Tales of October Crisis still enrage

DON MACPHERSON

The Gazette Thursday 17 May 2001

Neither do recollections of the chronology of the major events and the names and the roles of the leading characters of the crisis, the members of the terrorist Front de Liberation du Quebec, their victims Pierre Laporte and James Cross and the public figures who responded to the acts of the FLQ. We also need to know some of the little stories about the obscure, ordinary people who were also innocent victims of the crisis. Unlike just about everything else about the crisis, we haven't heard enough of these little stories in the three decades since they occurred.

A few of these stories are told in the published first volume of a biography of Jacques Parizeau by journalist Pierre Duchesne, published this week by Les Editions Quebec-Amerique.

The volume covers the period in the life of the former Parti Quebecois leader and premier from 1930 through 1970 and the crisis.

Parizeau as Hero

This is the book that discusses, as has been reported previously, an offer of financial aid to the PQ from France in 1970 and a secret meeting the year before at which Parizeau explained the party and its goals to American intelligence officers.

The book credits Parizeau, then the head of the PQ executive, with almost singlehandedly keeping the party alive through the crisis.

Some of the PQ's political adversaries associated the party with the FLQ, causing half the PQ's card-carrying members to quit during the crisis. In Drummondville, party members were so afraid that Parizeau had to re-build the local executive three times over three months.

Pierre Marois, a former PQ minister who succeeded Parizeau as head of the party executive, told the author that while leader Rene Levesque worried about what the crisis would do to the party he had founded, "Parizeau is one of those who contributed the most to preventing painful consequences among a good number of active members (who were tempted to quit the party) with the arrests, the threats to jobs, the fears."

Parizeau is convinced the federalist authorities used the crisis as a pretext to "demolish" the PQ, which six months earlier, in the first Quebec general election it contested, had finished second to the Liberals in the popular vote with 23 per cent. Nearly 500 arrests were made during the crisis, but except for the handful of actual terrorists, there were few charges laid and no convictions.

The book repeats stories Parizeau told the author of what happened to some PQ members after the army was called in and the War Measures Act was invoked, giving police sweeping powers of arrest, detention, search and seizure without warrant.

Almost Sacking

In Hull, the book says, soldiers entered "an incredible number" of private homes, "searching and almost sacking" some of them. Police twice visited the party's Outaouais regional president. In Trois-Rivieres, the entire local PQ executive was swept off to jail one night.

In Drummondville, no party members were arrested, but police carried out hundreds of nighttime searches in every neighbourhood, with the flashing rooftop lights of their cars drawing the attention of neighbours. As a result, Parizeau said, "the Parti Quebecois dissolved itself in the following days. The whole executive resigned and left. The members tore up their cards. There was nothing left."

The most haunting story is that of a riding president and his family whose home was visited by police at 2 a.m. "Before they arrested him," the book says, "the Surete du Quebec officers made his wife strip naked and parade in front of the police. 'The coarse laughter of the officers covered the crying of the young children,' said a disgusted Jacques Parizeau. 'One little girl had to be treated by a psychiatrist for years as a result.'"

Such stories help us to understand why some Quebecers are still bitter about the actions of the authorities during that crisis three decades ago.

- Don Macpherson is The Gazette's Quebec-affairs columnist. He is based in Montreal and can be reached by E-mail at dmacpher@thegazette.southam.ca