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People forget just how fucking crazy the 70s were. Like, even Canada had a homegrown terrorist organization that was kidnapping diplomats and politicians, and they murdered one of them. But Justin’s dad Pierre wasn’t having it. He sent in the military.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: October 5, 1970--
The “October Crisis” began on October 5, 1970, with the kidnapping of British Diplomat James Cross by the Front de libération du Québec, which I expect you can translate even if you don’t speak French. The FLQ had been around since the early 60s and had detonated almost a thousand bombs. The group mostly targeted mailboxes in affluent anglophone neighborhoods such as the suburb of Westmount near Montreal. One bomb attack on the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1969 caused massive damage and injured 27 people.
They financed their group via bank robberies and stole dynamite from military and industrial sites. By 1970, 23 members of the FLQ were in prison. They took Cross from his home at gunpoint and told authorities they would exchange him for release of FLQ “political prisoners,” and having the CBC broadcast their manifesto.
The CBC broadcast took place on October 8, and two days later the group kidnapped Quebec’s Deputy Premier Pierre LaPorte from his front lawn as he played football with his nephew. The military was then sent in to guard federal property in Montreal. CBC conducted a combative interview with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, asking how far he intended to take the military response. Trudeau replied with, “Just watch me.”
On October 16, Trudeau implemented the War Measures Act, suspending habeus corpus and giving far-reaching powers to police. Polls showed Canadians overwhelmingly supported the move. The next day, the FLQ announced they’d executed Pierre LaPorte. His strangled body was found in the trunk of a car at a regional airport across the river from Montreal. The killers would be captured a couple of months later and charged with his kidnapping and murder.
James Cross was held captive for two months by a separate cell of the FLQ. He was finally released in exchange for the five kidnappers receiving safe passage to Cuba, which was approved by Fidel Castro. Shockingly, within a dozen years all convicted participants in the kidnappings and murder had been paroled, and those who exiled to Cuba had all returned to Canada, some to serve short sentences.
In the aftermath, there was a significant loss of support for the use of violence by those seeking Quebec sovereignty.
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