Madam Speaker, personally, I support non-violence. I am greatly inspired by Martin Luther King and Gandhi. As Louis Fournier, the author and expert on the October crisis, wrote in his book, I am convinced that we cannot afford to be complacent about the FLQ's violence. Louis Fournier also stated that the FLQ extremism was a response to the extremism of power. The government of Ottawa took advantage of the opportunity to unleash a vast operation of repression. The unjustified violence of a state against its innocent citizens is no better than the violence of a group of individuals like the FLQ.
I was 10 years old at the time of the October crisis. I vaguely remember it. I remember seeing a soldier with a machine gun in front of the office of a municipal councillor. I think that the repression was so extensive that almost everyone who lived through those times has not forgotten it. In a single night, October 16, 1970, more than 450 people were unfairly imprisoned without a warrant and without a valid reason.
Why did it happen at night? Undoubtedly to create psychological shock. That is along the lines of what the Duchaîne report stated. People were woken up at night with machine guns in their face. That is rather incredible. Of the approximately 500 people who were arrested, 90% were released without being charged, and 95% of those who were charged were acquitted or had the charges dropped.
Here are some of those people, whom I feel we have a duty to remember: Gilles Gagliardi, Jean-Pierre Gagné, Théo Gagné, Armand Gagnon, Charles Gagnon, Michel Gagnon, Paul Gagnon—often whole families were arrested—Nicolas Galipeau, 15 years old and the son of Pauline Julien, Pascale Galipeau, the daughter of Pauline Julien, Michel Garneau, Juvencio Garza, Ms. Garza, Claude Gaudreau, Annie Gauthier, Jacinthe Gauthier, Maurice Gauthier, Gilles Gauvin, Étienne Gazaille, Claude Gendron, Paul-Émile Giguère, Claude Girard, Jean-Pierre Girard, Pierre Girard, Rosaire Girard, Pierre Girardin, Gérald Godin, Madeleine Barbara Goldstein, Rock Gosselin, Jean Goulet, André Goyer, André Gravel, Pierre Graveline, Stanley Gray, André Grenier, Pierre Grenier, Roger Grenier, Yves Guindon, Yvon Guindon, Marek Gutowski, Louis Hains, Lise Walser Hains, Daniel Hardy, Jacques Hébert, Robert Hébert, Gloria Horowitz, Denis Huard, Solange Hudon, Richard Hudson, Maurice Jean, Pierre Jobin, Réal Jodoin, Jeannine Ouellette Jodoin, André Joffre, Pierre Joncas, Guy Joron, who later became a Parti Québécois MNA, Michel Joyal, Fabienne Julien.
These people were not criminals. They included poets, singers, journalists, union members, lawyers and activists. I could also mention Pauline Julien, whose children I spoke of earlier, Gérald Godin, Michel Garneau, Gaston Miron, Denise Boucher, union leader Michel Chartrand, André Paradis, who I believe spent 51 days in jail, Gaétan Dostie, and the list goes on.
They were all thrown in jail. What they had in common was that they were separatists or opponents of the government of the day.
In his book Diary of a Prisoner of War, Gérald Godin recounts the first hours of his arrest. He writes:
On that first day, my main emotion was a feeling of being uprooted. Of floating in total uncertainty. Why am I here? If someone would at least interrogate me, I might know what I was dealing with. ...If I knew that, I could get my feet back on the ground. At the moment, it is a void.
It was a very traumatic experience for all of these people. The point was to intimidate them. We do not know all of the names, because the federal government has refused to give a list. Furthermore, according to the Duchaîne report, there were more than 30,000 warrantless searches. This was all possible because of the invocation of the War Measures Act, which allows for rights and freedoms to be suspended in the event of apprehended insurrection.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada said that opposition leader René Lévesque had supported the War Measures Act. That is not true. First of all, René Lévesque was not the opposition leader. He was not even a member of the Quebec National Assembly at that time. Second of all, René Lévesque was against the FLQ violence but against the use of the War Measures Act as well.
Here is an excerpt from what René Lévesque wrote in the Journal de Montréal on October 30, 1970: “Conflating these military reinforcements with the abhorrent War Measures Act, which is something else altogether, is yet more of the shrewd demagoguery that Mr. Trudeau and his entourage so masterfully and regularly demonstrate.”
There were three commissions of inquiry, and two of them concluded that the use of the War Measures Act was unjustified. These two were the Duchaîne commission and the Macdonald commission, which was created by the federal government. The Keable commission did not issue a ruling because it was focused on the events after the October crisis. Some very worrisome revelations later came from a number of stakeholders.
For example, Don Jamieson, the transport minister at the time, wrote in his memoirs that there had not been substantial grounds to think that there had been apprehended insurrection. He believed that a number of ministers in Trudeau's cabinet from Quebec, including Jean Marchand, Gérard Pelletier, Bryce MacKasey and Trudeau's principal secretary, Marc Lalonde, were using the act to take on their political adversaries in Quebec, whether they were federalist, like Claude Ryan, or sovereignist, like René Lévesque.
Eric Kierans, the communications minister at the time, devoted whole pages of his memoirs to this massive injustice, as he called it. After in-depth research, Professor Reg Whitaker, the great expert on security matters, wrote in 1993, “the RCMP never asked for the War Measures Act, were not consulted as to its usefulness, and would have opposed it if they had been asked for their opinion.”
Peter C. Newman, the editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star at the time, has debunked the provisional government story. It was said that the apprehended insurrection was because a provisional government, opposing the elected one, was going to be put into place under the leadership of René Lévesque, Claude Ryan and Louis Labelle, of the FTQ. “That scenario was a meticulously concocted lie” floated by Prime Minister Trudeau and his principal secretary, Marc Lalonde.“They both lied to me about why the War Measures Act was imposed.”
As Bernard Landry said on the 40th anniversary of the October crisis, we have a duty to remember those who were the victims of an injustice that was, and still remains, Canada's shame.
We are asking for apologies, because, as the Macdonald Commission recommended, there should be compensation for those whose rights were violated, for no valid reason, when the War Measures Act was invoked. The compensation should be not only for the loss of their property but also for the affront to their freedom. Apologies are necessary because such an affront to democracy must never be repeated in different circumstances. Freedom is fragile.