Homeland Insecurity

Restraining order: After attempting escape, Pierre Laporte (Denis Bernard) is returned to his room by Francis Simard (Louis-David Morasse, background) and Jacques Rose (Olivier Morin), in the CBC miniseries October 1970. (Chris Reardon/CBC)

Canadians who presume the restrictions on U.S. civil liberties that have followed the Sept. 11 attacks could never happen here should reconsider our own autumn of terror. As the CBC dramatic miniseries October 1970 reminds us, 36 years ago this week, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau ordered federal troops into Ottawa and Montreal in response to the kidnappings of a Quebec minister and a British diplomat by the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). After Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act allowed police wide-reaching powers of arrest, armed officers conducted lightning pre-dawn raids on 4,000 residences.

Many believed that Trudeau’s decisive response to the October Crisis was his heroic, defining moment. Others were less sure. Tommy (The Greatest Canadian) Douglas, leader of the New Democratic Party at the time, famously complained that employing the War Measures Act was like “using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.”

For the Canadian and Quebec governments, the scramble to save the kidnapped officials was slow torture. The FLQ murdered one hostage, Quebec Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte, who was a childhood schoolmate of Trudeau’s. (Laporte’s body was discovered in the trunk of a car seven days after his abduction.) British trade commissioner James Cross would not be freed for three months. While bargaining for the hostages’ release, Trudeau’s government reluctantly allowed the broadcast of the FLQ manifesto on the CBC, including its threat (translated from French): “In the coming year [Quebec Premier Robert] Bourassa is going to get what’s coming to him: 100,000 revolutionary workers, armed and organized!”

While there was clearly great drama unfolding in October of 1970, the current, eight-part TV interpretation of the FLQ’s power play is a curiously slack work. Probably because co-writers Peter Mitchell (Cold Squad) and Wayne Grigsby (Trudeau) too often cut Ottawa and Quebec City out of their story, choosing to interpret the October Crisis as a racing police procedural.

Unfortunately, as the first episodes of October 1970 prove, following the police is hardly a valuable point of entry into the subject. Minutes after Cross’s wife reports him missing — remember, he’s British — the police show up at a Greek official’s home. Later, two officers stumble upon Paul Rose, Laporte’s abductor. Twice they sit close to him on subways and buses, shy as wallflowers at a dance, inexplicably afraid to arrest the most wanted man in Canada. In between these blunders, we have Montreal’s anti-terrorist squad leader, Lt.-Det. Julien Giguère (Patrick Labbé), squabbling with members of the Sûreté du Québec and the RCMP over jurisdictional privilege. As it turns out, the various law enforcement agencies involved in the October Crisis weren’t racing anywhere except into each other.

Another problem is that in pursuing the police procedural to its logical end, October 1970 spends too much time following self-proclaimed revolutionaries in the Liberation Cell (the group that kidnapped Cross) and their uneasy allies, the Chénier Cell (Laporte’s murderers). In a well-written part, Mathieu Grondin is convincing as FLQ leader Jacques Lanctôt, an impassioned fantasist who believed the airing of the FLQ manifesto would incite a second French Revolution.

Vive le Québec libre: University student Christine (Karine Vanasse) rallies campus support in October 1970. (Chris Reardon/CBC)

Alas, in 2006, a little Marxist rhetoric goes a long way, and while the stories of the kidnappers are interesting, even the filmmakers recognize that the FLQ’s proselytizing plays best as domestic comedy. As in the scene where Lanctôt’s sister Louise (Fanny La Croix) argues with Cross (R.H. Thompson in his best screen role in years) over the radicals’ goals: “I believe in the creation of an independent Quebec free from the shackles of capitalist imperialism,” Louise Lanctôt announces, throwing her shoulders back with pride. After which we hear someone mutter from the other room, “Louise, what’s for supper?”

No, the October Crisis was a Night of the Generals. While Canada’s great civil emergency played out in the streets of Montreal, the real action took place in Ottawa and Quebec City. As viewers, we need to be placed on Parliament Hill, listening to Trudeau and his Quebec lieutenants — cabinet ministers Jean Marchand, Gérard Pelletier and a 36-year-old Jean Chrétien — as they argue and debate the threat of the FLQ, and later personally vet the list of FLQ supporters (many of whom were old friends and colleagues) targeted for arrest. We also want to attend the National Assembly of Quebec, listening in as Bourassa convinces Parti Quebecois leader René Lévesque to join him in requesting that Trudeau send federal troops to occupy Montreal. These figures decided the October Crisis. These men plotted the course of Canada for 30 years. They are largely absent from October 1970.

In fairness, director Don McBrearty (Terry) and writers Mitchell and Grigsby were faced with a fool’s errand: writing English dialogue for French Quebec actors. No one should suggest they be denied right of passage to what is a story for anyone to tell. The challenge here is that they are trying to re-imagine a time and place in Quebec that has already been captured by some of its best filmmakers — impassioned, partisan observers like Gilles Carle (Le vraie nature de Bernadette, 1972) and Michel Brault (Les orders, 1974). Both of these films have appeared on the Toronto International Film Festival’s lists of the top 10 Canadian films of all time.

By comparison, October 1970 seems manufactured. It never delivers the insights into Quebec society that a film like Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971), another TIFF top-10 Canadian movie, so casually provides. Who can forget the moment in that film when a Quebecois miner drains a beer and crows, “There’s another one the English won’t get”?

Nor does October 1970 compare favourably with other documentaries the CBC has already made on the subject — most particularly the 2000 film Black October, and also a provocative 1975 examination of the episode called The October Crisis. The latter included what might be the best explanation as to why Trudeau and his colleagues were so forceful in combating a perceived insurrection in Quebec. They may have been frightened of their own shadows.

“I cannot swear it, but I think we were all thinking about ourselves. We ourselves were a very small group, Trudeau, Pelletier, Marchand, [Marc] Lalonde, Chrétien, myself and a few people in the civil service, say 50 all told,” Minister of Industry Jean-Luc Pepin told the CBC at the time. “And we were bringing off a revolution. We held the key posts [in Ottawa]. We were making the civil service, kicking and screaming all the way, bilingual. We were a well-organized group of revolutionaries just like them, but working in quite a different way of course.”

Elsewhere Pepin asserts that to make history one has to be in the right place at the right time. That goes for reporting it as well. October 1970 nails the timeframe, but is too often in the wrong place to effectively tell the story of Canada’s great modern crisis in civil liberties.

The first instalment of October 1970 airs Thursday, Oct. 12 on CBC-TV.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.

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