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rfmcdonaldInteresting report from Montréal, this.
The Front de Libération du Québec is arguably Canada's most infamous terrorist group, with its various bombing attacks in the 1960s escalating to kidnappings and eventually, in 1970, the assassination of serving Québec government minister Pierre Laporte. This last led to the Canadian government's decision to declare martial law in Montréal and engage in a highly successful crackdown.
Why didn't the FLQ survive in some form, perhaps like ETA? Québec had a vastly different history. Save the 1837 Lower Canadian Rebellion, there was no history of revolutionary violence in a pretty stable and prosperous region. In comparing Québec with Northern Ireland, Byrne and Irvin emphasize the fact that Québec's political institutions were seen almost universally as legitimate, and that unlike Northern Ireland there wasn't nearly the same amount of bitter ethnic conflict. To this should be added the lack of taste for violence: as Lysiane Gagnon writes, the vague sympathies felt by many Québécois with nationalism and perhaps even the FLQ certainly did not extend nearly far enough to accomodate murder.
André Lavallée’s involvement with the Front de libération du Québec as a 19-year-old junior-college student almost four decades ago has been a matter of public record since the Keable Commission report was issued in March 1981, Lavallée said Thursday.
Lavallée, vice-chairperson of the city executive committee, mayor of the Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie borough and No. 3 leader in the current municipal administration, spoke after his youthful links with a cell of the terrorist FLQ were splashed on the front page of the French-language daily newspaper La Presse.
“I turned the page” and left the FLQ’s Michèle-Gauthier cell after being fined $25 because of his involvement in a 1971 bingo-hall robbery designed to raise funds for the FLQ, Lavallée added. He was left without a criminal record, Lavallée specified.
Any regrets?
“it was not the best decision I have made,” he said of his FLQ involvement.
“It was, for myself, the way I’ve been evolving. Can we regret what we’ve been 40 years ago? What I don’t regret is I rapidly changed my mind.”
Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay “is totally behind” Lavallée and is not seeking his resignation from municipal politics, a spokesperson for the mayor said earlier Thursday.
[. . .]
Lavallée said he had never denied his past association with the FLQ – and that many news organizations he did not name investigated his FLQ history during the mid-1990s, but did not follow up by publishing any stories.
In fact, he added, “from time to time, since my first involvement with municipal elections in 1986, I have been asked by journalists about all these questions.”
Lavallée said he told the mayor about his FLQ past Wednesday morning, and insisted that he retains the mayor’s confidence.
The Front de Libération du Québec is arguably Canada's most infamous terrorist group, with its various bombing attacks in the 1960s escalating to kidnappings and eventually, in 1970, the assassination of serving Québec government minister Pierre Laporte. This last led to the Canadian government's decision to declare martial law in Montréal and engage in a highly successful crackdown.
Why didn't the FLQ survive in some form, perhaps like ETA? Québec had a vastly different history. Save the 1837 Lower Canadian Rebellion, there was no history of revolutionary violence in a pretty stable and prosperous region. In comparing Québec with Northern Ireland, Byrne and Irvin emphasize the fact that Québec's political institutions were seen almost universally as legitimate, and that unlike Northern Ireland there wasn't nearly the same amount of bitter ethnic conflict. To this should be added the lack of taste for violence: as Lysiane Gagnon writes, the vague sympathies felt by many Québécois with nationalism and perhaps even the FLQ certainly did not extend nearly far enough to accomodate murder.
