Quebecs October Crisis, 1970

Details: Published on Thursday, 22 October 2020 03:22; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2222 ... October 22, 2020
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Quebec’s October Crisis, 1970:
What Today’s Left Learned From Ottawa’s Turn to Repression

Richard Fidler

Fifty years ago this month, the federal government, invoking the War Measures Act -- its first use in peacetime -- occupied Quebec with 12,000 troops, arrested almost 500 citizens without a warrant, and carried out 36,000 police searches of homes, organizations and publications.

Of the 497 trade unionists, artists, lawyers, and left activists jailed, 435 were subsequently freed without charges, and 44 of the 62 charged were acquitted or had their prosecutions stayed. But October 1970 marked a turning point in the federalist response to Quebec’s "Quiet Revolution" and the rapidly growing popular mobilization in favour of making Quebec an independent state.

The immediate pretext for these draconian acts were the kidnappings of a British trade commissioner and a Quebec cabinet minister by the FLQ (the Front de libération du Québec), a small band of revolutionary-minded youth -- even though the police involved in the hostage search said so many arrests simply complicated their task. This was soon... followed by Ottawa’s fraudulent claims that it was actually suppressing an "apprehended insurrection" led by Parti Québécois leaders René Lévesque and Jacques Parizeau, along with Claude Ryan, then editor of Le Devoir, the only Quebec newspaper that opposed the war measures repression. Their crime: they had called on the federal government to negotiate the release of the hostages by their kidnappers.