The October Crisis... as seen through the eyes of a 12 year old

As if the notion of missiles from Russia wasn't scary enough, in October 1970 the relative safety and security of all Canadians seemed to be threatened from within. On October 5, the Front de Liberation du Quebec kidnapped a British diplomat named James Cross in Montreal. This represented an abrupt escalation of terrorist activity by the FLQ which until then had satisfied itself largely with blowing up mailboxes in the affluent Anglo neighbourhood of Westmount. I was 12 and only just developing an interest in current affairs outside of my own realm of awareness. The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and the grainy, fuzzy black and white images on Channel 7 were my sources of information. Sketchy and vaguely understood.

While Quebec was physically very far away, we had only just left there to move to Alsask. A 12 year-old's understanding of such things as terrorism in 1970 was very different from that of the modern 12 year old whose exposure to CNN, the Internet and other sources of information are a quantum leap ahead. I struggled to connect the events in Montreal to the reality of my own world and came up short.

On October 8 all media outlets in Canada broadcast the FLQ's manifesto, a rambling and incoherent jumble of demands. Transcripts of the translation read in part:

"The Front de Libération du Québec wants total independence for Quebeckers; it wants to see them united in a free society, a society purged for good of its gang of rapacious sharks, the big bosses who dish out patronage and their henchmen, who have turned Quebec into a private preserve of cheap labour and unscrupulous exploitation.

The Front de Libération du Québec is not an aggressive movement, but a response to the aggression organized by high finance through its puppets, the federal and provincial governments (the Brinks farce ¹, Bill 63, the electoral map ², the so-called "social progress" tax ³, the Power Corporation, medical insurance - for the doctors ⁴, the guys at Lapalme ⁵...)

We have had enough of promises of work and of prosperity, when in fact we will always be the diligent servants and bootlickers of the big shots, as long as there is a Westmount, a Town of Mount Royal, a Hampstead, an Outremont, all these veritable fortresses of the high finance of St. James Street and Wall Street; we will be slaves until Quebeckers, all of us, have used every means, including dynamite and guns, to drive out these big bosses of the economy and of politics, who will stoop to any action however low it may be, the better to screw us.

We live in a society of terrorized slaves, terrorized by the big bosses, Steinberg, Clark, Bronfman, Smith, Neopole, Timmins, Geoffrion, J.L. Lévesque, Hershorn, Thompson, Nesbitt, Desmarais, Kierans (next to these, Rémi Popol the Nightstick, Drapeau the Dog, Bourassa the Simards' Simple Simon and Trudeau the Pansy ¹⁷ are peanuts!)."

Vive le Quebec Libre.

http://english.republiquelibre.org/Manifesto-flq.html

On October 10, another FLQ group, the Chenier cell, kidnapped the Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte from his front lawn, an act that was witnessed by his nephew. A week later, one day after le Premier-Ministre Robert Bourassa asked Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act, Laporte's body was found stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car near the airport at St Hubert. The safety and well-being of Mr Cross was unknown but his captors were insistent that his release was dependent on the fulfillment of their demands for the release of "political prisoners" being held for terrorist activity by the Quebec police.

Since we lived on a Canadian military radar station, it was thought that our little community could be a target for terrorist attack. We were all kept in a state of high alert and the army was called in to ensure our safety. We were instructed to inform our parents or teachers of any suspicious strangers we might see lurking around our homes or school; since there were only 124 houses on the station and a couple dozen in the village, strangers would have stuck out like a sore thumb and we viewed it as a game. We kids really had no idea of how serious all of this was. In retrospect, we were protected from the reality of it all by the adults in our world, a job that is all but impossible today. At the time, this was our 9-11 but we didn't know it.

On November 6, the QPF raided the headquarters of the Chenier cell of the FLQ; most of the members scattered but Bernard Lortie was arrested and charged in the kidnapping and murder of Pierre Laporte. It was nearly another month before British Trade Commissioner James Cross was released on December 3, at the same time that 5 high-ranking members of the FLQ were granted safe passage to Cuba. On December 28, the last 3 Chenier cell members to be arrested were finally caught in a 6 meter long tunnel in a farmer's field in St-Luc. They too were charged in the Pierre Laporte kidnap-murder case.

These events had far-reaching effects: popularity for the violent FLQ waned allowing the growth of the politically-active Parti Quebecois and its subsequent rise to power as the ruling party in 1976 and the creation of the Bloc Quebecois at the federal level following the failure of the Meech Lake Accord. Strong criticism of the federal invocation of the War Measures Act led to a rift in the Liberal party and the eventual success of the federal Conservatives under Bryan Mulroney.

When all is said and done, I'm happy that I was born when I was; by the time the instant-communication revolution had occurred I was already an adult and could cope with knowing of the evil man does unto man. The Challenger, the Gulf War, 9-11, Katrina, all these things that terrify our children and their children... We were protected from that. I wish we could extend that protection to the innocence of today.