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The 1970 kidnapping, and subsequent murder, of Pierre Laporte changed forever Canadians’ perceptions of themselves as immune from terrorism. This is one of 15 Canadian stories we are presenting as part of the Citizen’s ongoing Canada 150 coverage.
Pierre Laporte was at home in the Montreal suburb of St. Lambert, throwing a football with his nephew on the front lawn, when a group of men drove up in a blue-green Chevrolet Biscayne and forced him into the car. As they drove off, the nephew hastily wrote down the licence plate number.
It was Oct. 10, 1970. Quebec had already seen threats and bombings by the Front de libération du Québec — the FLQ — but kidnapping an important politician in broad daylight was an astonishing new tactic.
Laporte was minister of labour and deputy premier in the Liberal government of Quebec, well known as an ex-journalist who had campaigned against the corruption of former premier Maurice Duplessis.
From captivity, Laporte wrote to premier Robert Bourassa saying that he was well, but asking that the police searches stop and that the government negotiate with the FLQ. Negotiations began but quickly broke off.
“You have the power of life and death over me,” Laporte told Bourassa, and asked the premier to remember Laporte’s own children and those of his late brother, as he was their guardian. He warned that the death threat to him was very real.
Seven days later the country was shocked when police discovered the Chevrolet with Laporte’s body in the trunk. He had been strangled, probably with the chain on which he wore a religious medallion, and dumped by his FLQ kidnappers. British diplomat James Cross, also kidnapped that October, was still missing.
Meanwhile the FLQ was making demands: release of “political prisoners” and later $500,000 and a flight to Cuba or Algeria.
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau reacted hard. His famous “Just watch me” retort to a CBC reporter came as he invoked the War Measures Act, giving police power to arrest and hold people without charges or bail hearings. They did so, arresting suspected terrorists — but also ordinary sovereigntists who had no connection to violence or the FLQ. Most of the 497 people held were later released without being charged.
Troops, tanks and helicopters patrolled the centres of Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec.
Suddenly, Canada had changed. News photos of tanks in the street were familiar at the time – but only in scenes from Vietnam or Detroit. Not Canada.
Citizen photographer Wayne Cuddington was in Grade 8, living on Argyle Street. Foreign Minister Mitchell Sharp lived on nearby Monkland Avenue, “and I remember walking by his house to go over to my friend’s house or the Bank Street, and there would be military guards outside his house,” says Cuddington.
“My dad was in the air force, so uniforms were not new to me, but army uniforms were. And seeing guys in army uniforms with weapons … very much looking serious. We would cross the street when we got close to his house.”
The army presence was far greater in Montreal, where the police investigation was centred. And the high tensions continued until the last of the FLQ members were discovered hiding on Dec. 28, and arrested.
The two kidnappings were committed by different cells of the FLQ. The Chenier Cell, which killed Laporte, announced on the day of his death that he had been “executed” to prove the FLQ was serious in its demands.
Cartoonist Terry Mosher, known in print as Aislin, had just drawn a humorous cartoon which his Montreal Star editors decided not to print. (It showed the FLQ’s lawyer as a travel agent sending clients to Cuba.) “I am grateful” that they held the cartoon, Mosher wrote recently in the Montreal Gazette. “Otherwise, this rather flippant piece would have been published the same day Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte was killed by the FLQ.”
Found hiding in a tunnel under a farmhouse, cell leader Paul Rose was sentenced in 1971 to life for murder but paroled in 1982. Others in his cell were given sentences ranging from eight years to life. Rose died in 2013.
He once told a reporter from Le Devoir, “I regret nothing. … I did what I had to do. Placed before the same set of circumstances today, I would do exactly the same thing. I will not deny what I did and what happened. It was not a youthful indiscretion.”
The Liberation Cell, which kidnapped Cross, held him for 62 days until they were tracked down by authorities in early December. They negotiated Cross’s release in exchange for a flight to safety in Cuba. Though exiled from Canada for life, they were allowed to return in the late 1970s and to serve sentences for kidnapping.
But the October Crisis lived on and evolved in memory, taking twists and turns as the public learned more about the anti-terrorism measures.
Damien-Claude Bélanger grew up in a Montreal suburb near Laporte’s old home and teaches Canadian history at the University of Ottawa.
“At the time, a vast majority of Quebeckers favoured the Trudeau government’s response,” he said. “Upwards of 90 per cent of the population was in favour of a very heavy-handed crackdown.
“There was a real sense of panic at the time … a professor of mine at McGill told me that an uncle of his, who was an ordinary farmer, was so terrified of being murdered in his bed by the FLQ that he kept an axe under there.”
No one realized the FLQ was a tiny group, and not even particularly skilful.
They kidnapped British diplomat James Cross from his home, but only after realizing their preferred targets in the American and Israeli diplomatic services were too protected. Cross was easier — just a guy at home with his wife and the family’s dog.
It didn’t take RCMP investigators long to infiltrate the FLQ thoroughly, making it completely ineffective.
Bélanger says the strategy backfired as the years passed and the public began to resent the harsh security measures.
“Once it becomes clear that the FLQ was not that powerful, that the federal government likely had good intelligence on what was going on and blew it out of proportion, and that the federal government had used this … to intimidate the Quebec independence movement,” popular support faded away.
“While in 1970 most people approved of Trudeau’s actions, by 1980 it’s increasingly regarded as a huge human rights violation,” he said. “This government that wants to pass a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and talks endlessly about individual rights perpetrated a huge injustice.”
And the FLQ, despite its violence, “came to be viewed as misguided idealists. People begin to cast doubts on whether Pierre Laporte was even murdered by the FLQ.” Maybe, some suggested, it was an accidental injury. Maybe the whole crisis was all orchestrated by the RCMP.
“By the early 1980s there was a sense that this was one of those terrible injustices done to Quebec,” said Bélanger.
“There is a tendency among any political group to excuse its radical fringes. That is not an abnormal thing.”
In this case, the attitude spread more widely through Quebec society.
Bélanger also argues that in getting rid of the FLQ, the federal authorities handed a gift to the Parti Québécois.
“Every time the FLQ set off a bomb, every time they issued a communiqué, they identified Quebec independence with violence and radicalism. … It makes the PQ look bad. It makes the entire independence option look radical and crazy.
“And the destruction of the FLQ is one of the major steps toward the Parti Québécois achieving power.”
None of Pierre Laporte’s four kidnappers has ever said which member of the cell killed the labour minister. Two are now dead.
None has ever expressed remorse for the murder; indeed, some have justified it as a necessary means to an end: their struggle to build a socialist society modelled on Communist Cuba.
Francis Simard, a Chenier Cell member who served 11 years for murder, wrote his autobiography in the 1980s and told reporters at a news conference how the cell rationalized the murder. “It was a decision of sincerity and conviction,” he said. “It was a tough decision.”
Pierre Laporte’s widow, Françoise, rejected a state funeral.
James Cross left Canada for good and has said little about the events of 1970. He is now 95 and lives in Dublin.
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
Pierre Laporte was at home in the Montreal suburb of St. Lambert, throwing a football with his nephew on the front lawn, when a group of men drove up in a blue-green Chevrolet Biscayne and forced him into the car. As they drove off, the nephew hastily wrote down the licence plate number.
It was Oct. 10, 1970. Quebec had already seen threats and bombings by the Front de libération du Québec — the FLQ — but kidnapping an important politician in broad daylight was an astonishing new tactic.
Laporte was minister of labour and deputy premier in the Liberal government of Quebec, well known as an ex-journalist who had campaigned against the corruption of former premier Maurice Duplessis.
From captivity, Laporte wrote to premier Robert Bourassa saying that he was well, but asking that the police searches stop and that the government negotiate with the FLQ. Negotiations began but quickly broke off.
“You have the power of life and death over me,” Laporte told Bourassa, and asked the premier to remember Laporte’s own children and those of his late brother, as he was their guardian. He warned that the death threat to him was very real.
Seven days later the country was shocked when police discovered the Chevrolet with Laporte’s body in the trunk. He had been strangled, probably with the chain on which he wore a religious medallion, and dumped by his FLQ kidnappers. British diplomat James Cross, also kidnapped that October, was still missing.
Meanwhile the FLQ was making demands: release of “political prisoners” and later $500,000 and a flight to Cuba or Algeria.
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau reacted hard. His famous “Just watch me” retort to a CBC reporter came as he invoked the War Measures Act, giving police power to arrest and hold people without charges or bail hearings. They did so, arresting suspected terrorists — but also ordinary sovereigntists who had no connection to violence or the FLQ. Most of the 497 people held were later released without being charged.
Troops, tanks and helicopters patrolled the centres of Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec.
Suddenly, Canada had changed. News photos of tanks in the street were familiar at the time – but only in scenes from Vietnam or Detroit. Not Canada.
Citizen photographer Wayne Cuddington was in Grade 8, living on Argyle Street. Foreign Minister Mitchell Sharp lived on nearby Monkland Avenue, “and I remember walking by his house to go over to my friend’s house or the Bank Street, and there would be military guards outside his house,” says Cuddington.
“My dad was in the air force, so uniforms were not new to me, but army uniforms were. And seeing guys in army uniforms with weapons … very much looking serious. We would cross the street when we got close to his house.”
The army presence was far greater in Montreal, where the police investigation was centred. And the high tensions continued until the last of the FLQ members were discovered hiding on Dec. 28, and arrested.
The two kidnappings were committed by different cells of the FLQ. The Chenier Cell, which killed Laporte, announced on the day of his death that he had been “executed” to prove the FLQ was serious in its demands.
Cartoonist Terry Mosher, known in print as Aislin, had just drawn a humorous cartoon which his Montreal Star editors decided not to print. (It showed the FLQ’s lawyer as a travel agent sending clients to Cuba.) “I am grateful” that they held the cartoon, Mosher wrote recently in the Montreal Gazette. “Otherwise, this rather flippant piece would have been published the same day Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte was killed by the FLQ.”
Found hiding in a tunnel under a farmhouse, cell leader Paul Rose was sentenced in 1971 to life for murder but paroled in 1982. Others in his cell were given sentences ranging from eight years to life. Rose died in 2013.
He once told a reporter from Le Devoir, “I regret nothing. … I did what I had to do. Placed before the same set of circumstances today, I would do exactly the same thing. I will not deny what I did and what happened. It was not a youthful indiscretion.”
The Liberation Cell, which kidnapped Cross, held him for 62 days until they were tracked down by authorities in early December. They negotiated Cross’s release in exchange for a flight to safety in Cuba. Though exiled from Canada for life, they were allowed to return in the late 1970s and to serve sentences for kidnapping.
But the October Crisis lived on and evolved in memory, taking twists and turns as the public learned more about the anti-terrorism measures.
Damien-Claude Bélanger grew up in a Montreal suburb near Laporte’s old home and teaches Canadian history at the University of Ottawa.
“At the time, a vast majority of Quebeckers favoured the Trudeau government’s response,” he said. “Upwards of 90 per cent of the population was in favour of a very heavy-handed crackdown.
“There was a real sense of panic at the time … a professor of mine at McGill told me that an uncle of his, who was an ordinary farmer, was so terrified of being murdered in his bed by the FLQ that he kept an axe under there.”
No one realized the FLQ was a tiny group, and not even particularly skilful.
They kidnapped British diplomat James Cross from his home, but only after realizing their preferred targets in the American and Israeli diplomatic services were too protected. Cross was easier — just a guy at home with his wife and the family’s dog.
It didn’t take RCMP investigators long to infiltrate the FLQ thoroughly, making it completely ineffective.
Bélanger says the strategy backfired as the years passed and the public began to resent the harsh security measures.
“Once it becomes clear that the FLQ was not that powerful, that the federal government likely had good intelligence on what was going on and blew it out of proportion, and that the federal government had used this … to intimidate the Quebec independence movement,” popular support faded away.
“While in 1970 most people approved of Trudeau’s actions, by 1980 it’s increasingly regarded as a huge human rights violation,” he said. “This government that wants to pass a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and talks endlessly about individual rights perpetrated a huge injustice.”
And the FLQ, despite its violence, “came to be viewed as misguided idealists. People begin to cast doubts on whether Pierre Laporte was even murdered by the FLQ.” Maybe, some suggested, it was an accidental injury. Maybe the whole crisis was all orchestrated by the RCMP.
“By the early 1980s there was a sense that this was one of those terrible injustices done to Quebec,” said Bélanger.
“There is a tendency among any political group to excuse its radical fringes. That is not an abnormal thing.”
In this case, the attitude spread more widely through Quebec society.
Bélanger also argues that in getting rid of the FLQ, the federal authorities handed a gift to the Parti Québécois.
“Every time the FLQ set off a bomb, every time they issued a communiqué, they identified Quebec independence with violence and radicalism. … It makes the PQ look bad. It makes the entire independence option look radical and crazy.
“And the destruction of the FLQ is one of the major steps toward the Parti Québécois achieving power.”
None of Pierre Laporte’s four kidnappers has ever said which member of the cell killed the labour minister. Two are now dead.
None has ever expressed remorse for the murder; indeed, some have justified it as a necessary means to an end: their struggle to build a socialist society modelled on Communist Cuba.
Francis Simard, a Chenier Cell member who served 11 years for murder, wrote his autobiography in the 1980s and told reporters at a news conference how the cell rationalized the murder. “It was a decision of sincerity and conviction,” he said. “It was a tough decision.”
Pierre Laporte’s widow, Françoise, rejected a state funeral.
James Cross left Canada for good and has said little about the events of 1970. He is now 95 and lives in Dublin.
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
