Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles.
I am very pleased to rise to speak to this motion. I do so with great humility and compassion, because this motion is about compassion for the people who were unjustly imprisoned in 1970.
My friend Pierre Falardeau often liked to refer to a Chinese proverb: “The ox is slow but the earth is patient.” Of course this is in reference to the struggle for independence, which can be one step forward and two steps back. With all the ups and downs, one must be patient. I think this proverb also applies very nicely to the motion we are debating today.
It has been 50 years since the War Measures Act was invoked and people have been demanding justice. For 50 years now, people have been calling for recognition of the trauma that those individuals endured. October 16, 1970, is a dark day in Quebec history. On that day, the government suspended individual freedoms and arrested 500 people. On October 16, 1970, Quebec lived de facto under a dictatorship.
What happened? How did a democracy like Canada end up that way? Why did the government do what it did? The government was afraid. It was not afraid of the FLQ; it was afraid of the rise of Quebec nationalism. We have to go back 10 years earlier to fully understand what happened.
Quebec in the 1960s was characterized by the economic, social and linguistic oppression of one people by another people. At that time, 44% of Quebeckers were under the age of 20. They flocked to the cities and wanted to shake things up and build a society that they felt reflected them.
Thousands of Quebeckers, both men and women, rose up and founded two democratic political parties. In the early 1960s, Marcel Chaput, André d'Allemagne and, later, Pierre Bourgault founded a movement that would become a political party. It was called the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale. This party ran candidates in the 1966 election. In 1968, René Lévesque left the Liberal Party to found the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association, which would become the Parti Québécois, the PQ.
These two political parties had the same response to the oppression and exploitation of francophones in Quebec. The only possible response was independence.
In 1970, the PQ received 25% of the votes. Remember that at the time, a vote for the PQ was a vote for independence. In 1970, the independence movement clearly had momentum. That is what Pierre Elliott Trudeau would target. On October 16, 1970, Mr. Trudeau was not afraid of the FLQ, but he was afraid of René Lévesque and the thousands of people who followed him. It was this movement that they would try to crush in 1970. These were the people they would try to intimidate and arrest on the night of October 16, 1970.
They were people, young people, children and women who loved freedom and justice and who yearned for equity and equality, like the singer Pauline Julien, Guy Kosak, Gilles L'Espérance, Marie Labelle, Ronald Labelle, Raynald Lachaîne, Gérard Lachance, Robert Lachance, Donald Lacoste, Michèle Lafaille, Henri Lafrance, Robert Lafrenière, Jacques Lagacé, Hélène Lakoff, Serge-Denis Lamontagne, Hélène Lamothe, Daniel Lamoureux, Danièle Lamoureux, Michèle Lamoureux, Denis Landry, Richard Langelier, Robert Langevin, Yvan Lapierre, Harold Lapointe, Hélène Larochelle, André Larocque, Jacques Larue-Langlois, Claudette Larue-Langlois, Les Lasko, Jean Laurin, Michel Lauzon, André Lavoie, Michel Lavoie, Pierre Lavoie, Roger Lavoie and Urbain Lavoie.
We can see that these were family affairs.
There was also Jean-Denis Lebeuf, Alonzo LeBlanc, Côme Leblanc, Monique Leblanc, Thérèse Leblanc, Kristiana Leblanc. Again, a family affair.
We must not forget Manon Léger, Jim Leitch, Jean-Guy Lelièvre, François Lemay, Robert Lemieux, Serge Lépine, Marcel Lepot, who is a constituent of mine, Jean-Guy Leroux, Jean-Jacques Leroux, Loyola Leroux, Robert Leroux, Michel LeSiège, Gabriel Levasseur, Jean-Yves Lévesque, Michel Lévesque, Serge Lévesque and hundreds of others.
The only reason that the government gave for arresting these individuals was apprehended insurrection. Historians have been searching for 50 years. When we hear the phrase “apprehended insurrection”, we think there must have been boxes of grenades, crates of submachine guns, caches, guns or an army. Where were the military training camps? None were found. None have ever been found in 50 years.
I just named some individuals. We are talking about 497 people being arrested. This number represents realities and people. In the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity to meet individuals who were jailed in 1970.
I would like to talk about Jocelyne Robert. She was 22 years old in 1970. She was seven months pregnant. She was a separatist activist like thousands of others in 1970. She was living in Montreal with her husband and parents. One night in late October, police officers came into their house with submachine guns. Her father, who had just suffered a heart attack, was in a room in the back of the house. She unfortunately asked them not to make noise because her father was in the back room. They charged to the back of the house, broke down the door and pointed their guns at her father's head. He could have died.
They came back to her house three times. The third time, they arrested her and her husband. Jocelyne said that as she sat in the backseat of the car, flanked by two massive police officers, they showed her that her name was on a list. The officer then said something quite flattering. He said that they had received orders to shoot her if she tried to run. A police officer told her that in 1970.
In the middle of the night, Jocelyne underwent a gynecological exam in a small grey cell illuminated by a bare lightbulb. She was seven months pregnant. It took her 45 years to put into words what happened to her that night in October 1970.
Do we owe her an apology?
Will the government apologize to her?
She wrote a book a few years ago. She finally was able to get over this ordeal, but it took her 45 years. It is a lifelong trauma.
I could name many like that. I met many people who had a traumatic experience in October 1970 and never recovered. The apology we are demanding today is for them and for all the others, dead or alive. We are demanding an apology so their traumatic experience will not have been in vain. We want to be able to tell them that it was not a dream, that their pain is real, that it was a mistake and that it should have never happened.
