Just Watch Me
Page 9
Two days later Sharp relented and permitted the reading of the FLQ manifesto on Radio-Canada. It declared that the election defeat on April 29 had ended the revolutionaries’ hopes that they could “channel [their] energy and [their] impatience” into the PQ. Never again would they be “fooled by the pseudo-elections that the Anglo-Saxon capitalists toss to the people of Quebec every four years.”14 No more would they listen to the lies of the “fairy” Trudeau and the “dog” Drapeau. Trudeau was angry that Sharp gave in to the FLQ’s demand for the broadcast. While outrageous in its rhetoric and claims, the manifesto appears to have stirred the militants and influenced other sympathizers. As Gérard Pelletier wrote in the early seventies, “Who does not long, when he receives a summons from the police or compares his gross pay with the net total of his cheque, to give the authorities a good going over or address a few suitable insults to some minister or other? There, insolence of taunts addressed to public figures encouraged thoughts of this kind to come to the surface in the listener or viewer, who said to himself, thinking of Mr. Trudeau or Mayor Drapeau, ‘They got it right in the eye.’”15
Opinions divided quickly. Ryan called for negotiations; Jean-Paul Desbiens in La Presse supported the government’s hard line. The French government shared Ryan’s view; the British, hardened by Irish experience, accepted the Canadian government’s reasons. René Lévesque sided with Ryan while simultaneously condemning the “sewer rats” who had kidnapped Cross. Michel Chartrand of the CNTU, however, said he had no more sympathy for Mrs. Cross than he did for the thousands of Quebec workers without jobs, while other militants mocked the federal government’s hard position. Bitterness swelled.
Then, on Saturday, October 10, the Chenier cell of the FLQ kidnapped Pierre Laporte, the Quebec minister of labour and immigration, as he was playing football at dusk on a field across from his Saint-Lambert home. The stakes were suddenly much higher. Trudeau knew Laporte well: their fathers had attended the same college, and they themselves had shared school benches at Brébeuf, debated nationalism and Quebec politics in the fifties when Laporte was a prominent journalist, and quarrelled about Liberal politics in the sixties, particularly when Laporte had stood for the provincial Liberal leadership just a few months before.
The day after the kidnapping, Laporte wrote a letter to “Mon cher Robert,” in which he begged Bourassa to agree to his captors’ demands. His life, he said, was in the premier’s hands. In Ottawa the government began to believe “that perhaps the FLQ was not just a bunch of pamphlet-waving, bomb-planting zealots after all,” to use Trudeau’s own words; “perhaps they were in fact members of a powerful network capable of endangering public safety, and of bringing other fringe groups—of which there were a large number at the time—into the picture, which would lead to untold violence.” In this climate the fog of misunderstanding became a cloak.16
On Thanksgiving weekend, Bourassa moved into the heavily guarded Queen Elizabeth Hotel above the train station in central Montreal. In Toronto, Ontario premier John Robarts called for immediate and harsh action—even a “war” against the FLQ. At the Université de Montréal and the new Université du Québec à Montréal, students rallied behind calls for revolutionary action. The line between political legitimacy and revolution blurred: for instance, Carole de Vault, the mistress of PQ luminary Jacques Parizeau, was secretly organizing, without his knowledge, an FLQ robbery of a business where Parizeau had got her a job. As rumours billowed and tensions rose, the Quebec government seemed confused. On that surreal weekend, Bourassa and Justice Minister Jérôme Choquette appeared at times willing to compromise, while in other moments they reflected the harder federal line. In Ottawa Trudeau ordered the Canadian military to defend public officials in the capital, and troops soon appeared around Rockcliffe embassies and private homes throughout the city. Nervous soldiers with menacing machine guns protected ministers and sometimes frightened neighbours, who were brusquely questioned by uniformed guards holding raised guns. The first casualty was the assistant to Mitchell Sharp, who was wounded when an inexperienced guard accidentally fired his weapon.17
Trudeau and Marc Lalonde, his agent throughout the crisis, began to lose confidence in Bourassa as the crisis deepened, and they feared the impact the revolutionary rhetoric uttered by radical unionists and students might have in Quebec. On Tuesday afternoon, October 13, as Trudeau left his limousine to enter the House of Commons, Tim Ralfe of the CBC thrust a microphone in front of him.
“Sir, what is it with all these men with guns around here?”
Smiling, Trudeau responded sharply and defiantly: “Haven’t you noticed?”
“Yes, I’ve noticed them,” Ralfe responded. “I wondered why you people decided to have them.”
“What’s your worry?” Trudeau asked.
“I’m not worried, but you seem to be—”
“So if you’re not worried, what’s your …” Trudeau began, then snapped: “I’m not worried.”
“I’m worried about living in a town that’s full of people with guns running around,” Ralfe complained.
“Why, have they done anything to you? Have they pushed you around or anything?”
The banter, ever more sarcastic, continued as the cameras recorded Trudeau’s cool contempt for his questioner. He responded at length when Ralfe suggested that the troops were there to prevent leaders like Trudeau from being kidnapped.
“Sure, but this isn’t my choice, obviously. You know, I think it is more important to get rid of those who are committing violence against the total society and those who are trying to run the government through a parallel power by establishing their authority by kidnapping and blackmail. And I think it is our duty as a government to protect government officials and important people in our society against being used as tools in this blackmail. Now, you don’t agree to this, but I am sure that, once again with hindsight, you would probably have found it preferable if Mr. Cross and Mr. Laporte had been protected from kidnapping, which they weren’t because these steps we’re taking now weren’t taken. But even with your hindsight, I don’t see how you can deny that.”
“No,” said Ralfe. “I still go back to the choice that you have to make in the kind of society you live in.”
“Yes … Well, there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns,” Trudeau exclaimed. “All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don’t like the looks—”
“At any cost?” Ralfe interrupted. “How far would you go with that?”
“Well, just watch me.” His smile replaced by an icy stare, Trudeau continued: “I think society must take every means at its disposal to defend itself against the emergence of a parallel power which defies the elected power in this country, and I think that goes to any distance. So long as there is a power in here which is challenging the elected representatives of the people, I think that power must be stopped, and I think it’s only, I repeat, weak-kneed bleeding hearts who are afraid to take these measures.”18
Two days earlier, Claude Ryan, who had urged negotiations from the beginning of the crisis, had called his editorial staff together and mused about the possibility that the weak Bourassa government would crumble from within in the face of the crisis. Ryan told his staff that the time had come to add strength to the government from outside or even to form a provisional, parallel government. He spoke to Lucien Saulnier, head of the Montreal Executive Committee, a body representing the Montreal region, about the possibility of an alternative government that would replace the Bourassa government as it crumbled. Very quickly the news reached Ottawa that Ryan had been discussing the creation of a committee to replace “the elected representatives of the people.”
Confusion was constant, and ministers could take radically different positions from one day to the next. The journal of William Tetley, a Quebec Cabinet minister, reveals the wild swings of opinion in Quebe
c City. On October 13 he wrote: “Bourassa is wavering still. I am hawkish and want to call in the troops, impose martial law. I have completely changed in two days. Bourassa kindly reminds me that two days before I was for releasing all 23 prisoners.”19
On October 15 Le Devoir published a petition calling on the government to support Bourassa’s earlier willingness to negotiate with the kidnappers to bring about “an exchange of the two hostages for the political prisoners.” It condemned “certain attitudes outside Quebec, the last and most unbelievable of which … [were those] of Premier Robarts of Ontario, plus the rigid—almost military—atmosphere we see in Ottawa.” This document, which Trudeau thought “incredible,” was prompted by a telephone call from Lévesque to Ryan the previous day and bore the signatures of Ryan, Lévesque, Parizeau, several labour leaders, and the psychiatrist Camille Laurin—an old friend whom Trudeau had often walked with in Outremont in the early sixties when they both deplored the separatist option. Three of Trudeau’s former academic colleagues and friends—sociologists Marcel Rioux, Fernand Dumont, and Guy Rocher—were also among the sixteen who signed. “I might have understood the man in the street holding such opinions,” Trudeau later wrote. “But when university professors, leaders of a democratic party, and labour union leaders displayed such twisted logic, such willingness to capitulate to the demands of the FLQ, it suggested an extremely disordered state.”20
October 15 continued disorderly in other ways as well. FLQ lawyer Robert Lemieux, Michel Chartrand, Pierre Vallières, and Charles Gagnon (an FLQ activist recently released from prison) gave fiery addresses to students as strikes began at the Université de Montréal, where over a thousand students signed a copy of the FLQ manifesto. Sympathizers at the Université du Québec campus occupied the administrative offices and threatened to stay until the “political prisoners” were freed. Bomb threats had police scurrying through the city as crowds gathered for a mass rally in support of the FLQ scheduled to take place in the Paul Sauvé Arena that evening.
In Ottawa, meanwhile, the Cabinet met to consider the deteriorating situation. The RCMP said they had no leads on the hostages but continued to report ever more stories of plots and nefarious deeds. Justice Minister John Turner, who had returned from abroad just four days earlier, found the capital in turmoil: “The FLQ had tapped into a uniquely Canadian paranoia,” his biographer writes, “triggering dark imaginings of revolution afoot in a vast terrorist underground in Quebec.” Marchand, who felt personally betrayed by his former colleagues in the labour movement, simmered with anger and despair. Lalonde grew increasingly worried about the apparent weakness of the Bourassa government—a concern that Tetley’s journal suggests was overstated. Nevertheless, in times of crisis, perception trumps reality. And personality and memories are also a factor.21
The Cabinet made a fateful decision that mid-October day. With the apparent disintegration of resolve and public order in Montreal and a series of warnings from Drapeau, Choquette, Bourassa, and Saulnier that the police would not be able to cope with the challenges ahead, the federal ministers agreed to move troops into Quebec to preserve order in the province and to protect individuals and public places from attack. The record of the meeting betrays the tension, despite its stilted and bureaucratic tone. Marchand, who was Quebec leader in the government, began the meeting with a dire account of the turmoil; Marc Lalonde, who remained constantly in touch with Quebec City, gave updates on the situation throughout the day. Indeed, in his memoirs, Eric Kierans claims that Lalonde was “the dominating figure” at the meeting. He would return from phone calls reporting each time that “things … [looked] very bad, bad indeed.”22
The effect was dramatic. At the previous meeting of the Cabinet, on October 10, Trudeau had reported that Bourassa had asked for special powers, and Sharp had replied that the War Measures Act might be appropriate in the circumstance, rather than special legislation. Turner now appeared to support this suggestion, saying that “special legislation” required parliamentary debate—and that would alert the terrorists to their plans. To pass the War Measures Act, a relic of the opening months of the First World War, debate was not required. Moreover, when Drapeau had announced earlier on October 15 that he had asked for assistance from the Canadian military, he’d spoken of an “apprehended insurrection”—the very term employed in the act to justify its invocation.23
Marchand saw conspiracies everywhere and claimed during the Cabinet meeting that the FLQ had “two tons of dynamite” in Montreal, “the detonation of which was controlled by radio equipment.” When questioned where he’d obtained his information, he said, simply, police sources. More troubling, he said, was an indication that the FLQ was finding support beyond its own ranks. In that respect he referred “to the statement made public” by “Mr. Levesque [sic] and a number of other prominent people” (the petition published in Le Devoir calling for negotiations leading to the exchange of the two hostages for the “political prisoners”). Marchand urged the government not only to take swift action in the present crisis but also to break up the FLQ, which had become “a state within the state.”24
Cabinet debated throughout the morning, took a break, and then resumed in the afternoon as the demonstrations in Montreal mounted and the pressure for action from Quebec officials increased. Trudeau was blunt. Bourassa did not want his “backbenchers to sit around too long. They were falling apart.” Some ministers suggested a one-day delay; others, such as Allan MacEachen, favoured consulting first with Parliament; and a few, notably Ron Basford (Consumer and Corporate Affairs) and Joe Greene (Energy, Mines, and Resources), supported special legislation rather than the War Measures Act. None, however, doubted the need for action. Although Eric Kierans later claimed to have had his doubts, the record shows that his only intervention was to remark that “people in his [Montreal] riding were terrorized, and the sooner the government acted, the better it would be.”25
When Basford and Greene pointed out, correctly, that the security panel had not indicated that the grounds for action—“apprehended insurrection”—were present, their arguments were brushed aside by Marchand. The situation had changed and had become perilous, he argued: Bourassa was in a “weak position,” the people were “frightened,” and there was a “risk of losing Quebec.” Trudeau backed his Quebec leader, stating that the new uncertainties required a strong stand. The police, he said, did not know whether the FLQ “hard core” was two hundred or one thousand strong. If there were a thousand members and the Cabinet “did not react and there were an insurrection, where would the government stand?” Moreover, Bourassa must not be allowed to make “the deal demanded by the FLQ”—granting parole to convicted criminals and allowing them to fly to Cuba. Although later writers have argued that Turner had reservations, he was, in fact, the minister who said that Marchand had made his “case”: the raid against perceived FLQ supporters and sympathizers had to occur that night, before word got out of the government’s plans, and this decision meant that consultation of Parliament was impossible. “One way out of the dilemma,” Turner advised, “was to proclaim the War Measures Act.” Legislation could be introduced later, and “we would be regarded as having used the … Act as a protective and temporary measure. If, on the other hand, what was apprehended in Quebec really was insurrection,” the act could remain in place.26 Bourassa and Drapeau would make a formal request to invoke the act, and in the early morning of October 16, now only a few hours away, it would take effect.
The raids began at 4 a.m. Tipped off by a sympathetic police officer, PQ leaders raced to their party headquarters and grabbed papers they feared would be seized. Sirens blared and cruiser lights flashed in the darkness as officers clumsily swooped down on suspects chosen hastily from lists assembled by the Quebec and Montreal police forces and vetted quickly by Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier. While PQ leaders remained free, many of their supporters were arrested, including such notables as the singer Pauline Julien and the poet Gérald Godin, whose cell adjoined t
hat of celebrated Montreal boulevardier Nick Auf der Maur—a most improbable terrorist.* That night police arrested 397 people, disrupted many more, and created a climate of anger and fear among radicals.27
That fury exploded in the Chenier cell: they took their prisoner Pierre Laporte, strangled him with the crucifix he wore on a chain around his neck, stuffed his body into the trunk of a green Chevrolet, and abandoned the vehicle in the parking lot at St. Hubert Airport. Police discovered it just before midnight on Saturday, October 17.
The horror of the murder appalled all but the most militant. Trudeau went immediately to the Parliament Buildings in the early hours of Sunday morning. His face was ashen, his eyes cold, his anger palpable. At 3 a.m. he gave a brief statement on television denouncing the “cowardly” assassination “by a band of murderers.” “I can’t help feeling as a Canadian,” he said, “a deep sense of shame that this cruel and senseless act should have been conceived in cold blood and executed in like manner.”28
While Quebec-Presse, the militant’s media voice, blamed the invocation of the War Measures Act for Laporte’s death and bitterly attacked Trudeau, most critics firmly rejected this view in the days following the assassination. Carole de Vault, Parizeau’s lover, for instance, who had begun to have doubts about the FLQ cause, told Parizeau’s wife in his absence about the plot to stage robberies in order to fill FLQ coffers, and at Alice Parizeau’s insistence, became an agent for the antiterror forces. Lévesque sat transfixed before a television screen in the PQ office in Montreal, unwilling to believe what had transpired and deaf to the clamour of party activists about him. He called for harsh action against the murderers, though he continued to criticize the government’s actions. In the House of Commons, Conservative leader Robert Stanfield’s earlier hesitations about the use of the act disappeared, and when NDP leader Tommy Douglas expressed his opposition to it, four of his MPs broke with him. Invocation of the War Measures Act passed 190 to 16, and several polls revealed overwhelming support for the measure across Canada, including Quebec. To Douglas’s charge that the prime minister had used a sledgehammer to crack a peanut, Trudeau replied: “This criticism doesn’t take the facts into account. First, peanuts don’t make bombs, don’t take hostages, and don’t assassinate prisoners. And as for the sledgehammer, it was the only tool at our disposal.”29