There are a lot of different dates that could be used to mark the anniversary of the October Crisis. I choose October 16th because, on this day in 1970, Québec premier Robert Bourassa formally requested that the federal government implement the War Measures Act. Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau had made a similar request the previous day. Trudeau acceded to these requests and, for the first and only instant during peacetime, Canadian civil liberties, including the right of habeas corpus, were suspended. The federal government deployed troops to regulate the conduct of Canadian civilians. Now we witness a similar situation unfolding south of the border as Trump deploys federal troops in Portland and Seattle. I hesitate to say that the Canadian experience might offer some lessons when the person best positioned to learn from our experience is impervious to advice. Even so, anything is possible.
Although I was only 7 years old at the time, I have a personal memory of the October Crisis. My grandparents lived in Montreal and, for reasons I cannot comprehend, we drove there for a visit in the middle of October. When we reached the Ontario/Québec border, we had to wait to pass through a blockade where soldiers stopped each car and questioned the driver. It was the first time I had ever seen soldiers walking around with guns. I had no idea what to make of it. The only thing that was clear to me at the time was that the soldier who questioned my dad had all the power. My dad assumed an attitude of absolute deference. One word answers. A yes sir when he was done.
I have a fuzzy sense of the timeline. There are some things I know for certain because they are a matter of public record, but where they intersect with my family’s personal recollections, things are less reliable. What I’ve constructed here comes from my grandfather’s unpublished memoir and conversation with my parents:
My grandfather was the minister at Greenfield Park United Church. A neighbour lived in a duplex or small apartment building and she overheard the people talking in the next door unit. The people she overheard were named Jacques and Paul Rose and they were saying things that made it sound like they were involved in the FLQ kidnappings. The neighbour telephoned the police but, because she had young children, she didn’t want the police coming around to her home as that might tip off the Rose brothers that something was up and that would place her children in jeopardy. Instead, she proposed they meet at the manse a few doors down. So my grandparents hosted the police interview where this neighbour disclosed what she knew about two members of the FLQ’s Chenier cell.
Here are some things I do know for certain:
• Pierre Laporte was the local MPP in the riding where my grandparents lived. He was the deputy premier, Minister of Immigration, and Minister of Labour and Manpower.
• On October 10th, the Rose brothers, along with Francis Simard and Bernard Lortie, snatched Laporte from his front lawn while he was playing football with his nephew.
• On October 13th, when asked by CBC journalist, Tim Ralfe, how far he would go, Trudeau famously answered: “Just watch me.”
• On October 16th, while Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, my mom was packing our bags for the drive to Montreal. Because it’s a long drive and they’d want to make an early start of it, my parents may have gone to bed early and missed the evening news.
• On October 17th, the Chenier cell of the FLQ announced it had executed Pierre Laporte. It is unclear to this day whether Laporte’s death was intended or the result of a struggle as he tried to get away. He was strangled with the gold chain of his crucifix. They stuffed the body in Paul Rose’s 1968 Chevrolet Biscayne and dumped it near Saint-Hubert Airport. We spent most of the same day sitting in an 1968 Delta 88 Oldsmobile on the MacDonald-Cartier freeway asking: “Are we there yet?”
Somewhere between the 10th and the 17th, the police conducted an interview in my grandparents’ home. I don’t think the interview happened after the 17th because my grandfather implies that had the police acted on the woman’s information, they might have saved Laporte. For their part, the police said that while the information was credible, they already knew who they were looking for.
According to my father, there were two other people present at the interview: my great-grandparents. They lived in Florida and had come up to Montreal for a visit. According to my father, my great-grandmother was depressed. Then the October Crisis happened. Authorities found two bombs in the neighbourhood. My grandfather reports that they heard three bombs detonate in Westmount across the river. Then came the police interview in the living room! There was so much excitement, it gave my great-grandmother a huge lift. Suddenly, she came to life.
When you think about it, there’s a funny inversion at play here. We have my great-grandparents up from a state that, historically, has enjoyed a love affair with the Second Amendment along with the violence this love affair has engendered. Yet my great-grandparents were blithely unaffected by all that. In the same way, never once did they mention the Cuban Missile Crisis even though they were among the Americans who lived closest to the threat. No. They had to come to peace-loving Canada to see some real action.
Looking back, I find it hard to believe that Trudeau harboured nefarious intentions when he took the decision to implement the War Measures Act. He was not a trivial nor a dishonest man. I have every reason to believe that he thought deeply about the matter and its implications before he acted. He didn’t initiate this but acted at the invitation of the provincial and local governments. He limited forces to those locales where the FLQ was known to be active. And he didn’t maintain a state of emergency longer than necessary. The statute’s regulations were replaced by the Public Order (Temporary Measures) Act which automatically lapsed on April 30, 1971.
However, I do think its long-term effect has been to inure ordinary citizens to the notion that their rights are not inviolable but subject to a flexible ethic governed by the needs of the moment. We had a taste of this in 2010 with the G20 summit in Toronto, a two-day event secured by a police force of nearly 20,000 officers and a budget of a billion dollars. In that short period, there were almost three times as many arrests as happened in the six and a half months of martial law that came into effect in October, 1970. While the G20 summit saw no official declaration of martial law, the policing body looked more like an army than a gathering of beat cops, with sophisticated surveillance tools, armoured vehicles, even sound cannons.
Prime minister Stephen Harper was subtle enough that he could deploy a paramilitary force in the streets of downtown Toronto and still remain within the letter of the law. In the U.S., Donald Trump is not such a subtle man. On June 1st of this year, Trump used members of the National Guard to clear a space for him to walk from the White House to St. John’s Church. Later the same day, he threatened to deploy federal forces to quell rioting and property destruction. Rioting and property destruction are descriptions he applied to protests which had arisen in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Baltimore police officer. On July 22nd, Trump made good on his threat by sending 100 federal agents to Portland in what was called “Operation Diligent Valor.” Its mandate was to shut down Black Lives Matter protests. A day later, he sent a similar force to Seattle for the same purpose. In each case, there was no consultation with local government. While the U.S. has a legislative scheme similar to Canada’s which allows its federal government to respond to emergencies, Trump has never availed himself of this scheme but has simply barrelled ahead, acting without apparent reflection.
At this point, a turn to Hannah Arendt seems inevitable. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she identifies as a hallmark of the totalitarian leader his tendency to conflate the roles of army and police. In normal statecraft, we think of the army as the body that secures the border and all the state’s interests which lie beyond that border. It is outward looking. The police is that body which secures the safety of citizens acting within the state’s border. It is inward looking. But to a totalitarian, the roles merge. Everything is policing but with deadlier tools.
Within the totalitarian world view, this is eminently logical. Because the object of totalitarianism is world domination, there is no distinction between foreign and domestic concerns. Ultimately, everything is a domestic concern and for that reason is subject to police regulation. Unfortunately, by the time you’ve reached a situation where the leader deploys the army to regulate a domestic matter, and has violated the governing legislation with impunity, it is too late. Whatever laws might have governed the cessation of martial law—like the automatic expiration in Canada on April 30th, 1971—are now meaningless. Now, all that matters is the leader’s will.
A note about the accompanying photograph: I shot this in approximately 1969 on the grounds of Expo ’67 using a Kodak Instamatic camera. In the background is The Biosphere, the U.S. pavilion designed by Buckminster Fuller. Sitting in the foreground are my grandfather, mother, brother, and grandmother. I don’t know where my father is. Probably beside me reminding me not to put my finger in front of the lens.