by KEITH JONES
The vast majority of the detainees had no connection whatsoever to the Front de Liberation du Québec (FLQ), the tiny Quebec indépendantiste terrorist group that had kidnapped a British diplomat, James Cross, on October 5 and Quebec’s Labour Minister, Pierre Laporte, five days later.
With the aim of empowering the Canadian state to intimidate, jail and smear the government’s left-wing opponents as violent, the federal and Quebec Liberal governments, Montreal’s Jean Drapeau-led city administration and its police chief spuriously claimed the FLQ kidnappings were the first act in an attempt to overthrow the government.
This provided the legal pretext for invoking the War Measures Act. Enacted at the start of the First World War, the act gave the federal government quasi-dictatorial powers in the event of “war, invasion, or insurrection, real or apprehended.” During World War Two, its powers had been used to intern 22,000 Japanese-Canadians, ban strikes, jail Communist Party leaders and outlaw for the war’s duration the Socialist Workers League, then the Canadian section of the Fourth International.
With the invocation of the War Measures Act, the police gained the power to conduct warrantless raids and arrests and to hold persons without charge, legal counsel or any right to appear before a judge for 21 days. Even after the three-week threshold was reached, those who were charged could be indefinitely denied bail on the government’s say-so.
Denied the right to see a lawyer, many of the detainees did not learn for weeks that they were being held under the dictatorial powers of the War Measures Act. Some were subject to physical and/or psychological abuse.
The 497 people detained under the War Measures Act constituted a diverse group of left-wing opponents of the government—socialists, trade union militants, journalists and anti-poverty activists. They included ordinary working people as well as Michel Chartrand, the head of the Confederation of National Trade Unions’ (CSN/CNTU) Montreal Central Council, the poet Gerald Godin and his partner, the celebrated singer Pauline Julien. The latter two were prominent members of the Parti Québécois, the recently founded pro-Quebec independence party. Its leader, the former provincial Liberal cabinet minister René Lévesque, had repeatedly denounced the FLQ and terrorism.
Only 63 of the 497 were ever charged with any crime. Even more tellingly, just 18 were convicted.
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