Mr. Speaker, first of all, I want to congratulate my colleague from Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot for her passionate and fascinating speech.
We are here to talk about the famous War Measures Act. I think that it is rather important. I was actually disappointed to hear our Liberal colleagues repeat all day long that we should not be talking about that today and we should have focused on another subject. I am deeply disappointed by their attitude and I want to say it from the outset. It is nevertheless an historical event. A 50th anniversary is a unique occasion. It does not occur every week. The October crisis left its mark on so many people that I do not understand why we should not talk about our history. It looks like the members opposite feel uneasy about our history. I think it is important to look closer into that, because uneasiness can often be a sign that something smells bad and that people have something to hide.
I did not live through that era, since I had not been born yet. I had to find out about it through history books, videos, documentaries and all sorts of content and testimonies that we still have today. What I learned was deeply shocking to me. I was shocked to see that the army was sent out in Quebec, that Quebeckers' rights were suspended, that more than 30,000 searches were carried out, that 500 Quebeckers were arrested arbitrarily, without a warrant and for no reason. Most importantly, I was shocked to see that decision-makers in Ottawa wanted to create a climate of terror in Quebec.
As I said earlier, I was not born yet at the time, but my father lived through this event. He was a child, about seven or eight years old. He once told me that he was afraid to leave his house around that time, because the streets were full of soldiers. On top of that, his father was a card-carrying member of the Parti Québécois, so it was serious. In the eyes of the Liberals, that meant you were almost like a hardened criminal. Every time my father, who was a child at the time, saw an army truck go by, he wondered if a soldier had taken his dad away. Every time he came home from school, he wondered whether his dad would be there waiting for him or whether he would be in jail. That would be really stressful and scary for a child at that age.
In the end, my grandfather was never imprisoned, but how many other families and children were frightened like my dad when he was just a kid? How many were not so lucky and saw family members thrown in jail? What were those people guilty of? They were guilty of having opinions. They were guilty of being nasty separatists, an opinion that was so dangerous that they had to be locked up and crushed.
Fifty years later, the government has still not published the official list of those arrested. It must be done. In fact, there may be a lot more, because those 497 people who have been listed are only the ones who were eventually found when we searched. Today, I want to mention several of them: Edward Martin Sloan, of Outremont; Thomas Sloan; Harold Slobod; Patrick Straram; Charles Felder Suddutch; Diane Synnett; Pierre Taddéo; Jocelyne Talbot; Monique Tardif; Claude Tedguy; Pierre Tétreault, of Montréal; Pierre Tétreault, of Longueuil; Richard Théorêt; Richard Therrien; Colette Therrien; Gilles Toupin; Julien Tourigny; Gérard Townsley; Tran Dung Tran; Gaétan Tremblay; Jean-Yves Tremblay; Pierre Tremblay; Réjean Tremblay; Yvon Tremblay; Louise Trépanier; Mona Trudel; Léonard Turcot; Normand Turgeon; Andrew Typaldos; Arthur Vachon; Pierre Vachon; Marcel Vaive; Pierre Vallières; Jean Van Schoorisse; Annie Vautier; Léo Veillette; Claude Veilleux; Fernand Venne; Pierre Venne; René Venne; Roger Venne; Gilles Verrier; Michel Viau; Frederick Vickerson; Do Duc Vien; Michel Viger; Pierre Villeneuve; Anne Villeneuve; Hélène Vinet; Robert Walker; Jeannine Warren Champagne; Daniel Waterlot; Leon Vincent Wright; Arthur Young; and Klaus Zezzar.
When we take a step back from the situation, we see that the real objective of this elaborate exercise, this whole charade, was not to flush out members of the FLQ, because almost none were found.
The real objective was to intimidate a people, to scare them and send them the message that what was happening to those who were locked up could happen to any one of them. This is serious, because this allegedly happened in a country of democracy, openness, peace and freedom of expression. In the end, it was clear that it was more of a country that prefers to lecture.
Sending out the army to crush a people is what dictatorships do. The Prime Minister, who is quick to apologize and has even managed to make a specialty of it, has shown himself incapable of apologizing for what his country, and especially his father, did to us.
However, even Jean Chrétien acknowledged it. The former prime minister, who was in the Trudeau cabinet at the time, said the following in his book Dans la fosse aux lions, published in 1985:
“One thing is obvious. The police did not need to arrest everyone who was arrested; they would only have had to arrest about 60 people, while they arrested more than 400”.
The next page reads as follows:
“In hindsight, I readily admit that the powers granted to the police by the War Measures Act were excessive, that a handful of would-be terrorists did not justify such a rush into battle”.
Those quotes were from former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien.
Apologies have been given for other situations. For example, the Canadian government apologized to the Canadians of Ukrainian descent who were interned during the First World War. There were apologies to Canadians of Japanese and Italian descent during the Second World War. Once again, the Canadian government apologized. Meanwhile, when Quebeckers are the ones being arrested, Canada does not apologize.
Is the Prime Minister refusing to apologize for his father invoking the War Measures Act because if he does, he will potentially have to apologize for the other despicable actions his government has taken against Quebeckers or that his father took against Quebeckers?
There are plenty of examples. There was the Brink's affair, which the federal government carried out just before the 1970 election to make people believe that all of the money was being removed from Quebec and that there would not be a penny left in our banks. There were the many attacks perpetrated in the name of the FLQ that turned out to be planned by the RCMP itself, as was revealed by the Keable commission. There was the infamous Neat Pitch plan developed in 1972, a secret military plan to invade Quebec. After all, they needed to make sure that Quebeckers did not control their own future, so they had to figure out how to invade them. There was the RCMP's theft of the list of PQ members in 1973.
These kinds of events reveal the real nature of the Canadian regime. It is a hypocritical and oppressive regime that would go to any lengths when it comes to Quebec. None of this stopped the PQ from taking power a few years later, in 1976. Quebeckers stood up and held strong against the intimidation.
The most ironic part of all this is that this same prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a few years after imposing the War Measures Act, imposed the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on us in 1982, which, since its inception has been used to gut Bill 101. There are people today who would like to use this same charter to attack our state secularism law. We really have to wonder, then, what could we possibly gain from being in this country that is simply incapable of respecting us.
What worries me the most is that the Canadian government refuses to apologize. The Canadian government seems to have no problem sending the military out on the streets and throwing innocent people in jail. In fact, the Canadian government has shown no remorse, which means this could happen again. I find that appalling.
That is what the government across the aisle is all about. Actually, it is not just the Liberals, since the Conservatives seem to be on their side. That is outrageous. Those members should be ashamed of themselves. In any case, I am ashamed of them. They can send out the army as much as they like, but they can never kill what will eventually emerge in Quebec: a free country where people can live happily and peacefully, fully independent. We will not send the army out against our own people.
