moved:
That the House demand an official apology from the Prime Minister on behalf of the Government of Canada for the enactment, on October 16, 1970, of the War Measures Act and the use of the army against Quebec’s civilian population to arbitrarily arrest, detain without charge and intimidate nearly 500 innocent Quebeckers.
Mr. Speaker, in 1970, the House of Commons of Canada voted to implement the War Measures Act. I want to focus on the word “war”. A war is either a conflict with a foreign enemy or a civil war. It may be the result of insurrection, and that is what we will be talking about. In this case, the War Measures Act was invoked in response to what we now know was a lie. That has been amply acknowledged. Now the government is refusing to take responsibility for that lie and apologize for it. This is like the only kid in the family who does not get a Christmas present. Everyone has been apologizing for everything. It seems to me that the Prime Minister of Canada apologizes when it snows, but he will not apologize to the 500 Quebeckers who were detained and arrested or to their families and their descendants.
This is an eminently troubling and serious context, but it proved to be an unfortunate opportunity to turn a crisis that should have been resolved into an apprehended false insurrection, with democratic leaders and newspaper executives as imaginary protagonists and adversaries.
Five hundred people were detained with no explanation, no warrant and no trial, using abusive search and interrogation tactics. This has caused long-lasting trauma. We have tried to share information about a number of cases to make the point that this issue should be more about compassion than politics. As my esteemed colleague from Longueuil—Saint-Hubert said, it is important that these individuals be able to put this behind them.
The current Prime Minister of Canada said just a few months ago that no army should be used against its own people. That is just plain common sense, except under certain dictatorships. However, just 50 years ago another prime minister, who was also named Trudeau and whose name I can say, sent the army in against its own people.
Thirty-two members of the Bloc Québécois sit in the House of Commons of Canada to uphold this same idea of independence for the Quebec nation, an idea that Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau tried to crush once and for all.
The 32 of us, backed by millions of votes, attest to the fact that he failed. In light of that failure, the House of Commons could do the honourable thing and recognize that it was unacceptable and unjustified, as history has made clear.
The current Prime Minister has apologized to the Japanese community, the Ukrainian community and the Italian community for internments during the Second World War. He was right to do so. Why not make an equally well meaning apology to these 500 Quebec families?
Historically, the government has also not apologized to the Métis people for the crisis that culminated in the hanging of Louis Riel. Nor has it apologized to the Acadians who were deported thousands of kilometres from their home. It is as though Prime Minister Trudeau's apologies are reserved for anyone who is not francophone.
This raises a lot of questions from a historical perspective. The Prime Minister is Her Majesty's government representative in Canada. He is telling us that the country moved on a long time ago, it is time to move on to something else and that we are playing politics, but the War Measures Act is not that old.
To engage in politics is to serve the people. Serving the people is impossible without having some compassion. I am not certain that being the heir of a self-proclaimed aristocracy with a good dose of intellectual arrogance demonstrates great compassion towards people who have suffered.
I doubt that the Prime Minister has ever closed his eyes and imagined that a machine gun was pointed at him, his father or his children and that, under the law, the person holding the gun had the right to use it with no questions asked. That is unbelievable violence that leaves an indelible mark on people's psyche. It is still very real 50 years later. Does that not deserve an apology?
The Canadian government ordered raids similar to those carried out in eastern Europe in the communist era. It used, threatened, encouraged, called for and wanted interrogation methods that caused scars that people still carry today. It pursued tens of thousands of interrogations, and it sought to cause costly damage without ever fixing the homes where children were woken up in the middle of the night.
There was a will to repress with violence a nation that had not been assimilated or even seduced into assimilating on its own. That nation had not been persuaded to give up its language, its culture and its arts. The government would not even hesitate to lock up artists as well.
The government used the pretext of an apprehended insurrection because the law required it and because what is legal is not necessarily ethical. It is now well known that Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Bourassa and Mr. Drapeau, without talking about it directly, together came up with a lie worthy of the Francoists, whose dishonourable remaining adherents still roam the streets of Barcelona at night with a similar goal.
The government suppressed a nation's democratic will to exercise the right to self-determination. It was said that this was an apprehended insurrection to overthrow the Government of Quebec, nothing less. Who devised this insurrection? Who led it? Members will not believe it, and I dare them not to laugh when I tell them. One of the alleged leaders of the insurrection was Claude Ryan, the director of Le Devoir, whose violent charisma we saw later. René Lévesque, the one we all knew, was also allegedly the leader of the insurrection. I am trying to imagine him with a rifle in hand. That is beyond ridiculous. There was also Guy Rocher. Could there be a more peaceful intellectual than Guy Rocher? I wish everyone could have the opportunity to meet him. This was absolute folly, but it was intentional, calculated and designed to stir up trouble, despite the warnings of the RCMP, an institution that all members of the House revere. The RCMP specifically told cabinet that there was no apprehended insurrection and there was no need to impose the War Measures Act. That warning was quickly swept under the rug.
There was intent behind that. You do not arrest 500 innocent people, upset 30,000 others and terrorize an entire nation without a specific intent, which was to crush support for a movement.
That is something the Bolsheviks would do. Sure, we must always condemn acts of terrorism, but ideally you do not wait 10 days to do so. All forms of terrorism must be condemned, and we did so without hesitation. Paul Rose's son did so. We condemned terrorism.
That said, there is no connection between the use of the War Measures Act and the terrorist actions. Honourable citizens, our Canadian neighbours, were fed misinformation. Hate for Quebec nationalists was intentionally fuelled and then taken in, absorbed and embraced. This left an enduring stain on the Quebec nation.
My Twitter feed has become a frightful cesspool of hateful messages, which come in by the thousands. They mainly come from people who are misinformed, so I forgive them, but I do not respond because that would be a waste of my time. They have been fed lie after lie, which they continue to perpetuate today. Of course, the opposite is said in French. Canadian bilingualism will remain one of the greatest myths to survive the 21st century.
The raids did not lead to the arrest of a single terrorist. It does not matter because that was not the objective. The raids were not meant to catch terrorists. The terrorist kidnappers, who are to be condemned and denounced, were used as a pretext to quash an idea that seemed like a threat to Canada, even though that idea was growing peacefully and democratically. That idea was legitimate, whether people agreed with it or not, and it was independence for the nation of Quebec.
In 1970, they deliberately created confusion. Yesterday, the current Prime Minister of Canada purposely re-created that confusion and perpetuated it. That is a crying shame in an institution that should make truth one of its core values. In 1970, Canada engaged in state terrorism. In 2020, Canada still condones state terrorism.
In 1837, Canadians—or the French, as they called them back then—rose up, exasperated, but they were repressed into a lasting fear. Then they tried to assimilate them, claiming that it was for the good of this poor gang who had no culture or history. However, things turned out very well for us.
In 1968, Quebeckers felt humiliated on the day that would become their national holiday. How many were arrested? How many were beaten? They were trying to scare them once again.
When the Parti Québécois was elected in 1976, they tried to scare them.
During the 1980 referendum, they tried to scare them.
During the 1995 referendum, they tried to scare them.
In October 1970, they tried to scare them.
Each time, people thought it was the last time, but it will never be the last time because, on a daily and weekly basis, Quebeckers are told it is over and nobody is interested anymore. Anytime someone actually takes the time to look into it, however, it turns out that a lot of people are indeed still interested.
I suggest we do things differently. I suggest we proceed as neighbouring nations and friends rather than use force, intimidation and public money to suppress the legitimate expression of a democratic will.
The Prime Minister of Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada and even, I might add, the Conservatives, including their leader, Mr. Stanfield, voted to invoke the War Measures Act. Later, they clearly stated that they regretted doing so because invoking the War Measures Act was not justified. The federal Parliament, which was also made up of quite a few honourable people at the time, would not have voted to invoke the War Measures Act had it not been fed a bunch of lies.
It took incredible cynicism and a profound hatred of Quebec nationalism for them to be prepared to go that far and run roughshod over the democratic values that those in the upper echelons of the government of the day had publicly championed for decades.
All those important people were on the wrong side of history. All those people were sure that Quebeckers would never recover from the humiliation. All those people were betting that Quebec was beaten, that Quebec would never rise up again, that Quebec would give in and be a province like all the rest and that Quebec would resign itself to being conquered yet again by fear and lies. Maybe Canada was wrong.
The Prime Minister says I do not speak for Quebec. That is true. However, he is in a minority situation and does not speak for Canada, either. Quebec speaks for Quebec, and I look forward to Quebec being able to speak for itself again.
Does the head of state have the right to lie, cheat and send in the army against his own people simply because he is the boss, because he said, “just watch me”, because he does not know the difference between common good and hubris against his own people?
Perhaps Canada has it wrong. We will be there to offer an alternative to those Quebeckers who are sick of being humiliated. We will be there to offer them what we hope will be a better country, one they can call their own. This will come one day, with another proposal and another election.
