The October Crisis of 1970 has seemingly faded from the collective memory of Canadians and its lesson forgotten by the once mighty Liberal party and its present leadership aspirants. But the lesson of that history has acquired great relevance in our post-9/11 world.
Let us briefly recall the events of nearly 36 years ago. On Oct. 5, 1970, members of the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner, in Montreal. Five days later, Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s minister of labour in Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government, was kidnapped by another group of FLQ members.
These kidnappings were preceded by political unrest, strikes and violence in Quebec politics surrounding the 1970 spring provincial election, which Liberals won. Here’s how the historian Kenneth McNaught described the situation:
“The Quebec electoral battle had been fought against a background of escalating violence in strikes, protest marches and bank robberies — many of which were to raise money for extremist nationalists such as those in the FLQ. Not only did both the Parti Quebecois and the Union Nationale preach separatism, but it was clear that more and more students, workers and frustrated professional people were willing to give at least tacit support to those who would ‘politicize’ the French Canadians through the methods of confrontation and terrorism.”
Quebec’s gradual slide towards anarchy preceding the October Crisis was not an isolated event in world politics. Though Washington and Moscow, at the head of NATO and the Warsaw Pact respectively, were then moving towards detente and the war in Vietnam was grinding towards its messy end, the politics of terror and violence continued to strike indiscriminately in various parts of the world.
In May 1968, Paris fell into the grips of student strikes that eventually spread across France, threatening the republic. Charles De Gaulle, France’s president, responded by dissolving the National Assembly, delaying parliamentary elections and calling in the army to quell the unrest.
The troubles in Northern Ireland turned for the worse in 1968, with bombings in Londonderry and in Belfast in 1969, and the conflict there between Protestants and Catholics would continue into the 1990s.
In Italy, the terrorist Red Brigades were organized by university students in early 1970 and their mindless violence turned spectacular with the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, a former Italian prime minister, in May 1978.
Then there were the wars of the Mideast — and terror in the air when several planes were hijacked by Palestinian terrorists in September 1970 to Jordan and destroyed on the ground.
Closer to home was the civil rights movement in the United States that gradually turned violent, with race riots occurring in Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit. There were assassinations of political and civil rights leaders — John F. Kennedy in 1963, his brother Robert in 1968, Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King in 1968.
The FLQ and its supporters romanticized their vision of armed struggle for the “liberation” of Quebec from the rest of Canada (likening the struggle of French-Canadians to that of American blacks), but the movement quickly descended into embracing politics of terror and violence.
The fear among politicians in Quebec City and Ottawa about Quebec deteriorating into the sort of anarchy witnessed elsewhere was genuine. The kidnappings of Cross and Laporte raised the stakes immensely.
In a television interview on Oct. 13, 1970, then-PM Pierre Trudeau said, “there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people.”
When Trudeau was challenged by reporters on how far he would go, his defiant reply was, “Just watch me.”
In the early morning hours of Oct. 16, Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act — a statute from 1914 providing unlimited powers to the federal government in times of “war, invasion, or insurrection, real or apprehended” — and demonstrated how far his Liberal government would go in crushing the incipient terrorist movement on Canadian soil.
Laporte was murdered by his kidnappers and his body left in the trunk of a car, to be found on Oct. 18. Cross survived his ordeal and was freed when his abductors were given safe passage to Cuba.
Trudeau’s imposition of the War Measures Act to deal with terrorism was denounced by the NDP and some Conservatives, including then Tory leader Robert Stanfield. Tommy Douglas of the NDP slammed the government for “using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.”
But public support for the government soared. In a plainly stated speech on TV, Trudeau explained why he imposed measures that he found abhorrent. The main reason was “to make clear to kidnappers that in this country laws are made and changed by the elected representatives of all Canadians, not by a handful of self-styled dictators.Those who gain power through terror rule by terror.”
Since 1970, much handwringing has taken place over Trudeau’s stern response to Canada’s homegrown terrorists.
Much that his government did in its misplaced zeal for liberal reform — implementing social experimentation and multiculturalism while undermining Canada’s armed forces and traditional foreign policy — needs to be re-examined. (A new portrait of Trudeau’s intellectual fault lines emerges in the recent book Young Trudeau by Max and Monique Nemni.)
But on the one big question of our time, Trudeau was prescient and right.
A political leader earns greatness in history when he acts with the decisiveness the occasion demands. Trudeau’s essential reason for using disproportionate force to crush terrorists remains as valid today as it was in October 1970.
There cannot be, nor should there be, any allowance made for those who seek to profit by terror. This is a lesson that, when ignored or forgotten, leads to the ruin of civilized living.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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