Mr. Speaker, I wish to inform you that I will be sharing my time with my colleague, the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby.
This is a complex and very emotional debate, and it stirs up many things from the past for everyone who lived through that period, including friends and family members. I hope my speech proves that this is not a subject that I take lightly. It is not like any other speech one might give on a bill or trade agreement, for example.
This is important, because we are discussing events that happened 50 years ago. It is extremely difficult to look at something that happened half a century ago with today's eyes. I would therefore like to take a few minutes to provide some historical context.
For decades, Quebec's working class was exploited, scorned, humiliated, overlooked and treated like second-class citizens.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there was an incredible number of artistic and intellectual movements. I am thinking of the Refus Global manifesto, which would lead to greater emancipation of Quebec's French-speaking working class. There would be major accomplishments with the Quiet Revolution, the election of Jean Lesage and his government, the nationalization of hydroelectricity and the creation of the ministry of education. These were undeniable advances that were made peacefully in a democratic context. We can be proud of them and we continue to be proud of them today.
At the time, certain young revolutionaries thought that things were not moving quickly enough or going far enough. They were losing hope in peaceful, democratic changes and social progress. They made the fundamental mistake of using political violence, which is always unacceptable in a democratic and lawful society.
They committed violent acts that caused irreparable harm. They were responsible for deaths, injuries and kidnappings and they left many people in mourning. We must not minimize or leave that out of the discussion.
When a kidnapping occurs, the appropriate response is to conduct a search and have a police investigation. The job of the police is to find those who are kidnapped and bring them safely home. That is not what happened. That is the tipping point, the point of divergence that will also have serious consequences.
As I reminded my colleague earlier, the wrongs of some people do not cancel out the wrongs of others and the suffering of some does not cancel out the suffering of others. I feel that our discussion on the entire context of the time must be reasonable and nuanced.
It is at moments like those that things slip out of a government's grasp. The reaction is disproportionate. Instead of giving more powers to the police so that they can conduct police investigations, the ultimate weapon is used. Basic freedoms and civil rights are suspended. The War Measures Act is invoked and the Canadian army is sent against its own people.
This was the first and only time that has happened in our history. The NDP, led at the time by Tommy Douglas, said very clearly and explicitly that, in a democratic society, there is a danger in wishing to save democracy by attacking democracy, and wishing to preserve civil liberties by suspending them. That is going much too far.
We must not take this lightly. Considerable powers were given to the army to be able to bypass basic rights, end civil liberties, allow arrests without warrant, and imprison people for up to 90 days with no outside contact and before they were even told what they were accused of. At the time, only the NDP opposed those actions because it considered them to be excessive.
Let me paraphrase Tommy Douglas, the NDP leader at the time. He said that, in a democracy, the proper thing to do, the only thing to do, is to come to Parliament and ask Parliament to grant additional powers or, if necessary, to change the Criminal Code.
However, that is not at all what happened. The government bypassed Parliament and parliamentarians. It overreacted, sending the army out against its own citizens in peacetime. It was a serious crisis, but we were not at war.
Tommy Douglas continued by saying that basic human rights cannot be destroyed, suspended or disregarded simply because the country is cloaked in a climate of fear. We were indeed cloaked in a climate of fear, but that does not justify the government’s reaction. In a democratic and lawful society, people are considered innocent until proven guilty. That was all swept aside.
Tommy Douglas continued by saying that it was extremely risky and dangerous to revoke fundamental freedoms like that. He reminded Canadians of what happened in countries like South Africa, Rhodesia, as it was then called, and Czechoslovakia, and that it sometimes ended very badly.
It is difficult to tell the story 50 years later. My impression is that they did not want to bother with a small group or small active cells but rather to hit hard and create a climate of fear among Quebeckers. They wanted a wide-ranging response and they brought out the heavy artillery. When I say heavy artillery, I mean tanks in the streets.
There were also mass arrests: 500 people were arbitrarily arrested. There were raids in 31,700 houses, where people were woken up in the middle of the night with a machine gun in their face or in their children’s faces. Of course, they were traumatized and felt threatened. Items were seized from more than 4,200 apartments. The 500 people arrested were from every walk of life: artists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, socialists, unionists. They were people who wanted a better, fairer and freer society.
Still today, I cannot understand how people like Gaston Miron, Gérald Godin and Pauline Julien could have been arrested without a warrant under the War Measures Act. People were arrested who had no contact with the outside world and who had no idea what was going on in society. It is hard to imagine the anguish and anxiety these people felt at being jailed without knowing why, without knowing when they would get out or what they were accused of. Some people were physically intimidated and threatened at gunpoint while they were in jail. Do you not think that these people deserve an apology from the federal government?
The police committed some blunders and went too far. However, these blunders and excesses and raids only occurred because civil liberties were suspended and the War Measures Act was imposed. The raids were so sweeping, they bring to mind the lowest moments of the authoritarian regimes of Chile, Argentina, or Greece under the colonels. It is nothing to be proud of. We must acknowledge the harm and suffering inflicted on people who were unjustly arrested and families who lost a father, a husband or a friend.
I would also like to quote Le Devoir, the only newspaper that came out against the War Measures Act. At the time, it was run by Claude Ryan, a good friend of René Lévesque's. René Lévesque and Claude Ryan had a good friend in common named Pierre Laporte, and yet, neither Mr. Lévesque nor Mr. Ryan hesitated to say that invoking the act was unacceptable.
I would like to an article by Jean-François Nadeau in Le Devoir:
As political scientist Guy Lachapelle reminds us in a new book about the October crisis, Ryan and Lévesque were first and foremost allies in that time of turmoil: “During the 1970 crisis, political power sought to kill Quebec's democracy by attempting to silence everyone...who dared speak of freedom.”