Politics: What’s the True Story of the October Crisis?
Originally published in The Globe and Mail. Read the full text here.
In his 1974 film Les Ordres – one of the few Canadian movies that can rightly be called a classic – the director, Michel Brault, attempts to answer a tricky question: Why do authoritarian excesses happen in liberal democracies? Or, more precisely: Why, in the fall of 1970, were nearly 500 Canadians rounded up and jailed, mostly without warrants or charges, in a manner befitting a police state?
Mr. Brault’s lightly fictionalized film is set during the height of the October Crisis. The events leading up to it are well known. In early October, 1970, members of the Front de libération du Québec, a separatist paramilitary group, kidnapped two public officials, British diplomat James Cross and Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, and threatened to kill them unless the authorities released 23 FLQ prisoners. In the case of Mr. Laporte, the kidnappers eventually carried out this threat.
The government of Pierre Trudeau responded first by calling in the army to patrol key locations in Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. Then, in the early hours of Oct. 16, and with the consent of the governor-general, Mr. Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, an emergency law from 1914 that gave the prime minister and his cabinet wide-ranging powers.
Under the act, they retroactively banned the FLQ, and anybody with vague or even suspected connections to the group was subject to arrest. To combat what the government deemed an insurrection, the police conducted thousands of warrantless raids and jailed 497 people. Just 62 were ever charged with a crime and a mere 18 convicted.
Mr. Brault tells the story of five prisoners – a left-wing social worker, a stay-at-home dad, a doctor who’d once run for office as a socialist, a union leader and his apolitical wife – their experiences compiled from interviews with 50 sources. The film depicts the trauma of the arrests (many carried out in front of frightened, tearful children), the terror of being consigned to a jail cell, the prosaic indignities of prison life and the abuses – violent interrogations, a mock execution and stints in solitary confinement.
At the finale, a character tersely sums up his thoughts on the ordeal: “It shows that something is rotten somewhere.” A liberal society that engages in such cruelties is in a terrible state of decay.
This is a common opinion on the October Crisis, but it isn’t the only one. There’s an alternate story that is much more flattering to Mr. Trudeau and the Canadian state. In this version, the government’s actions – the emergency laws, the mass arrests – were indeed unprecedented, but not irrational. Mr. Trudeau and his cabinet didn’t overact; they simply reacted, in a manner commensurate with the crisis at hand – at least as they understood it.
This story is strikingly different to the one Mr. Brault and other critics of the government have told over the years, but it remains prevalent. As the 50th anniversary of the crisis nears, we owe it to ourselves to figure out which is true.
This is an excerpt. Read the full story here.