Pierre Elliott Trudeau (12 page)

The actual details of the October Crisis, however, give a much more nuanced impression of Trudeau’s role. Trudeau’s “Just watch me” interview, for instance, reads completely differently when seen in its entirety than it does in the provocative clip that it got reduced to by most of the media. The exchange between Ralfe and Trudeau actually went on some seven and a half minutes and was more in the way of a spirited debate than an interview. What comes across in Trudeau is not so much a sense of arrogance as of generosity. In all the tension of the moment, with the troops swarming the hill and the crisis in its eighth day, he stopped to give Ralfe his undivided attention, openly soliciting his opinions and on more than one occasion ignoring the questions of other reporters clamouring for attention around them. Ralfe had managed to catch Trudeau’s interest by raising a legitimate question: what was the appropriate use of force in a democracy? Much of what comes across as belligerence in the shortened piece sounds merely like the usual Trudeau hyperbole in the full interview. On the whole, Trudeau got the better of Ralfe, presenting a logical defence for his
actions to which his “Just watch me” was simply a punchy conclusion. As he continued on his way, he gave Ralfe a smile and a pat on the shoulder and commended him on playing the devil’s advocate.

Trudeau’s behaviour during the crisis, in fact, showed very little bravado and a good deal of integrity and restraint. From the beginning he took the position that there should be no capitulation to the terrorists’ demands—which included the release of so-called “political prisoners”—on the legitimate grounds that conciliation would only encourage further terrorist acts. In future years, this logic would in fact come to define the official response to terrorism around the world. Trudeau was as good as his word; at the time he even made it clear in private to his future wife, Margaret, whom he was already secretly seeing, that he would take the same line even if she or one of their children were ever to be kidnapped.

In Quebec, Premier Bourassa at first under-reacted to the crisis, failing to cancel an official visit to New York after Cross was kidnapped, and then instantly went into a siege mentality after the Laporte kidnapping, holing up his entire Cabinet in a Montreal hotel under strict security. Meanwhile Mitchell Sharp, the external affairs minister, had, without Trudeau’s permission, agreed to let the abductors’ manifesto
be read on air, believing it was so scattered and extreme that it could only hurt the FLQ cause. The tactic backfired: students in Quebec immediately began to express sympathy with the kidnappers’ demands and to organize rallies and protests in support of the FLQ. In addition, a petition signed by sixteen prominent Quebec personalities, including labour leaders, businessmen, academics, and Trudeau’s old associates René Lévesque, now leader of the fledgling Parti Québécois, and Claude Ryan, at the time editor of
Le Devoir,
called on the Quebec government to negotiate with the abductors “despite and against all obstruction from outside of Quebec.”

Bourassa, however—who at many important moments over the course of his career would suffer a failure of nerves—had neither the will nor the desire to face the crisis alone and implored Trudeau to send in troops to assist his police in tracking down the abductors. Rumours abounded of arms caches, of bomb threats, of further FLQ cells planning further abductions, and Bourassa apparently feared that the province was on the verge of revolution. Under the National Defence Act, Trudeau was legally obliged to meet Bourassa’s request for troops. But the decision whether to accede to Bourassa’s further request for the special powers available under the War Measures Act was Trudeau’s alone.
The act would amount to a total suspension of civil liberties, allowing for searches without warrant and detentions without charge. It could only be invoked, however, in the case of “war, invasion or insurrection, real or apprehended.”

It later came out that in Cabinet Trudeau had initially been against imposing the act, not trusting that the information coming from police and from the provincial government was reliable and being wary of the political fallout of imposing such far-reaching measures. It was a young minister from Quebec, however, Jean Chrétien, whose philosophy carried the day. “Act now,” was his advice, “explain later.” What finally tipped Trudeau toward imposing the act was the petition signed by his former colleagues, which had uncritically adopted the term
political prisoners
from the FLQ list of demands. In Trudeau’s eyes, this legitimizing of the terrorists’ rhetoric—the prisoners in question had been convicted of criminal acts that included bombings and manslaughter—showed that even the elite in Quebec had lost all perspective. To protect himself, however, Trudeau insisted that Bourassa and Mayor Jean Drapeau of Montreal—the same person for whom Trudeau had given his rousing anti-conscription speech back in 1942—write letters requesting emergency powers and making specific reference to a state of insurrection.

In the House, the only dissenter when Trudeau announced the act was Tommy Douglas, who accused the government of using “a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.” He turned out to be right. All of the abductors were eventually revealed to be well known to police—who might easily have prevented the kidnappings if they had bothered to follow through on their own information, which included repeated reports from one of their informants that a major FLQ action was in the offing. After sixty days, the location where Cross was being held was tracked down through normal police work, and his release was negotiated in exchange for his abductors’ free passage to Cuba. The killers of Laporte, meanwhile, again through normal police work, were all arrested within two and a half months of the killing. No evidence was ever discovered of an arms cache or of any organized plan for insurrection. The taking of Laporte, in fact, had been merely an in-sympathy action, planned at the last moment, given that the only information the two cells initially had of each other’s activities was what they had read in the papers. The Cross kidnappers later admitted that the Laporte kidnapping had been a mistake: by implying a much higher level of organization than was the case, it had essentially been responsible for the authorities’ exaggerated reaction.

Even the killing of Laporte involved a level of happenstance. At the time it seemed a direct retaliation for the imposition of the War Measures Act, but according to the admission long afterwards of one Laporte’s abductors, Francis Simard, it was more a matter of last resort. Laporte, who the day after his abduction was allowed to send a letter to Bourassa in which he pleaded for his life, apparently grew severely depressed as his captivity continued. On hearing about the imposition of the act on his abductors’ TV, he tried to escape by flinging himself at a window, botching the attempt but seriously injuring himself in the process. His abductors were then faced with the prospect of his bleeding to death if he didn’t receive medical help and in the end decided to kill him, strangling him with his own necklace, according to Simard, because they couldn’t bear the thought of the “fascists” having the victory.

It would be years, however, before the various inquiries that looked into the kidnappings would report their findings and before the kidnappers themselves would publicly admit any of the specifics of what had happened. Many conspiracy theories would be alleged, a few backed up by actual evidence, and many people’s positions would shift depending on convenience and the political winds. Bourassa would later say he had called for the War Measures Act not because
he had truly believed an insurrection was imminent but so he could say he had taken every possible action—an admission that only seemed to highlight his lack of leadership in the crisis. Robert Stanfield, who had supported the measures, later regretted that he had, as did several of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers of the time. Even Jean Marchand, who had claimed during the crisis that the FLQ had thousands of active members and hundreds of pounds of dynamite, later said the act had been “like using a cannon to kill a fly.”

Trudeau himself was never to recant. In his memoirs, however, he went to uncharacteristic lengths to defend his actions, which suggested he had taken the criticism over them to heart. Part of the reason, no doubt, was that the crisis had been such a personal one for him. In retrospect it got cast as the usual battle between Ottawa and Quebec, but for Trudeau, only two years in power then, it would have been a much more internal battle, fought entirely on his home turf. People like Ryan and Lévesque with whom he had once shared common purpose were now his enemies; he saw the lists of people arrested as a result of the act and knew the names. Back at Brébeuf he had sat in the desk next to Pierre Laporte’s; a generation earlier their fathers had also been schoolmates. Meanwhile, the FLQ, which for most Canadians was a faceless entity they knew only from the
nightly news, for Trudeau meant young men like Pierre Vallières, who had passed through the very offices of
Cité libre,
and who must have seemed as impassioned and wrongheaded as he himself had once been. In one of the ironies of the crisis, Jacques Lanctôt, one of Cross’s abductors, and Paul Rose, leader of the cell that kidnapped Laporte, had first met in a police van after being arrested at the 1968 Saint-Jean-Baptiste protest that had brought Trudeau such renown. Rose later said it was that event that had radicalized him and turned him to the FLQ.

The kidnappers all ended up doing their time. Even those who had been given free passage to Cuba eventually grew bored there and returned home of their own accord, to be tried and imprisoned. In 1981, however, the Laporte kidnapper Jacques Rose, Paul’s brother, by then already paroled, was given a standing ovation at a convention of the Parti Québécois. The one dissenter was René Lévesque, who had served with Laporte in the Lesage government and who looked visibly dumbfounded at Rose’s warm reception. Lévesque’s reaction underlined what had become by then the peculiar, complex legacy of the October Crisis. Though Lévesque had given nearly two decades to the separatist cause by then and had staked much of his political capital on the failed referendum of the previous year, he could,
nevertheless, see how the lens of nationalist sentiment had already distorted his party’s collective memory of Rose’s actions. For many in Quebec, however, despite the overwhelming approval there of Trudeau’s handling of the crisis at the time, the event had somehow become a symbol of his betrayal of the Quebecois. In English Canada, too, it came to be seen as a moment of reversal, when Trudeau had abandoned the principles that people had admired in him and shown himself a despot.

The revelations from the Trudeau archives of his fascistic prewar attitudes might suggest he had merely reverted, during the crisis, to an old, authoritarian self. It would be easier to argue, however, that if his old self ever crossed his mind during the crisis, it was surely in horror. The abductors were what he had been, this handful of militants determined to overthrow the established order—except that they had acted. He was seeing now, from the other side, what he might have become but what all the intervening years had turned him away from. His actions during the crisis, far from betraying his principles, had sprung from them: he had upheld the rule of law. Whatever knowledge he may have had in later years of the RCMP’s nefarious operations to discredit the separatists, the evidence suggests that at the time of the October Crisis, at least, he acted in good faith. Of the
many players in the drama—Premier Bourassa and the police, the petition signers and flame-fanners, the kidnappers themselves—Trudeau, arguably, behaved the most clear-headedly, again the right man at the right moment.

For all the criticism Trudeau took over the matter afterwards, his handling of the crisis became an indelible part of his image and likely helped account both for his political longevity and for his continuing place in the Canadian consciousness long after his retirement. He was the man who spoke his mind. Who was strong when he needed to be. The impeccable logic he brought to his uncompromising treatment of the kidnappers—give in and there would be no end—was the same logic he would bring to the constitutional talks and to his attacks, after his retirement, on the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. It was a logic born again of the legalistic mind that his detractors scoffed at and that in his public image often read as something quite different: arrogance, bravado, wilfulness, though also as strength, which people responded to. Whatever else Trudeau did during the October Crisis, he didn’t make a botch of it. He didn’t dither. He didn’t embarrass us before the eyes of the world, but gave a grave situation its proper gravity. For that, we were grateful.

Trudeau’s exchange with Tim Ralfe on the steps of Parliament during the crisis contrasts sharply with the selfprotective sound bytes favoured by today’s politicians. In the midst of a crisis he was willing to be put to the test, to stand in front of the nation and risk the extravagant statement, the rhetorical flourish. It was a quality that drew the public’s eye to him. There was always the sense in an interview with Trudeau that there was no script, that anything might happen. Part of that feeling came from the fact that he was as much the questioner as the questioned, that he, too, was putting out a challenge.

Over the years Trudeau came to be seen as increasingly hostile to the media, but the truth was likely more complex. An intensely private man, he nonetheless never got out of the habit of taking planeloads of journalists with him whenever he travelled, and many of his diatribes against them seemed to have come from a desire not so much to be free of them as to improve them, to make them understand the seriousness of the task they were involved in. At the Commonwealth conference in London, when he had threatened to pry into journalists’ private lives as they had pried into his, his point had been that they, too, were public figures with public responsibilities.

The media never quite lived up to Trudeau’s standards, yet at some level he must have understood that much of what he was, much of what he was seen to be, he owed to them. “I’m kind of sorry I won’t have you to kick around anymore,” he said, parodying Nixon, when in 1979 he announced what he thought would be his retirement. But there seemed real affection in the jibe. Some ten years earlier, when Trudeau was still in his honeymoon phase, Barbara Frum had asked Patrick Watson, “When Trudeau talks to you, Patrick, who’s more in control, you or Trudeau?” The truth, perhaps, as in the interview with Norman DePoe, was neither. It was, rather, that quality in Trudeau, as Marshall McLuhan had seen, that said, “Just watch me.”