DON MACPHERSON
Montreal Gazette

Saturday, October 20, 2001

He was what we now call a terrorist. At least, he was involved in "terrorist activity" as it now is defined by the proposed federal Anti-Terrorism Act currently before Parliament.

A fiery speaker and writer as a young man, he publicly advocated the use of violence for political purposes. Not only that, he was also, at age 23, a leading member of an organization that conspired to take up arms against the government of his homeland.

When the authorities discovered the plot and began to arrest the conspirators, he fled his country for the United States. He continued to advocate revolution against those he considered the oppressors of his homeland as he moved from one city to another. Eventually, he came to Montreal.

And that is how a certain Thomas D'Arcy McGee came to Canada, where this one-time terrorist soon turned against the use of political violence and became one of our country's Fathers of Confederation.

Respectable Enough

Only 10 years after the thwarted Irish rebellion of 1848 against the British, he was already considered respectable enough to be elected to the colonial legislature. And less than a decade after that, McGee was one of Canada's most eminent statesmen.

Fortunately, for Canada as well as for McGee, he lived in times when former terrorists were more readily forgiven than in our own.

Had McGee lived today, his terrorist past would have rendered him unfit even for the lowly post of non-resident representative to Algeria of the province of Quebec, at least in the eyes of the present official opposition and perhaps future Liberal government.

This week in the National Assembly, the Liberals suggested the Landry government "reconsider" its recent appointment of Michelle Duclos to that post in light of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against symbols of American financial and military power.

Duclos was once convicted of transporting 30 sticks of dynamite from Montreal to New York for use in a plot among radical American blacks, Castro supporters and members of the terrorist Front de Libération du Québec to bomb the Statue of Liberty in New York, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and the Washington Monument in the U.S. capital.

This happened when Duclos was 27, a few years older than McGee was when he flirted with political violence. That was 36 years ago, or about twice the time it took McGee to go from youthful revolutionary to generally respected nation builder.

Plot Thwarted

As was the conspiracy involving McGee, the plot involving Duclos was thwarted. She was arrested upon her arrival in New York and received a five-year suspended sentence.

So she has been tried and convicted and has paid her debt to society. And she has been law-abiding ever since. The Quebec terrorist organization with which she was involved, the FLQ, no longer exists. Unlike a few other former Felquistes, she has never tried to rationalize her past actions or toyed again with violence. On the contrary, in 1973, she renounced violence, as McGee did, and described her involvement in the bombing conspiracy as "foolish" and "stupid." From 1976 until 1993, she held several posts in the Quebec government, representing the province in Toronto and Mexico City.

But being a model of rehabilitation as well as qualified for her job were not enough for Liberal leader Jean Charest, who argued that the situation has changed "radically" and Quebec has new "obligations to its partners." If he meant the Americans, they probably have more pressing concerns these days than the appointment of a long-retired terrorist to a secondary-level diplomatic post for the government of a Canadian province.

The Liberal attack on Duclos was not only "cruel" and "mean," as Premier Landry said, it was also politically foolish. As the Liberals acknowledged, Duclos had also worked for the government under them, from their arrival in power in 1985 until 1993.

This allowed Louise Beaudoin, the minister for international relations, to dismiss the Liberal criticism easily by saying, "If she was good enough for you, she's good enough for us." One got the impression the Liberals will not be pressing the matter further.

- Don Macpherson is The Gazette's Quebec-affairs columnist, based in Montreal. His E-mail address is dmacpher@thegazette.southam.ca.