killing was not the death of separatism. On the contrary, the October Crisis seemed to push the separatist movement toward political maturity. Separatism was now able to present itself as a peaceful alternative to the FLQ while still drawing on the underlying support for the FLQ’s objectives and on the memory of federal troops occupying the streets of Montreal. Trudeau’s “Just watch me” began to seem more and more the epitome of the arrogance of the federal government, which was willing to ride roughshod over the aspirations of the Quebec people in order to safeguard its own power. In English Canada, meanwhile, the statement came to represent the betrayal of the ideals that the 1960s generation had invested in Trudeau, who was now revealing himself as merely another pillar of the establishment.
The actual details of the October Crisis, however, give a much more nuanced impression of Trudeau’s role. Trudeau’s “Just watch me” interview, for instance, reads completely differently when seen in its entirety than it does in the provocative clip that it got reduced to by most of the media. The exchange between Ralfe and Trudeau actually went on some seven and a half minutes and was more in the way of a spirited debate than an interview. What comes across in Trudeau is not so much a sense of arrogance as of generosity. In all the tension of the moment, with the troops swarming the hill and the crisis in its eighth day, he stopped to give Ralfe his undivided attention, openly soliciting his opinions and on more than one occasion ignoring the questions of other reporters clamouring for attention around them. Ralfe had managed to catch Trudeau’s interest by raising a legitimate question: what was the appropriate use of force in a democracy? Much of what comes across as belligerence in the shortened piece sounds merely like the usual Trudeau hyperbole in the full interview. On the whole, Trudeau got the better of Ralfe, presenting a logical defence for his actions to which his “Just watch me” was simply a punchy conclusion. As he continued on his way, he gave Ralfe a smile and a pat on the shoulder and commended him on playing the devil’s advocate.
Trudeau’s behaviour during the crisis, in fact, showed very little bravado and a good deal of integrity and restraint. From the beginning he took the position that there should be no capitulation to the terrorists’ demands—which included the release of so-called “political prisoners”—on the legitimate grounds that conciliation would only encourage further terrorist acts. In future years, this logic would in fact come to define the official response to terrorism around the world. Trudeau was as good as his word; at the time he even made it clear in private to his future wife, Margaret, whom he was already secretly seeing, that he would take the same line even if she or one of their children were ever to be kidnapped.
In Quebec, Premier Bourassa at first under-reacted to the crisis, failing to cancel an official visit to New York after Cross was kidnapped, and then instantly went into a siege mentality after the Laporte kidnapping, holing up his entire Cabinet in a Montreal hotel under strict security. Meanwhile Mitchell Sharp, the external affairs minister, had, without Trudeau’s permission, agreed to let the abductors’ manifesto be read on air, believing it was so scattered and extreme that it could only hurt the FLQ cause. The tactic backfired: students in Quebec immediately began to express sympathy with the kidnappers’ demands and to organize rallies and protests in support of the FLQ. In addition, a petition signed by sixteen prominent Quebec personalities, including labour leaders, businessmen, academics, and Trudeau’s old associates René Lévesque, now leader of the fledgling Parti Québécois, and Claude Ryan, at the time editor of Le Devoir, called on the Quebec government to negotiate with the abductors “despite and against all obstruction from outside of Quebec.”
Bourassa, however—who at many important moments over the course of his career would suffer a failure of nerves—had neither the will nor the desire to face the crisis alone and implored Trudeau to send in troops to assist his police in tracking down the abductors. Rumours abounded of arms caches, of bomb threats, of further FLQ cells planning further abductions, and Bourassa apparently feared that the province was on the verge of revolution. Under the National Defence Act, Trudeau was legally obliged to meet Bourassa’s request for troops. But the decision whether to accede to Bourassa’s further request for the special powers available under the War Measures Act was Trudeau’s alone. The act would amount to a total suspension of civil liberties, allowing for searches without warrant and detentions without charge. It could only be invoked, however, in the case of “war, invasion or insurrection, real or apprehended.”
It later came out that in Cabinet Trudeau had initially been against imposing the act, not trusting that the information coming from police and from the provincial government was reliable and being wary of the political fallout of imposing such far-reaching measures. It was a young minister from Quebec, however, Jean Chrétien, whose philosophy carried the day. “Act now,” was his advice, “explain later.” What finally tipped Trudeau toward imposing the act was the petition signed by his former colleagues, which had uncritically adopted the term political prisoners from the FLQ list of demands. In Trudeau’s eyes, this legitimizing of the terrorists’ rhetoric—the prisoners in question had been convicted of criminal acts that included bombings and manslaughter—showed that even the elite in Quebec had lost all perspective. To protect himself, however, Trudeau insisted that Bourassa and Mayor Jean Drapeau of Montreal—the same person for whom Trudeau had given his rousing anti-conscription speech back in 1942—write letters requesting emergency powers and making specific reference to a state of insurrection.
In the House, the only dissenter when Trudeau announced the act was Tommy Douglas, who accused the government of using “a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.” He turned out to be right. All of the abductors were eventually revealed to be well known to police—who might easily have prevented the kidnappings if they had bothered to follow through on their own information, which included repeated reports from one of their informants that a major FLQ action was in the offing. After sixty days, the location where Cross was being held was tracked down through normal police work, and his release was negotiated in exchange for his abductors’ free passage to Cuba. The killers of Laporte, meanwhile, again through normal police work, were all arrested within two and a half months of the killing. No evidence was ever discovered of an arms cache or of any organized plan for insurrection. The taking of Laporte, in fact, had been merely an in-sympathy action, planned at the last moment, given that the only information the two cells initially had of each other’s activities was what they had read in the papers. The Cross kidnappers later admitted that the Laporte kidnapping had been a mistake: by implying a much higher level of organization than was the case, it had essentially been responsible for the authorities’ exaggerated reaction.
Even the killing of Laporte involved a level of happenstance. At the time it seemed a direct retaliation for the imposition of the War Measures Act, but according to the admission long afterwards of one Laporte’s abductors, Francis Simard, it was more a matter of last resort. Laporte, who the day after his abduction was allowed to send a letter to Bourassa in which he pleaded for his life, apparently grew severely depressed as his captivity continued. On hearing about the imposition of the act on his abductors’ TV, he tried to escape by flinging himself at a window, botching the attempt but seriously injuring himself in the process. His abductors were then faced with the prospect of his bleeding to death if he didn’t receive medical help and in the end decided to kill him, strangling him with his own necklace, according to Simard, because they couldn’t bear the thought of the “fascists” having the victory.
It would be years, however, before the various inquiries that looked into the kidnappings would report their findings and before the kidnappers themselves would publicly admit any of the specifics of what had happened. Many conspiracy theories would be alleged, a few backed
up by actual evidence, and many people’s positions would shift depending on convenience and the political winds. Bourassa would later say he had called for the War Measures Act not because he had truly believed an insurrection was imminent but so he could say he had taken every possible action—an admission that only seemed to highlight his lack of leadership in the crisis. Robert Stanfield, who had supported the measures, later regretted that he had, as did several of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers of the time. Even Jean Marchand, who had claimed during the crisis that the FLQ had thousands of active members and hundreds of pounds of dynamite, later said the act had been “like using a cannon to kill a fly.”
