J. L. GRANATSTEIN
J.L. Granatstein is one of Canada’s best-known academics, writers, and broadcast commentators. He taught history at York University from 1966 to 1995, and in 1998 became CEO and director of the Canadian War Museum. His many publications have focused on Canadian national history, Canada-US relations, the public service, universities, and the teaching of history. Although he never voted for Pierre Elliott Trudeau, he has supported Trudeau’s constitutional views.
THERE HAD NEVER BEFORE been a crowd at York University like it. Gathered around the flagpole in the centre of the still-growing campus that October noon in 1970 were at least five thousand students and faculty, pressed close together and surrounding the small stage. This was the university’s “Rally for Canada,” a response to the crisis in Quebec that had led the federal government to impose the War Measures Act and arrest almost five hundred suspected “terrorists” and their supporters.
The night before, one of my departmental colleagues, a young historian who had just arrived at York from Harvard University and who understood nothing whatsoever about what was happening, had called to ask me to speak at the rally. “But I don’t support the government and its actions,” I said. “That doesn’t matter,” came his very American reply, “come and speak for Canada.”
So I did. There were other speakers, including historians Ramsay Cook and John Saywell, but in my memory I was the only one to oppose the government’s actions forthrightly. I cannot remember my exact words, but I suggested that the imposition of the War Measures Act was a direct attack on the civil liberties of all Canadians, that it was using a mallet to kill a flea, and that, under its terms, not only the Front de libération du Québec terrorists but activists, hippies, Vietnam draft dodgers, and troublemakers could be arrested anywhere in Canada. That morning, the newspapers had reported that the mayor of Vancouver had greeted the imposition of the act with pleasure as a way to clean up his city.
I have never before or since been afraid of a crowd, never feared being torn limb from limb, but that day I was frightened. The shouts from the students that interrupted my speech were frequent and hostile; the visceral hatred of the FLQ kidnappers and murderers, and, as I interpreted it, of all Québécois, was palpable. I was very pleased to get off that platform and into my office before I was attacked and beaten.
The same vengeful mood pervaded my classroom the next day. One hundred students were enrolled in my third-year course on post-Confederation Canada, and I asked how many supported the government’s policy. Every hand but one went up, a result that mirrored the national opinion polls. A Canadian Institute of Public Opinion poll taken on October 17 found that 88 percent of Canadians thought the government actions either not tough enough or about right; in Quebec, 86 percent felt that way. Understandably, none of the students was for terrorism, and everyone believed that Pierre Trudeau had acted with appropriate force to deal with the crisis created by the kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross and the kidnapping and murder of Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s labour minister. Several female students referred to a comment by Jean Marchand, the minister of regional economic expansion who was also Trudeau’s friend, that a woman had been found in Hull with “FLQ” scratched on her stomach. In other words, no one was safe. Marchand also painted the FLQ as having up to three thousand activists with weapons such as rifles and machine guns and two tons of explosives, and, for good measure, he labelled the Montreal civic action party, the Front d’action politique, or FRAP, which was fighting a city election against Mayor Jean Drapeau, as quasi-terrorists. Like the minister and the Quebec and federal governments, my students were frightened, concerned, and certain that Trudeau was the leader to put Quebec finally and firmly in its place.
It wasn’t only students who felt that way. I recall very clearly a meeting of the board of the Canadian Forum, the left-centrist monthly of small circulation and, we fondly believed, much influence that had been publishing since 1920. Abe Rotstein of the University of Toronto was the editor, and we always met at his home. The question in the immediate aftermath of the FLQ crisis was what position the Forum editorial would take. The majority, of which I was part, was firmly for denouncing Trudeau’s position, but a significant minority supported the government’s actions. Ken McNaught, the University of Toronto historian and biographer of J.S. Woodsworth, was the main proponent of this view, and the discussion was fierce. In the end, the Forum attacked the government, and McNaught resigned from the editorial board. Years later, shortly before his death in 1997, he reminded me that at one point in the discussion I had threatened to punch him in the nose. Happily, I didn’t.
Two years after the October Crisis, at a time when public opinion had begun to move massively against the Trudeau government and when many had begun to forget their strong anti-Quebec/pro-government responses at the time, the University of Toronto Press published Forum: Canadian Life and Letters 1920–70: Selections from The Canadian Forum. There was a grand party at Rotstein’s house, and the book was hailed. At one point during the evening, Frank Scott, the constitutional expert, civil libertarian, poet, old socialist, and frequent Forum writer in the 1930s and 1940s, was asked to say a few words. In his celebratory remarks he referred to the Forum’s editorial about the imposition of the War Measures Act with a tone of mild criticism, and there were some kindly hisses—if hisses can ever be characterized that way, those ones were. I still remember the amazement with which I was soon hearing from people who hadn’t attended the party that Scott had been shouted down because he still supported the imposition of the War Measures Act. Many professed pleasure that the socialist-turned-reactionary Scott had been so treated. As that small incident suggested, the strong feelings about Trudeau’s actions still persisted, though the swing in opinion was well under way.
Now, a quarter-century later, scarcely anyone appears to remember that the Canadian public, including the Quebec public, was solidly behind Trudeau and the War Measures Act in October 1970. A recent conversation with a young francophone journalist, to whom I told my story about the York rally, drew only puzzlement from her. You mean, she asked, that the students opposed you because you supported Trudeau? That it was the other way round she could scarcely believe.
Today, the students and faculty who gathered at the flagpole at York University that day in 1970 would, if asked about their position on the FLQ crisis, likely claim to have opposed the War Measures Act. “Trudeau overreacted,” they would say. “Yes, the FLQ had to be dealt with, but the arrests, the troops in the street, that was just too much. Worse still,” they might continue, “Trudeau’s actions fostered the growth of the Parti Québécois.” Canadians, in retrospect, always seem to be more in favour of civil liberties than they ever have been in times of crisis.
Why have we changed our collective mind about October 1970? Certainly it is not because there is any new support for terrorist actions, or any greater acceptance in English Canada of Quebec separatism. The never-ending constitutional struggles, the referenda, and the continuing blackmail game played so successfully by Quebec City and Quebec MPS in Ottawa guarantee that the vast majority of anglophone Canadians remain as hostile to the idea of Quebec independence, Quebec as a nation, or Quebeckers as a peuple as they did in October 1970. In Quebec, the belief that Trudeau was a bully serving the Anglos and inflicting yet another humiliation on Quebec in the crisis has taken firm root, an attitude reinforced by the way Trudeau fought the 1980 referendum and then patriated the Constitution over the opposition of the nationalistes. In Quebec’s flexible, fallible public memory, no one supported Trudeau in October 1970—the opinion polls must have been wrong!
What has changed, in other words, is the perception of Trudeau. The trampoline-bouncing candidate of 1968 turned into the grimvisaged and remorseless opponent of terrorism in October 1970, and Canadians accepted and admired him for his defence of the state. “Just watch me!” he said on television on October 13, 1970, and all but the “weak-kneed bleeding hearts” watched what he did with approval.
But when Trudeau’s arrogance began to grate on the public (“Why should I sell your wheat?” “Where’s Biafra?”), and when, inevitably, he proved unable to resolve all Canada’s problems, the mood changed. The hero of 1968 and 1970 was beginning to be scorned by the time of the election of 1972, which produced a narrow minority government dependent on the NDP for its continued existence. Liberal free-spending produced a majority in 1974, but in 1979 the bland, unknown Joe Clark defeated Trudeau’s discredited Liberals. The age of Trudeau seemed over, and the assessments at the time of the man’s record suggested limited achievements and a still-growing distaste for the strong-arm methods of 1970. René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois had won power in Quebec in 1976, and the first referendum on separation was drawing near.
But Trudeau came back when Clark threw away his opportunity at government, won the election of 1980 with a majority, and proceeded to defeat Lévesque handily in the referendum that year. For a time, Trudeau the hero was back, but only briefly, and the tepid government of the next four years was weakly led. The peace initiative of the last months seemed only a tired, futile gesture, and the famous “walk in the snow” that produced Trudeau’s decision to retire from office was inevitable. John Turner briefly succeeded him, but, saddled with the legacy of fifteen years of Trudeau, Turner proved easy meat for Brian Mulroney’s Tories.
Curiously, even Mulroney’s failures at constitional reform, failures that galvanized the separatists who had been gravely weakened by the 1980 referendum defeat, did not alter the firm perception that Trudeau had overreacted in October 1970. Perhaps it was the 1982 addition to the Constitution of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that gave Canadians a new sense of their liberties. Perhaps it was the repeal of the War Measures Act itself, or, possibly, the failure of Trudeau’s government ever to explain the basis for its actions in the crisis. Whatever the reasons, the public mind now seems fixed: Trudeau used a mallet to crush a flea, almost exactly as I had said in October 1970 at York University.
So why am I not happy that I was proven right? Because, like the Canadian public, I too have changed my position. Over the last dozen years I have come to believe that Trudeau acted properly during the FLQ crisis. The FLQ had been exploding bombs since 1963, attacking CBC property, armouries, and mailboxes and toppling the monument to General Wolfe in Quebec City. People were killed by the frustrated, angry felquistes, but ordinary police methods seemed able to control matters. In October 1970 they did not seem sufficient. Terrorism can never be tolerated. Advocating Quebec (or British Columbia) separatism is a legitimate political activity in a Canadian democracy, but kidnapping and murder are not.
The government of Canada could not allow its duly elected politicians or foreign diplomats to be at the mercy of anti-democratic political thugs. Virtually every measure to create and maintain public order in such circumstances was justified. Should the federal government have stood idly by and done nothing? Should the FLQ hoodlums—who were not freedom fighters, intellectuals, or heroes of any kind—have been allowed licence to kill? Nothing Trudeau and the government did, however extreme the rhetoric at times, crossed the line into unjustifiable areas. I am prepared to grant that the unwarranted arrest of 497 nationalists and democratic separatists, almost all on lists prepared by the Quebec Sûreté and the Montreal Police, not the RCMP or the federal authorities, was an overreaction of a shocking sort. The Aislin cartoon of Jean Marchand holding a Montreal telephone book and saying he had a list of suspects seemed all too accurate at the time, though in later television interviews Marchand explained that the federal government had, in fact, intervened to reduce the number. The last of those arrested was released on January 1, 1971.
Yet even the detentions had their justification. The situation in Montreal in particular, where recent police and taxi-driver strikes had degenerated into violence, and in Quebec in general, was on the verge of slipping out of control, tending towards the “apprehended insurrection” that the imposition of the War Measures Act had aimed to squash. Students, unionists, and separatist radicals—cheered on by what historian Desmond Morton called “the affluent dilettantes of revolutionary violence”—were creating a psychological atmosphere of crisis and fear in which a political putsch, massive civic unrest, or the collapse of the just-elected Quebec Liberal government of Robert Bourassa began to seem very real possibilities. The killing of protesting anti-war students by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio had occurred a few months before, and ministers, generals, and police must have been haunted by the fear that something similar could occur at Université de Montréal.
The most visible sign of the growing sense of destabilization and crisis came on October 15, when Le Devoir published a document signed by a group of leading Quebec business, academic, trade union, and political figures which called, in inflammatory language, on the Quebec government to negotiate “an exchange between hostages and political prisoners.” The group and the document it produced were the inspirations of René Lévesque, the Parti Québécois leader who, while strongly condemning terrorism, had his own game to play in destabilizing Quebec and attacking Ottawa. The hostages were Pierre Laporte and James Cross; the “political prisoners” were the FLQ activists, hoodlums who had been jailed for their part in bombings in the 1960s. After this incredible statement, Trudeau and his advisers clearly concluded that only the firmest action could bring a dangerous and rapidly collapsing situation under control. In retrospect, the arrests of militants, the troops on the street, and the sense that the federal government, if not Mayor Drapeau or Premier Bourassa, was taking firm action were necessary. The imposition of the War Measures Act, the awareness that the state would use its full powers, was precisely the boost that the forces of order and public confidence required. It worked, and the government’s firmness won it the same overwhelming support in Quebec as in Canada.
Yes, the FLQ murdered Pierre Laporte as its counter to the imposition of the War Measures Act. But the terrorists might well have done the same thing at any time that the Quebec labour minister’s death served their purposes. Yes, the Parti Québécois won the election of 1976 (campaigning not for independence, but against the Bourassa government’s corruption and incompetence), and there is little doubt that the backlash against the War Measures Act contributed to its stunning success. But since October 1970 there have been no acts of terrorism, no bombings, and no kidnappings. Trudeau may have hoped and even expected that the October Crisis would destroy separatism once and for all; if so, he was wrong. But there can be no question that Trudeau’s bold actions had moved the idea of separatism completely out of the conspiracy-charged FLQ cells and into the bright light of public debate. That, at least, was a major accomplishment, and the issue ever after would be fought out in a civilized fashion in public forums. If Canada loses and separatism wins, it will not be because of the way Trudeau dealt with the events of October 1970.
Frank Scott, the great man that I jocularly hissed that night in 1972, was right and I was unquestionably wrong during the FLQ crisis. The proclamation of the War Measures Act was “drastic,” he wrote in a letter in January 1971, but “there was no other means at hand … While there was no likelihood of any ‘insurrection’ here, there was an imminent collapse of civil government. Unfortunately we live in a fragile civilization which can be brought to the brink of disaster by a few ruthless and determined men.” Scott had watched the NDP, led by his old colleague David Lewis, along with a few Tories and civil libertarians, oppose the Trudeau government’s actions, and he could understand why they did so. “But they hadn’t been living in Quebec under seven years of bombing and they hadn’t been living in Quebec in a volatile atmosphere,” he said; “they hadn’t seen seven thousand or six thousand students approving the FLQ manifesto.” Nor had they seen Quebec’s attorney general taking refuge on the top floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in a suite guarded by the police. The rule of law was threatened. The leaders of the government of Quebec may have been scared silly, Scott said, but “they were the legitimate government of Quebec and I was going to defend their right to govern against any terrorist.”
Trudeau, I believe, took this same view in October 1970, and it shaped his government’s actions. As he wrote in his memoirs, “it is the duty of any democracy to protect itself against the forces of dissolution as soon as they raise their heads … never giving in to chaos or terror.” Essentially, the Canadian state chose to defend itself against the campaign of terror launched by a handful of ideological pygmies, as it had to do, and Trudeau used the only means predecessor governments had left at his disposal. No one was killed by the state and, though some temporarily lost their liberty, democracy was preserved. Trudeau himself (as Margaret Trudeau wrote in her first volume of memoirs) was shaken by the way old civil libertarian friends turned against him and, she noted, he wept when Pierre Laporte was murdered.
Canada itself, also shaken to its roots, continued to exist, and a badly shaken Quebec remained a part of the nation. Trudeau was right; yet, in a curious way, the fact that Canadians could turn so quickly against the leader who had brought them through the October Crisis was the best sign of their democracy’s strength.