Working the Dead Beat by Sandra Martin Page B

Vietnam War was tearing the country apart, especially after the military launched the Tet Offensive in January and civil rights leader Martin Luther King was murdered in April and Senator Robert Kennedy in June. Canadians watching TV reports of rioting and looting south of the border knew they weren’t immune. Quebec separatists had been blowing up mailboxes and delivering package bombs for years in their terrorist campaign to secede from the rest of Canada, a movement that would gain political strength and credibility in 1968 with the formation of the Parti Québécois.
    Trudeau confronted the fear of politically motivated violence when he insisted on appearing at the annual Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade on the eve of the federal election he had called for June 25, 1968. Trudeaumania had swept much of the country, but in Quebec he was hated by many for his pro-federalist stand, a situation he had inflamed with his belligerent and uncompromising remarks. Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau advised him to stay away from the parade and so did others, but he refused. Trudeau, along with other dignitaries, including Mayor Drapeau and the archbishop of Montreal, Paul Grégoire, sat on a reviewing stand on Sherbrooke Street across from Lafontaine Park. A group of hardcore separatists led by Pierre Bourgault of the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale ( RIN ) started heaving bottles and shouting, “ Trudeau au poteau ” (Trudeau to the stake). More than forty police and eighty civilians were injured and nearly three hundred rioters arrested.
    Several dignitaries fled and two RCMP officers threw their coats over Trudeau and tried to force him to the floor of the reviewing stand. He shook them off and sat upright, staring defiantly at the protesters, his eyes flashing as he sent an unmistakeably tough message to voters across the country watching the late-night news. Here was a politician willing to stand up to the separatists. By the time the ballots were counted the next evening, he and the Liberals had won a majority government, the first since Louis St. Laurent’s victory in 1953 and John Diefenbaker’s landslide triumph for the Progressive Conservatives in 1958.
    If Trudeau’s performance on the reviewing stand made a difference in the outcome, his message was heard loudest in Quebec (56 seats), Ontario (63 seats), and, surprisingly, in British Columbia (16 seats). It was the first of five federal elections that Trudeau fought in his nearly two decades in public office. He won four of them.
    The Bellicose Prime Minister
    EVEN BEFORE TRUDEAU went to Ottawa, small and disparate incendiary groups, inspired by revolutionary movements in Algeria, Cuba, and other despotic states, had been terrorizing the citizenry under the guise of freedom fighting. Their specialties were Molotov cocktails, bomb blasts in mailboxes, vandalism to monuments of Anglo heroes, and infiltration into labour disputes in foreign-owned factories. In the spring of 1963, a war veteran on the eve of his pension was killed and an explosives expert maimed as he tried to defuse a bomb in a Westmount mailbox. Early in 1969, bombs ripped through the Montreal Stock Exchange, injuring close to thirty people.
    Then, on October 5, 1970, a Front de libération du Québec cell kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross at his Redpath Crescent mansion on the southern slopes of Mount Royal, issued a manifesto urging the people of Quebec to rise up against their oppressors, and demanded concessions for Cross’s release, including freedom for twenty-three “political prisoners,” $500,000 in gold, and broadcast and publication of the FLQ manifesto.
    Trudeau refused to negotiate, although the manifesto was read in French and English on radio and television. Police raids on suspected troublemakers began on the morning of October 7. Two days later, on Saturday afternoon of the Thanksgiving weekend, another FLQ cell abducted