Against the tide: André Frappier’s journey as a class-struggle militant

Introduction

I first met André Frappier in the late 1970s, when we were members of the Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue ouvrière révolutionnaire, a pan-Canadian Marxist cadre organization. When the league decided to hoist its banner in the 1980 federal election campaign, André — already well-known as a union militant — was chosen as our candidate in a downtown Montréal riding. (No, he was not elected!)

Along with many others, André and I parted company with the RWL/LOR soon afterward. For André, this was by no means the end of his political activism, quite the contrary, as this recent interview by Pierre Beaudet shows. It is published in the current issue of Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, no. 25, winter 2021, under the title “À contre-courant : André Frappier, toujours présent,” also published as a separate text on the NCS webpage.

My translation, along with a few supplementary notes and this introduction.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

André Frappier became an activist in the 1970s, in the student movements. He was then hired at Canada Post, where for several decades he became one of the pillars of the combative Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). Later, André became an active member of Québec solidaire (QS) which he sees as a potential tool for our emancipation.

From the CEGEP, where you had your first activist experience, you went on to the Post Office...

I spent a good part of my time as a CEGEP student[1] in activism, especially in solidarity with Chile, then at the heart of the political debates. It was fascinating to watch an attempt to transition to socialism without revolution, which contradicted what we were learning from Marxism. Finally, the coup d’état in 1973 put an end to the experiment, reminding us that the capitalist class does not allow itself to be controlled so easily [1]. On May 1, 1974, several of us in the Québec-Chile student solidarity committee occupied the Chilean consulate. We were all arrested, and I spent a night in a cell. My political vision was to deepen after that, as internationalism is decisive in the fight for an egalitarian society.

I had not completed my college diploma when I was called to the Post Office for an interview in August 1975. Among the 1000 hired (out of 10,000 applicants), I was ranked 740th! As soon as I got to work, I took part in my first major strike, which lasted six weeks.

In the union, there was a great leader...

For two decades, the Syndicat des postiers du Canada (SPC) [2] in Montreal was Marcel Perreault. He had been president of the largest section in Quebec since 1968 (over 4,000 members) and the second largest in Canada after Toronto. He was a fiery leader who knew how to command respect among his members as well as in other unions. He was vice-president of the FTQ (Quebec Federation of Labour) and president of the Montreal Labour Council (CTM) for several years. In 1977, I attended my first “national” convention in Halifax, when Joe Davidson was president [3]. It was at this congress that an extraordinary trade unionist, Jean-Claude Parrot, became national president [4]. In 1978, a strike that was initially legal was declared illegal with Bill C-8. Parrot found himself on the front lines and was sentenced to three months in prison, after being cravenly abandoned by the president of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), Dennis McDermott.[2]

You had to follow the “line”...

In congresses, Perreault required the Quebec delegation to vote with one voice. However, at the 1980 convention, I dared to vote with two other comrades in favour of a resolution aimed at adjusting the union dues of part-time employees according to the hours worked. Perreault was opposed to it, but the proposal had the support of the rest of Canada. During the adjournment, National Director Clément Morel ordered our expulsion from the Quebec caucus. At that time, I had just been fired by management and was awaiting arbitration of my grievance. I was somewhat distraught. My friend Paul Heffernan from the Toronto local advised me to report this event to the convention. The next day, I went to the microphone and asked the national director of Quebec to explain why he had expelled three members of his delegation. I got a standing ovation from delegations from the rest of Canada who took a dim view of the rigid discipline to which we were subjected in the union.

In the end, I was able to gain some respect. A few years later, to my surprise, Clément Morel confided in me that he did not fully share Perreault’s feelings! In the meantime, my friend Paul Heffernan had become president of his local. In my opinion, one of the best Toronto has seen.

Perreault was opposed to everything that was progressive...

Despicably, he had fought the establishment of a women’s committee on which several women had worked for months [5]. Perreault had also opposed the proposals from the Western region concerning sexual harassment at the 1983 convention as well as the plans for day care and child care costs. The majority of delegates from Quebec, overwhelmingly made up of men, registered their dissent when these policies were adopted at the 1986 convention. That same year, when the votes were counted for the local union elections, the children of parents who supported my candidacy were expelled by the union marshals, made up exclusively of Perreault supporters.

He was even against the unification of unions at the Post Office...

He fiercely opposed the merger with the Union of Postal and Communications Employees (UPCE), which took place anyway, and helped sabotage the merger with the Letter Carriers Union of Canada (LCUC). It was not until the vote ordered by the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) in February 1989, following the plan to overhaul the certification units by Canada Post, that this unification could take place. The 23,000-member CUPW won over the 21,000-member LCUC with a majority of just 901 votes.

The new union, which was not based on mutual agreement, gave rise to an open war in which Perreault took delight in provoking the former members of the LCUC. He rebuked them for their interventions and set up a union marshalling squad made up of about fifteen men dressed in black who stood at the front of the room. At one meeting he even called in the police. It took a long time to pick up the pieces, even after his election defeat in 1991. In fact, it required a new generation to take over on both the former CUPW and LCUC sides.

During all these battles, did you have a hard time?

At each union meeting, he was waiting for me around the corner. Perreault’s discourse was based on a narrow nationalism which hardened the Quebec members against the positions of the members in the rest of Canada. He used my support for Parrot and my links with several union activists in the rest of Canada to present me as a spy for the Canadians and a traitor in Quebec!

In March 1987, I attended an important meeting on a draft collective agreement. In the room, the seats around me were empty, no one dared be seen beside me. Perreault spoke of the “four-page rag”, referring to a tract published in my recent union election campaign. He tried to entertain the room with a dubious play on words: “Je ne vous demande quand même pas que vous le Frappier” [“I’m not even asking you to hit him!” Frappier is close to frapper, to hit.]

It got pretty wild?

During all these years, I helped to put together teams in local elections with a democratization program and I ran against him for the presidency. I wanted us to deepen our ties with the FTQ, to participate in political battles. We had to put forward the demands of women who had been sidelined for so long. To my surprise, in my first election in 1983, despite all the pressure and the smear campaign against me, I got almost a third of the votes. It encouraged me a lot. I naively believed that since I had made a show of strength Perreault would calm down a bit and that we could finally hope for a more serene climate in the union. The opposite happened, he took it as a danger to his survival. After this election, a few comrades and I were put on a blacklist, distributed by members of the executive during the assemblies to elect delegates to union bodies and to congresses. It was ten years before we could participate again.

Your resistance ended up getting some results...

Perreault continued to protect his power by taking advantage of a conservative ideology. He was a brake on trade-union unity, so necessary in this context of a government offensive. In 1981, more than 100,000 workers, including several thousand SPC members, protested in front of parliament against the economic policies of the federal government. The following year, when the Parti québécois (PQ) government wanted to cut Quebec civil service salaries by 20%, Jean-Claude Parrot offered financial assistance of five dollars per union member both in Canada and Quebec to organize the resistance. But Perreault was opposed, on the pretext that we were not allowed to play with the union dues. However, it was clear that the governments were organizing an offensive against the public services and that union unity was more urgent than ever.

Things came to a head in 1987...

During negotiations, the national leadership of the union understood that the government was going to pass a special law. The National Executive Council wanted to keep up the pressure while preventing the government from legislating. Rotating strikes were the appropriate way to achieve this. Perreault opposed this, adopting the false image of a radical trade unionist. He hoped anti-union legislation would allow him to blame the government and the national leadership while relieving himself of all responsibility. When the time came to vote he made a fiery speech against rotating strikes. No debate was allowed, and Perreault was going to proceed to a strike vote by show of hands, contrary to the rules of procedure. I walked to the front of the room and demanded microphones. The union marshals expelled me manu militari. I had, however, opened a crack; several members who ordinarily would not have dared to speak congratulated me. The media were present and reported the event. During this period, I thought about resigning my duties as a union delegate and quitting my activism, but I was too proud to do so!

But in the end, the tide turned...

It was at this point that Perreault lost his bid for re-election to Richard Forget. The arrival of the LCUC members in 1989 was the factor that hastened his downfall. His strategies were aimed not at strengthening the trade union movement, but dodging to make others bear the burden of possible compromises. The iron fist imposed on militants was now arousing growing discontent. His defeat made it possible to move on. It was high time!

Did Perreault’s departure open the door?

Faced with the growing rebellion against Perreault, the vice-president of the Montreal local, Richard Forget, won the union elections of 1991 by promising some democratization. I had worked hard and was disappointed that he did not call on me. He had actually backed the cheap blows against me, but we were in new times, hope was finally allowed, so I supported him without hesitation. In the first general meetings, Perreault and his supporters persisted in their attacks on the new executive and the president. I came to his defence, giving Perreault a good lesson in democracy. He was now unable to come to terms with the decision of the members, which he regarded as the basis of the union when he was in power. I was warmly applauded, it was a first for me, I almost felt like crying.

In the end, you manage to break down the wall...

In the subsequent election of the Montreal section in 1993, I was elected to the Forget team, in charge of union education. Gradually, our union began to function normally, apart from the opaque games of the former president. Yet I thought we were marking time, especially since Canada Post, managed by the Liberal party, wanted to “restructure” the postal service, which meant cutting jobs, reducing wages and increasing productivity. The threat of privatization loomed on the horizon.

Finally, you become president of the Montreal local of CUPW...

Richard Forget wasn’t a bad guy, but he had retained his old reflexes. Information circulated in dribbles to the executive except among those close to him. This had repercussions among the members and discontent grew in the general assemblies, especially on the side of the letter carriers who were still smarting and remained suspicious. Finally, the majority of the executive committee wanted to put together a new team. I was elected president in 1996 with the majority of our team. In anticipation of the 1997 negotiations, we felt that our 6,000 members really had to regain control of their union. Trade union unity and participatory democracy were at the heart of our platform. The Montreal section thus threw itself into mobilization. In the spring of 1998, more than 1,000 members from Montreal demonstrated at the Parliament in Ottawa. In the fall, 300 militants occupied the Canada Post headquarters in downtown Montréal. The following week, we occupied Place des Arts on the evening when the Post Office had invited its executives and contractors to a concert at its expense.

A few years later, you change course...

The six years in the presidency had worn me out. There had been some real political battles, but also factional battles, the two sometimes intertwined. I therefore decided to leave the presidency and to run for the post of national director in 2002. This post would offer a more political role, in particular through developing union strategies during negotiations. I was happy to take charge of organizing campaigns including that of the rural route mail couriers, which was a big step forward. This made it possible to get better terms for people who had been classed as independent contractors without the right to unionize. To get around this legal obstacle, we negotiated an agreement with Minister André Ouellet in the 2004 collective agreement. It was not a smooth process for our troops. Without saying so directly, some of our members resented our spending a lot of money from the available funds at our disposal on achieving the first collective agreement of the Organization of Rural Route Mail Couriers (ORRMC). I argued that this cheap labour in rural areas allowed Canada Post management to exert downward pressure on working conditions, which affected everyone. In the end, we managed to organize 6,000 new members, bolstering the union with new militant strength. This is how Nancy Beauchamp, who was one of these precariously employed people, was the first woman to be elected to the position of national director for the Montréal region. She is now an executive member of the FTQ.

Throughout, you got involved with activists from the “Rest of Canada”...

I had developed links for a long time with militants outside Quebec. My tenure as National Director now allowed me to work more closely with them. National Executive Council (NEC) meetings lasted a week and took place once every two months in Ottawa, but during negotiations it was often monthly. I really enjoyed this experience and learned a lot from it. Despite our differences, I learned to better understand the reality of activism outside Quebec. I also appreciated the fact that the Quebec reality was respected. I had the good fortune to work under the presidency of Deborah Bourque, a visionary woman very concerned about democracy. Her defeat at the hands of Denis Lemelin in 2008 was certainly the event that most disappointed and saddened me in this union.

At the CLC convention in Vancouver in 1999, I took the floor and made my speech entirely in French, which nobody had dared to do. There was an interpretation service, but the majority of delegates from the rest of Canada did not use it, with the exception of the CUPW delegation! At the end of my speech, I asked those who understood what I had said to raise their hands. That was revealing, and everyone got the point. But it will take a long time to change entrenched attitudes.

Anti-Quebec prejudices remained strong...

The CLC reflected the incomprehension that the Canadian labour movement had in relation to Quebec. It must be said that the major Canadian media practice Quebec bashing regularly and to their heart’s content, as in the Maclean’s magazine article that charged Quebec with being the most corrupt province in Canada. With the exception of CUPW, very few pan-Canadian unions, including the CLC itself, have taken a position that unambiguously expresses Quebec’s right to self-determination.

A few years later, in 2002, on the occasion of Jean-Claude Parrot’s departure from the CLC, I had the honour to present on the rostrum a tribute to his work on behalf of the Quebec delegation; this time everyone used the interpretation devices…

In 2004, you got involved in an election with the New Democratic Party (NDP)...

I thought there was some momentum with a leader who had also been present in Quebec. Jack Layton wanted to change things and to include Quebec while respecting its autonomy. He even told me that he didn’t mind having a pro-sovereignty candidate. So I took the plunge in Papineau riding, which had long been held by the Liberal party. My friend Pierre Laliberté did the same thing and ran in Gatineau. I had the support of my local, and also of Michel Taylor, president of the Montréal Regional FTQ Council, as well as of CUPW national president Deborah Bourque. At the nomination meeting several other trade union members were present, including my friends from the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN).

Navigating in a federalist party was not easy...

The NDP communications officer was always by my side, making sure that I avoided answering directly to the “question” of my pro-independence beliefs. This did not, however, prevent Stéphane Dion, in a letter published in The Globe and Mail, from criticizing Jack Layton for having accepted the candidacy of an evil “séparatisse” in Papineau. After the election (I received 8% of the vote), the NDP concluded that its pro-Quebec discourse had not produced the hoped-for results and that instead this position had caused it to suffer losses in Western Canada. With Pierre Laliberté, we agreed that this desired alliance with the NDP did not have much of a future.

In 2005, your re-election as National Director of CUPW did not go very well...

When I ran for the position of National Director, I knew I was putting myself in a risky position. At the local level, thousands of members vote by mail for those running for the executive, but a national director is to be elected at convention by the 70 delegates from Montreal. My opponents knew it and worked more effectively than I. It must be said that I had often put my head on the chopping block, defending what I thought was important for the union, such as the collective agreement which made it possible to integrate the rural route mail couriers. I lost narrowly, by three votes.

For you, CUPW has been and remains a progressive union...

CUPW is one of the few unions that has played an important role on the Canadian political scene. It has led battles and strike actions from one end to another of Canada “and Quebec” which have been at the centre of media news. This union was a forerunner in obtaining the right to strike at the federal level, in the fight for a reduction in working time without loss of pay, and in obtaining parental leave. The mobilizations and political credit that it was able to build on a pan-Canadian scale have made it an imposing union force, but also a political force in opposing the Canadian government and the private companies that have always sought to gain entry to this sector for their profit. The fact that the Canadian postal sector has not yet been totally privatized, as it has been in many countries, is an achievement on the part of the union. No wonder it has been in the cross-hairs of governments.

Did you come back to basics then?

At the time, my defeat really disheartened me. But I went back to being a letter carrier, a job that I really liked. At the same time, I worked with the Montreal section of CUPW, which put me in charge of a special project at the Youville branch where I worked. The idea was to test an improvement in the flyer delivery process for the next collective agreement.

I also got involved again with the Regional Council of the Montréal FTQ and I was elected for a second time to the executive. With Michel Ducharme, we wanted to bring unions closer to popular groups mobilized in the Coalition Main rouge [Red hand coalition], formed in the fall of 2009 following the announcement by the then Liberal government that it would make greater use of user fees on public services and implement budgetary austerity [6].

You came up against the so-called concertation approach that prevailed at the FTQ...

The then president of the FTQ, Michel Arsenault, was not sympathetic to the Coalition Main Rouge. Like many union leaders, he feared this kind of coalition where unions are on an equal footing with many smaller groups. But ultimately, I think these positions were motivated more by the FTQ’s preference for tripartite consultation and partnership. In fact, it is only some local unions and regional labour bodies like the Montréal Central Council of the CSN and the Montréal Regional Council of the FTQ that have joined.

The concertation orientation has limited struggles and even resulted in defeats. In 2012, during the historic social mobilization in response to the student upsurge, the unions simply gave it lip service and prevented this movement from moving to a higher level. During the negotiations with the government, the leaderships of the centrals at no time threatened the government with a mobilization of their forces in aid of the student movement. In fact, these leaderships exerted more pressure on the student spokespersons than they did on the government [7]. In the years that followed, the various governments have continued their policies of social disengagement in education and health, the tragic consequences of which can be seen today.

Life then took you elsewhere...

I retired in the late summer of 2010, but soon after was hired by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) to work on union organizing with a bunch of young and dynamic activists who were at ASSÉ (Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante), including a certain Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. In the meantime, my involvement with Québec solidaire grew. I was part of the QS National Coordinating Committee for six years from 2012 to 2018. We had many debates, particularly with regard to electoral alliances with the Parti québécois, which raised several questions concerning our democratic functioning. The members had spoken out against these alliances twice, at the congresses preceding the elections of 2012 and 2014. But the day after the elections, it was as if we were faced with a blank page. This long road ended at the 2017 congress where the idea of ​​an alliance with the PQ was defeated after a wide-ranging debate that lasted several months. Fortunately, everyone agrees now. The results of 2018 [when QS elected 10 members to the National Assembly] would not have been the same if we had fallen into the trap of Jean-François Lisée, head of the PQ.[3] Since then, we have not made much progress in terms of our way of implementing this independence project and our strategy with regard to the Canadian state.

This question has led you to new initiatives...

The clarification of QS’s positions on these issues has been at the heart of my engagement within this party. Along with others, including mainly my comrade and friend Andrea Levy, we have established a pan-Canadian progressive network that met virtually almost monthly for several years. The emergence of Québec solidaire as an independentist left party raised many questions among the Canadian left, to which answers and perspectives had to be provided. The Canadian people have no interest in defending their own establishment against the people of Quebec fighting for their emancipation. Conversely, the support of the Canadian working class is essential to the survival of this project. For lack of support, we saw the failures of the Greek and Catalan progressive parties in 2015 and 2017.

Did this liaison work continue later?

I took part in several conferences in Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto and Calgary and I reported to the leadership bodies of Québec solidaire. I also worked closely with Naomi Klein’s team for the creation of the Leap Manifesto, along with Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and Roger Rashi, by trying among other things to adapt the text of the declaration to the reality of Quebec. For several years now, I have been writing a column in the journal Canadian Dimension which focuses mainly on politics in Quebec. At the same time, as QS’s (interim) co-spokesperson, I became more familiar with the struggles of the Indigenous nations. In the winter of 2013, I was in Ottawa during the Indigenous protests in support of the hunger strike of Theresa Spence, Chief of the Attawapiskat Nation, at the start of the Idle No More mobilizations. In the spring of that year, I met with the Algonquin population of Lac-Barrière accompanied by Geneviève Beaudet and André Richer, also of QS.[8]. In a delegation of 14 people, we heard the message of the Indigenous people and their very different vision of the territory. Michel Thusky, an elder in the community, explained to us that “the land does not belong to anyone, everyone can occupy it by respecting it and ensuring the sustainability of its resources. White governments see this same territory not as a precious ecosystem to be respected, but as an asset to be squandered.”

True to your convictions since the beginning of your activist life, international solidarity is always present...

In October 2014, I participated in Toronto, on behalf of QS, in an international meeting on public transport organized by Die Linke, the German left party. This gave me the opportunity to lay the groundwork that led to the invitation of Andreas Gunther, a representative of this party, to our congress in May 2015. In the meantime, Benoit Renaud worked to invite Cat Boyd of the Radical Independence Campaign in Scotland. This was the beginning of our openness to international guests at congresses. In October 2017, I represented QS within a delegation of the international left in Barcelona at the initiative of the independentist left party CUP (Popular Unity Candidacy). In return, we invited to the QS congress in December 2017 two elected CUP members, Anna Gabriel and Eulalia Reguant.

In November 2018, thanks to you, my friend Pierre Beaudet, I had the opportunity to participate in the thematic Social forum on the mining and extractivist economy in Johannesburg, where I represented Québec solidaire. Then, in the summer of 2019, I attended the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention in Atlanta on behalf of QS, because although I have not been a member of the National Coordinating Committee since the National Council in December 2018, I am part of the party’s commission on global justice issues. As a socialist, internationalism is not an “extra” activity or a luxury, but a necessity. It is not always easy, but we must continue.

We have no choice, we have to look to the future...

COVID-19 has intensified the challenges of securing basic living needs on a level not seen since the recession of 1929. The crisis is global, global warming has caused devastating fires in Australia and California while the last plateau of unspoiled Canadian Arctic ice has just collapsed. The future of society depends on us. Neoliberal political parties cannot represent a way out, they are at the origin of the crisis.

The challenges are high. The unions have had some victories, but they have not been able to address the source of the problems, constantly restarting the cycle of gains and setbacks, which eventually deepen. The broad left has succeeded in building a political party since 2006 with Québec solidaire, but the junction with social movements and unions has not really materialized.

If there are common traits in the various struggles of my militant life, I would say that democracy would be at the top of the list. This fight is taking on decisive importance today. We have seen how easy it can be for a government like that of François Legault of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) to lead by decree if we lack vigilance.

Horizontal democracy must become a fundamental value within Québec solidaire because it is, even more in this time of confinement, the essential basis for the mobilization and life of the party.

The lessons of the coup d’état in Chile have also guided my activist journey throughout my life. If neoliberal governments can be ousted, the capitalist institutions that support them will still be present. Another eloquent illustration was the economic crushing of the Syriza government by the troika [9] in Greece in 2015.

We cannot conceive of our struggles without the development of an internationalist strategy. The future of the planet in environmental, social and health terms depends on it. The Quebec for which we are campaigning and whose population will regain control of its destiny, will constitute a step forward and generate a new social dynamic which, we hope, will transcend our borders. But the Canadian establishment will not stand idly by. Building solidarity with the working class in the rest of Canada, in alliance with the Indigenous nations, remains an unavoidable challenge. This has been and still continues to be at the centre of my militant journey.

NOTES

[1] Popular Unity was an alliance that brought together a broad spectrum ranging from Communists to the Christian left and had the support of the unions. Elected in 1970, it proposed a program to fight inflation, revive the agrarian economy, nationalize the banks and the copper industry in which the United States and Canada had interests. Pinochet’s coup d’état was made possible by operations undertaken by the CIA in 1970. See: “Un dictateur mis en place par les États-Unis,” Le Devoir, December 11, 2006.

[2] The Syndicat des postiers du Canada changed its name after merging with the Letter Carriers Union of Canada (LCUC) to become the Syndicat des travailleurs et travailleuses des postes (STTP). The name in English has remained unchanged: Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW).

[3] See his autobiography: Joe Davidson and John Deverell, Joe Davidson (Toronto, James Lorimer & Company Publishers, 1978).

[4] See his autobiography, Jean-Claude Parrot, Ma vie de syndicaliste (Montréal, Boréal 2005). [In English, My Union, My Life (Fernwood, 2005).] Note, the terms national president or national leadership are used by the union.

[5] This is recounted in Julie White’s book, Mail and Female. Women and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (Toronto, Thompson Educational Publishing, 1990).

[6] See the Declaration of the Red Hand Coalition: <https://www.nonauxhausses.org/declaration/>.

[7] See on this subject the collective work, Le printemps des carrés rouges, by André Frappier, Richard Poulin and Bernard Rioux (Saint-Joseph-du-lac, M éditeur, 2012).

[8] At the time, QS did not have any activist representing the indigenous nations. [At the QS congress in November 2019, the delegates voted unanimously to establish a National Indigenous Commission (CAN in its French acronym) to give voice to the party’s First Nations and Inuit members. https://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2019/11/with-little-debate-but-few-skirmishes.html]

[9] The troika appoints the experts representing the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

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[1] The CEGEP (Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel, or general and vocational college) is a public post-secondary, pre-university college peculiar to the Quebec education system.

[2] See Jean-Claude Parrot, My Union, My Life (see text note 4), chapters six and seven.

[3] See “Québec solidaire: No to an electoral pact with the PQ, Yes to a united front against austerity, for energy transition and for independence,” https://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2017/05/quebec-solidaire-no-to-electoral-pact.html

Quebec, Canada and the Indigenous Peoples: Toward Plurinational Alliances around a Decolonial Outlook?

Introduction

The latest issue of the Quebec journal Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, published in September, revisits the Quebec national question in light of the mounting struggle against climate catastrophe, the growth of Indigenous resistance, and the crisis of Quebec’s national movement. A number of articles probe the potential for creation of the strategic class alliances and perspectives that are needed if we are to begin a fundamental social transformation that re-imagines not only the Quebec reality but its place in the creation of an ecosocialist society in the Canadian, North American and global context.

I publish below, in my translation, an article by NCS editor Pierre Beaudet introducing some of the key themes in this issue, followed by what I consider an outstanding contribution by Dalie Giroux that challenges the Quebec left to rethink national emancipation within a decolonial perspective that can help enlist Indigenous and international solidarity around a common project of rethinking the relationship between national and social emancipation.

‒ Richard Fidler

* * *

Our friends in Canada

By Pierre Beaudet

Until the 1960s, the left in Canada and in Quebec was mainly Canadian and Anglophone. During Premier Maurice Duplessis’s “Grande Noirceur” (the great darkness), the provincial government drew heavily on the reactionary right wing of the Catholic church, making life very difficult for Quebec progressives. Some trade unionists and artists chose exile instead. In this period, as well, the Canadian left, from the Communist party to the social-democracy (later the NDP) held fast to the idea of a strong federal state as the vehicle for implementing the social changes sought by the popular classes, such as medicare, social welfare, etc.

Quebec demands for national emancipation were relegated to the sidelines, regarded as an abhorrence to be fought by all means. The CP denounced the “separatist threat” in terms not notably dissimilar from those used by Ottawa’s political establishment; a courageous exception, sometimes, was the party’s intellectual leader and historian Stanley Ryerson who defended the right to self-determination of the Quebec people. After much debate, the NDP shut the door on its Quebec branch, which went on to form the Parti Socialiste du Québec and called for constitutional protection of that right. Later, the NDP campaigned alongside the parties of reaction for the No side in the 1980 and 1995 referendums. However, while this effectively eliminated the Canadian left from Quebec it opened room for the creation and development of a pro-independence Quebec left.¹ But the links between Canadian and Quebec progressives remained infrequent apart from the efforts of a few courageous trade unions that fought for social emancipation linked with national emancipation. Examples are the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

Some decades later

This non-dialogue had many perverse effects. In Canada, the left failed to wage a resolute fight against the post-colonial state structures, not even when the Constitution was “patriated” by Pierre Trudeau in 1982 in the face of intense opposition from Quebec’s National Assembly and public opinion. After the 1995 referendum, the NDP members of Parliament (with few exceptions) voted for the so-called “Clarity bill” which limited even the likelihood of a negotiated agreement with Canada following a Quebec vote for independence. In the short period during which he led that party, Jack Layton tried to shift the party’s position, but after his death the party under Thomas Mulcair’s leadership returned to its hard-line federalist alignment. Quebec’s attraction to the NDP was short-lived.

The non-dialogue did not help the cause of the left in either Quebec or Canada, and efforts to achieve coordination on inter-provincial issues were difficult and uncertain. During the Summit of the Peoples of the Americas, in Quebec City in April 2001, in opposition to the proposal of a hemispheric free-trade area of the Americas (FTAA), groups such as the Council of Canadians tried to impose the same Canadian perspective “from coast to coast.” Canadian unions more attuned to Quebec concerns supported the position of almost all Quebec participants that the fight against the FTAA was not tied to “strengthening” the Canadian state. A progressive magazine published in Winnipeg, Canadian Dimension, upheld this point (as it still does), providing Canadian progressives with information and analyses concerning Quebec’s popular movements and struggles.²

Subsequently, attempts at dialogue outside the framework of the formal organizations were initiated by André Frappier of Québec solidaire, who met over several years with various left-oriented groups in Toronto, Edmonton, Halifax and Vancouver.³ The basic idea was to meet and discuss the national questions in the Canadian state, in an effort to combat the substantial indifference on these issues in both the Quebec and Canadian left. Some progress was made with a small part of the Canadian left, but it can hardly be said that the fundamental idea in the Quebec left of combining anticapitalist struggle with a challenge to “made in Canada” colonialism is widely understood or accepted among Canadian progressives.⁴

This timid reopening to dialogue has been encouraged by political developments among the Indigenous peoples. Their reawakening and leadership of some mass movements targets the very essence of the Canadian state, built upon a persisting colonial dispossession and thus challenging the legitimacy of the federal government. As the Dené intellectual activist Glen Coulthard has said, the Indigenous struggle will go nowhere if it does not become a wider anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggle.⁵

In recent years some Indigenous leaders like Roméo Saganash have voiced publicly what many Indigenous think, that their anticolonial struggle will be strengthened if it finds ways to interface with the struggle for Quebec emancipation. And this requires that the Québécois openly acknowledge the right to self-determination of the Indigenous peoples.⁶

The Quebec challenge

The struggle for Quebec emancipation will be conducted in Quebec, of course. However, we must be conscious of the balance of forces that exists between this project and its opponents. Those elites are politically organized around the federal state and its subaltern relays in the provinces. They have their counterparts in the Quebec bourgeoisie and its political expressions in the Quebec Liberal party and the Coalition Avenir Québec, now the government. They are supported overwhelmingly by U.S. imperialism, which our first sovereigntist premier René Lévesque failed to see when he tried to convince the big shots in New York and Washington that the sovereigntist project would be completely harmless in the North American context and that Quebec would remain a subaltern ally like Canada. This dream that Quebec’s independence could be negotiated peacefully misled the people, including in the two referendums. It is not hard to see that for U.S. imperialism, access to Canada’s rich resources, and the interests of continental defense against the Russian and Chinese “threat” are priorities, which means that it is imperative for the rulers in both Washington and Ottawa to keep Canada as it is. Long ago Pierre Vallières and Charles Gagnon, to mention only them, understood this very well, which is why they emphasized the need for connecting with the forces of change in the Americas.

Break down the wall

How are we going to breach this wall of indifference in English Canada? As Andrea Levy and André Frappier argue,

“it is necessary to define a strategy of common organized struggle to retake power in the Canadian state. The struggle must be common because in Quebec alone we cannot manage to create an egalitarian and independent society without confronting the Canadian state, and because an ecologist perspective cannot be implemented solely within our borders. Quebec needs the support and collaboration of the workers and popular groups in English Canada, and these cannot develop an emancipatory perspective without adhering to a strategy of common anticapitalist struggle with the progressive forces of Quebec.”⁷

That was in fact the message that was conveyed in 2014 with the Peoples Social Forum that brought together in Ottawa several hundred activists and thinkers from Quebec, Canada and the First Nations. With Québec solidaire and the social movements, we need to continue these efforts, engaging in manifestations of mutual support and solidarity.

* * *

Indigenous peoples and Quebec: Rethinking decolonization

By Dalie Giroux

Dalie Giroux teaches in the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa. She has published, inter alia, many studies on the cultural and scientific relationships between the Indigenous peoples and state cultures within capitalist society.

My purpose here is to outline some thoughts that can assist in a reassessment of the question of Quebec independence in light of relations between Quebec and the Indigenous peoples. This entails in part undertaking a necessary albeit painful critique of the history of these relations since the election of the Parti québécois (PQ) in 1976. It also means proposing some principles that can guide us in a new development of Quebec anticolonialist thinking, which up to now has failed to question the British colonial regime from a truly inclusive standpoint, and without serious or sufficient consideration being given to the Indigenous presence on this continent for thousands of years.

Quebec’s colonial legacy, its obscure expression in law, its mentality, the form of its productive activity, was established in successive steps through the operation of a set of dispossession measures that we must inspect, understand, criticize and dismantle if we are to pursue a collective policy of fighting this dispossession. Approaching dispossession from a decolonial perspective based on the Quebec situation is not inspired by some patriotic necessity but rather expresses the need to confront a history that we did not choose but inherited, as we have inherited and cultivated the ethical tensions inscribed in our political life. This rethinking must address the following questions:

• How can we escape, all of us, in the here and now, from the complex structure of dispossession that is the legacy of French and British colonialisms?

• How are we to undermine and eliminate the measures of dispossession by accumulation that define that structure?

• How, especially, can we combine all the mutual expressions of struggles for emancipation – decolonial, antiracist, feminist, pro-immigration, ecologist – within a materialist horizon, without eliminating the singular features of the places, affects, temporalities, and narratives that constitute, traverse and animate our specific common habitat?

Masters in our own house?

Let us begin by backtracking a bit. Modern Quebec arose at the turn of the 1960s around the proposal to become “Maîtres chez nous,” masters in our own house, and to take control of the whole of the provincial territory the limits of which had been fixed in 1912 by federal legislation. Retroactively, it must be observed that this Quebec, master of itself, had been built on the basis of a colonial-type state. Quebec’s exit from the Canadian constitutional fold, as set out in the sovereignty project put forward by the Quebec nationalist forces, was not an accomplished movement of decolonization, that is, of rupture with the structure of dispossession inherited from French and British colonialism. It rather involved giving the Québécois the privilege of acquiring the status of colonizer they had lost with the British Conquest. As Zebedee Nungak writes:

“No one would question the ‘masters’ part of the slogan if Quebec’s borders were confined to the locations in which Champlain’s descendants lived and farmed the land in order to maintain and sustain their distinct French identity, their language and culture as they wished. The problem lies in the part that reads ‘in our own house,’ which has come to encompass Eeyou Estchee (the Cri territory) and the Inuit nunangat, including large swathes of territory where there is not an ounce of French history, language or culture. These lands should never have been incorporated in the French ‘house.’ But that is exactly what happened when Quebec rushed headlong toward carrying out its James Bay hydroelectric project.”⁸

In reality, a major portion of the territories over which Quebec governments have exercised their power to the explicit benefit of the Francophone majority have never been surrendered within the meaning of the British Canadian colonial regime. Access to the territory north of the 49^th parallel, and its occupation by the populations needed for colonization, exploitation and control over the groundwater, hydro-electric, forest, mineral, marine and tourist resources, have been defended both by the Canadian courts and successive Quebec governments as pertaining, in Canadian legal language, to “compelling and substantial governmental objectives.” Moreover, although the Canadian and Quebec governments have signed a series of treaties in the terms peculiar to modern treaties, the result has been the consolidation of the Crown’s sovereignty and the colonial enterprise of generalized extraction to the benefit of the owners of the means of production and the resulting rents. The jurisdictional and financial compensation negotiated between the Indigenous groups and the state, and the renunciation of the inherent right to the territory implied in almost all of the cases involving this type of treaty have constituted an irreparable loss of sovereignty for all of the Indigenous peoples and the consolidation of an extractive economy of dispossession.

The contradictions in the PQ project

The election of the Parti québécois in 1976 marked an important turning point in the march of the “Masters in our own house” and highlights the ambiguous political role of the Québécois within the British empire. An explicitly sovereigntist government was in place in Quebec City and held the reins of the provincial state. Today it is hard to imagine the power of that moment for the descendants of the “anciens Canadiens”: an illiterate, residual people with a bastardized language, had acceded to the institutional pinnacle of the state, through their own efforts and in opposition to the entire history of British Canada which had sought its tranquil submission and cultural assimilation. The people without a state proved to the English colonizer that it was worthy of a state and of power. It was a revenge and an exploit, promising a new world – a victory over themselves and over the adverse forces of history.

It was not long, however, before this enthusiasm came up against the Indigenous question. Rémi Savard, the anthropologist who studied this question for many years, himself a fervent independentist, asked himself whether the Indigenous policy of the first PQ government, headed by René Lévesque, could really challenge the colonial relationship between Quebec and the First Nations. Instead, he found that the Quebec of the PQ’s first term of office had positioned itself along the lines of British colonialism:

“In the spring of 1977 Bérubé, the minister, was proclaiming on Radio-Canada, without batting an eyelid, his government’s formal and definitive opposition to any recognition of the right of the Indigenous to self-determination, explaining that it was inconceivable since ‘we are the proprietors of the soil’.”⁹

Yves Bérubé was at the time minister of natural resources and lands and forests, and what he was defending against the sovereignty claims of the Indigenous peoples was also clear: the exploitation of natural resources is the foundation of Quebec’s strategy of mastery in its own house, through economic development in French and in our name. This mastery of resources was accompanied by a claim to “ownership of the soil” and referred to the public land held by the state. The unceded Indigenous territories of north-eastern Quebec were located, as it happens, almost entirely on these public lands, 90% of the territory of the Province of Quebec. The PQ minister’s statement was quite explicit about the nature of the mastery claimed by the Québécois through their “national” government: “we are the lords of the public lands, and no political claim over these lands is conceivable.” In the following year Gérald Godin, now the minister, repeated the PQ position, citing the right of conquest inherited from the British crown. Savard concluded that the sovereignty project was proclaiming explicitly the pursuit of the genocide anticipated by the Canadian government “and which has often targeted the Québécois people.”¹⁰

Some dissident approaches

While the sovereignty project has been unable to go beyond the colonial framework, there is no denying the transformative potential of Quebec’s struggle for national emancipation. This struggle, which to a large degree has ensured the passage from servitude to mastery, is one of the major political experiments of the 20^th century. Moreover, some Quebec intellectual and political actors have indeed seen the need to integrate a global overcoming of colonialism within the liberatory dynamic. For example, Pierre Vallières stated that the Indigenous peoples were more oppressed than the French Canadians of Quebec. That led him to nurture a certain distrust toward the promotion of nationalism as the ultimate goal of Quebec struggles and to uphold the claims of Indigenous sovereignty.¹¹ Charles Gagnon, too, thought it was necessary to integrate the anti-racism fight and the Indigenous struggles in his revolutionary project of anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggle:

“This does not mean, and cannot mean, making Quebec a new Mexico, politically ‘independent’ but economically exploited, pillaged, dispossessed. It does not mean creating one or more Black or American Indian capitalist states subject to imperialism. It does mean destroying imperialism and racism; it means building in North America a new society in which the different races and ethnic populations cohabit in harmony because each has endowed itself with the structures and institutions it considers favourable to its fulfilment.”¹²

Rémi Savard, the anthropologist, through his research and his attempts to develop solidarity between the Quebec and Indigenous peoples, thought the opposition of the Québécois to Indigenous claims was linked to the fact that they themselves were wronged by the Canadian constitutional regime. He criticized the colonial posture of the first independentist government in Quebec’s history which, he said, while comprising an undeniable economic motivation, was based on an opportunist legal conservatism. This posture profoundly shaped the relations between the Quebec state and the Indigenous peoples on the territory that we have inherited, through its refusal to respect the minimal requirements of peoples’ justice that the Indigenous peoples were developing on the international level.

The missed encounters

Overall, the independentist movement failed to take the hand proferred to it by the Indigenous peoples, and this was a factor, as we know today, in its political marginalization and the failure of its project. Savard reports that in 1978, two years before the referendum on Quebec sovereignty, Noel Starblanket, then chief of the National Indian Brotherhood (which became the Assembly of First Nations in 1982), wrote to René Lévesque:

“We have studied your project of sovereignty-association. This political platform suits us because it coincides with the demands of the Indians throughout Canada who want to exercise the greatest possible power over their natural resources and establish normal relations with their neighbours. We are starting from a position the opposite of yours: you are in Confederation and want to put a foot outside of it, while we who have never been a confederative club want to set foot in it. In practice, however, we agree completely. Extend us your hand. Let us, together, put an end to the federal government’s colonial power over us. But to the benefit of our respective collectivities. Not to put the Indians under the rule of some other white power, in this instance that of Quebec and the other Canadian provinces.”¹³

As to the sovereignty-association proposed by the Parti québécois, the chief stated, on behalf of his organization, that “this political platform suits us.” The subaltern position of the Francophones in the Canadian regime, as well as their existence as a collective entity, were acknowledged outright. Starblanket went on to propose an alliance between Quebec and the First Nations, against the colonial power of the federal government. This alliance, he said, was conditional on the equality of the parties: Quebec, in its approach to independence, was not to replace the federal government as a colonizer. It would have to work for the concurrent liberation of the First Peoples. In short, to break up the post-British Canadian regime in the interests of the peoples, Francophone and Indigenous, who were minorities within it.

Like Noel Starblanket, another leading Indigenous leader, Georges Erasmus, openly called for an alliance between the Indigenous peoples and Quebec to counter Ottawa’s approach to patriating the Constitution without recognizing the national minorities.

“We the Indigenous, have been pushed, along with Quebec, under the rug of the country that Trudeau and his sidekicks of the English provinces have just constituted. I call on the government and people of Quebec, and on René Lévesque in particular, to make known their reaction to this and to express their feeling about the rights of the Indigenous populations to self-determination. I challenge the people of Quebec – if in fact this people believes in self-determination – now is the time to support the Indigenous people. It is not the time for us to remain separated and to lead ourselves individually to defeat. We must act now. This is the moment of our reckoning. We, the Indigenous, need Quebec’s support in the coming hours. We need the support of the Quebec people. The country is in a state of national emergency and this demands that the Indigenous and Québécois unite their forces.”¹⁴

Given these quite dramatic statements at the time, Savard was adamant as to the conditions of any possible Francophone political existence in America:

“As to the project of Quebec self-determination itself, I think there is no chance it will come about in the short, medium or long term unless it begins to articulate the pan-Amerindian dynamic. [...] The worst disservice we can render to our descendants is to underestimate the political meaning of Indigenous aspirations and the continental reach of the present immense political awakening.”¹⁵

He lamented the fact that this invitation to an alliance had remained a dead letter, testimony to the sovereigntist élite’s very poor understanding of the continental colonial situation at the time.

“The imprecise desires of the Indigenous peoples for political autonomy may very well unleash furious reactions among many citizens against the threat of creating so many de facto holes in our national territory. That’s the Canadian side, somewhat buccaneering I would say, of our nationalism. It is also what prevents us, to the great relief of the federalists, from grasping the historical perch now being tendered to us, as explicitly as can be, by the Indigenous peoples of Canada as a whole.”¹⁶

Rethinking the terms of emancipation

The history of decolonization experiences offers many examples of national emancipation carried out by the state and capital that produce the results we have experienced in Quebec: the self-dispossession of the peoples through the exercise of the privileges of a national-state within the framework of a globalized economy, and the renewal of the oppressions suffered by other, subaltern populations, other minorities.

That said, the Quebec republican resistance, which has taken the colonial institutions as its emancipation model, has helped to constitute within the continental colonial space a place of distinct power, Quebec, the existence of which has undeniable ethical, political and epistemological value. If we start from that reality, that place, it is possible for us today to rethink emancipation in a more complete and more inclusive form. But this reconsideration must be radical, and not make any commitment as to the continental, colonial, historical and economic situation of Quebec.

To reinterpret the spirit of independence that gave rise to “Masters in Our Own House,” it is truly and urgently necessary to rethink the relations between the peoples inhabiting the territory of the province, the ways in which they mutually conceive the frontiers of this territory, and the way in which we draw from this our subsistance and the powers of dispossession that we support (and that support us). The emancipatory policy of the 21^st century, which will be conceived on the basis of Quebec’s situation, cannot elude this thinking, which necessarily challenges the life style of the majority and the legitimacy of the claim to mastery over the “national” territory, but has the merit that it invites us to escape the colonial political imagination and to begin to think about the alliance that remains to be formulated.

A second dimension that must be advanced if a decolonial tension is to be introduced in the Quebec emancipation current is that of the Indigenous presence in the territories placed under the jurisdiction of the Province of Quebec, 90% of which is classified as being property of the Quebec state – the Quebec equivalent of Crown lands.

The chain of solidarity that could begin to develop through a rethinking of independence within North America and the need for alliances that must inform it can only be developed or experienced not from the Quebec “majority” standpoint, but by and through a psycho-political and material process of dis-identification with the colonial state and the capitalist, extractive life of dispossession that this state imposes, supports, renews, generalizes and legitimates. Accordingly, we must in this context study the genealogy of the cognitive, material and political tools through which the populations involved in the colonization self-identified existentially with the structures of dispossession that were, for better or worse, the conditions of formation of the peoples of the New World. We have to revisit frankly our relations with the other peoples on this territory as well as the genesis and onto-juridical framework of our present relations.

The big challenge

This is a sizable challenge for a people whose existence is closely linked to the colonial undertaking, a motley people, intrinsically diasporic, without age-old tradition or inherent rights toward which to turn as the basis for its coherence and collective action, who do not and will not have the political aura of the European colonizer or the prestige of the white decolonizations of the 19^th century, or the ethical presence of the present decolonial and antiracist forces today. For a people dismissed and removed from power over the territory, a people whose initial segment is a product of a remaining, residual, demobilized, rebellious population lacking in social mobility and the possibility of representation, this seems to me to be also an opportunity to think otherwise and directly the questions of possession and dispossession, to go counter to colonization, to invent other ways of living, and to constitute ourselves as a hybrid, perhaps in a hitherto unseen form of upstream humility and downstream hospitality.

The political issue for Quebec in the 21^st century will not be to find the road to becoming masters in our own house – which would mean pursuing the European colonization of the Americas in our own name – but to think and act in terms of the real and urgent objective of abolishing, through a grand alliance, all relations of servitude that make up the French and British colonial forms of dispossession that we have inherited.

1 See Pierre Beaudet, “La gauche canadienne et le Québec. Les multiples dimensions d’un dialogue inachevé,” in Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, No. 24, Autumn 2020.

2 Canadian Dimension, https://canadiandimension.com/ Among the regular contributors to CD are Andrea Levy and André Frappier, members of the NCS Collectif d’analyse politique.

3 Frappier also attended the 2016 Socialist Scholars conference in Calgary, where he participated as a resource person in several workshops. -- R.F.

4 See “Le défi de lutter ensemble,” by André Frappier and Andrea Levy, NCS No. 24.

5 Glen Coulthard, “Marx et la grande tortue,” NCS No. 21 (Winter 2019).

6 Which Québec solidaire has done, unlike the other parties including the Parti québécois.

7 “Le défi de lutter ensemble,” NCS No. 24.

8 Zebedee Nungak, Contre le colonialisme dopé aux stéroïdes. Le combat des Inuits du Québec pour leurs terres ancestrales (Montréal, Boréal, 2019 [2017]), p. 42.

9 Rémi Savard, Destins d’Amérique. Les autochtones et nous (Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1979), p. 109.

10 Ibid., p. 110.

11 Daniel Samson-Legault, Dissident. Pierre Vallières (1938-1998). Au-delà des Nègres blancs d’Amérique (Montréal: Québec Amérique, 2018), p. 391.

12 Charles Gagnon, Feu sur l’Amérique. Écrits politiques, Vol. 1 (1966-1972) (Montréal: Lux, 2006), p. 117

13 Savard, op. cit., p. 145. [My retranslation from the French. - R.F.]

14 Quoted (and translated from the English) in Jean Morisset, Sur la piste du Canada errant (Montréal: Boréal, 2018). [My retranslation from the French – R.F.]

15 Savard, op. cit., p. 110.

16 Ibid., p. 154`

50 Years Ago: When Canada Suspended Civil Liberties

Introduction

This memoir by John Riddell, at the time a leading member of the League for Socialist Action (in Quebec the Ligue socialiste ouvrière), illustrates how a small revolutionary-minded organization responded to the repression unleashed by Ottawa in October 1970. John published his account on October 16 on his web site, from which it is reproduced with thanks. It centers on the response of our Montréal members, using their candidacy of Manon Léger for mayor and their support of the labor-based Front d’action politique (FRAP) candidates for city council to maintain a public profile while defying the marshall-law restraints.

The LSA/LSO had already established itself as protagonists in the fight for Quebec language rights and as leading participants in Quebec student struggles in the late 1960s. In 1964, as a university student in Montréal, I reported in our biweekly newspaper Workers Vanguard on a lengthy interview I had with André d’Allemagne, the founder of the pro-independence RIN (Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale), a forerunner of the Parti québécois.

But while a staunch defender of Quebec’s right to self-determination, the LSA/LSO had hesitated to declare its support for independence; still unclear to us was the path the Quebec working class would take in its fight against national oppression in the Canadian state. By 1970 the demonstrated failure of the NDP to engage with Quebec liberation, coupled with the escalating mass support for the newly-founded PQ, settled the question. Barely a month before the outbreak of the October crisis our pan-Canadian congress had voted overwhelmingly to adopt a programmatic statement, For an Independent and Socialist Quebec,¹ following an unprecedented public discussion by party members in our English and French language newspapers.

Critical of the PQ for its separation of Quebec sovereignty from the needed program of social emancipation, the LSO was on the contrary quick to embrace the union-endorsed FRAP as the most promising expression to date of the labour movement’s search for a political course independent of the capitalist parties, including the PQ.

In the aftermath of the October crisis, our comrades were active in defending the remaining political prisoners – chief among them Pierre Vallières and Charles Gagnon (the political thinkers behind the FLQ), their lawyer Robert Lemieux, trade-union leader Michel Chartrand and Radio-Canada producer Jacques Larue-Langlois. Among other actions we organized a defense committee in Toronto that brought the last three, along with singer Pauline Julien (herself arrested in October) to address large crowds at the U of Toronto’s Convocation Hall. In the end all of the defendants were acquitted by jurors of seditious conspiracy or had their charges dropped.

And we worked with other supporters of democratic rights in English Canada to organize a citizens’ commission of inquiry into the War Measures, modelled on the Russell Tribunal in England to expose imperialist war crimes in Vietnam.²

-- Richard Fidler

* * *

Recollections of Montreal Under the War Measures Act

By John Riddell

It was October 16, 1970, fifty years ago today. Turning on CBC radio over breakfast that day, I was startled to learn that the War Measures Act had been decreed across the entire country. The Canadian equivalent of martial law, War Measures were invoked on the excuse that the country faced an “apprehended insurrection.”

During that night, hundreds in Quebec had been arrested. Secretly. No charges. No phone call. No right to a lawyer or court hearing. All civil liberties were suspended. Quebec was under military occupation. A few hours later, television news started showing photos of soldiers in battledress armed with assault rifles and of tanks in the streets of downtown Montreal.

Police Abductions

I got in touch with other members of the League for Socialist Action in Toronto, where I then lived. Our first concern was to contact our group in Montreal, which had several dozen active supporters. At first, no answer. Then news: the editor of our French-language newspaper, Art Young, had disappeared, along with another leading local comrade, Penny Simpson. Hundreds in Montreal had been jailed and arrests were continuing.

The federal government’s drastic attack on civil liberties did not come as a surprise. Only three days earlier, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, when asked how far he would go to “restore order” in Quebec, had quipped, “Well, just watch me.” He claimed that a “parallel power” had emerged that was challenging elected political authorities.

Earlier in October, a British diplomat, James Cross, and Quebec’s deputy premier, Pierre Laporte, had been kidnapped by cells of the FLQ (Quebec Liberation Front). Many Quebeckers, while often critical of the kidnappings, expressed support for the liberatory goals of the FLQ manifesto.

Radical Upsurge in Quebec

The previous decade had witnessed a tumultuous rise of labour and nationalist movements in Quebec, and of support for radical social reforms and political sovereignty. Quebec had seen massive student strikes and protests, an explosive rise of labour militancy, and deep-going structural reforms such as nationalization of its electric power industry and of the previously church-run educational system.

In addition, during the decade, a succession of small groups seeking to spark a colonial freedom struggle had carried out more than a hundred guerrilla-style attacks using the FLQ label.

My organization, the League for Socialist Action/Ligue Socialiste Ouvrière, contended that the real responsibility for this violence lay “with the monopolists, the exploiters who are repressing the Quebec nationalist movement.” While criticizing kidnappings as a method, we called for an end to attacks on civil liberties and freedom for political prisoners.

These events unrolled long before the Internet age. As socialists, we did not have access to daily papers, television, cellphones, or radio. We communicated with each other and the broader world in person, by phone, by letter mail, and by printing and distributing literature. But the War Measures seemed at first to have outlawed all public radical activity.

Emergency Office

The day after the War Measures decree I took the first train to Montreal. I located my Montreal comrades, who had gone underground. Expecting further arrests and a raid on our headquarters, they closed down our headquarters. They removed our most valued asset – our card file of contacts and subscribers – and took it out of Montreal for safekeeping. They buried it on the farm of a member’s friend. They set up a provisional office in a couple of motel rooms, equipped with two typewriters, paper, carbons, one telephone, and a list of phone numbers.

By that evening it seemed that the wave of arrests was ending. Already, there were signs of dissent regarding Trudeau’s drastic measures. Figuring that the government had overreached, we made plans to reassert our right to speak and help build the protest movement now beginning to take shape across the country.

We set out to help break down the gag law, step by step, by reopening our office, publishing and widely distributing our views, and doing all we could to help build resistance to the War Measures.

Utilizing an Election Campaign

We had a great asset. Montreal would be voting in a few days to choose its mayor, and we had a socialist candidate in the field: a young and dynamic activist, Manon Léger. Despite the mass arrests, guns, and tanks, the election was going forward.

We were supporting a promising new left political party, “FRAP” (Front d’action politique). They had no mayoralty candidate, so Manon, challenging the notoriously right-wing mayor Jean Drapeau, complemented their slate. Under War Measures, FRAP offices had been repeatedly raided, confidential files seized, and their lawyer interned. Drapeau slanderously associated the FRAP with the FLQ. Martial-law measures had dealt FRAP a crippling blow. Manon spoke out in their defense.

Under War Measures, printshops were closed to us. But back in Toronto, our headquarters housed our own small printshop – a rarity in those days – and it was effectively underground.

We in Montreal worked together with our comrades in Toronto to prepare articles for emergency underground editions of our newspapers in English and French. Travel between the two cities was still open, so we sent a comrade to Toronto with articles and then received, again by courier, a large press run for mass distribution.

We Take to the Streets

Three days after War Measures, we organized Montreal’s first street action against the crackdown. We planned it on a very small scale, aiming to show the scope for public protest without risking too much.

We sent out two squads. One crew, including Manon, went to the main subway station, Berry-De Montigny, with signs and leaflets building her campaign.

I was part of a second crew, which went to the Canadian Forces armouries at Bleury and Ontario streets, home of the Black Watch Regiment. It was a prominent spot, just a couple of blocks from the subway station. We started picketing and leafleting, right under the noses of the armed soldiers. “Withdraw federal troops!” we shouted, in French. “Free political prisoners! For a workers’ city hall!”

It took the authorities about an hour to decide what to do with us. Eventually, we were all arrested and hauled in to the local cop shop. There was a long wait while the cops tried to decide what to charge us with. Finally, they booked us for “sporting political insignia within a week of an election” and let us go. The charges were farcical. They revealed that the authorities did not dare invoke the draconian provisions of the War Measures Act. A clear victory for freedom of speech!

Getting Out the Word

Three more days; I was back in Toronto; and 11,000 copies of our emergency French-language newspaper reached our comrades in Montreal. They were distributed widely in campuses and workers’ districts. There were no arrests. This was a test of the relationship of forces. Activists took note: conditions were good for a revival of broad protest activities.

Manon got some media breaks. She picked up on a widespread sentiment that all Quebeckers were themselves hostages, members of a nation kidnapped 200 years before.

In the October 25 mayoralty election, Drapeau and his allies were victorious; FRAP candidates were defeated. Manon picked up 7,000 votes, a quarter of those voting against Drapeau.

By then, an impressive civil liberties campaign was under way, led by a new coalition, the Front Commun pour la Liberté.

The police never raided our Montreal headquarters, but they did descend on the farm where we had buried our precious records. Fortunately, they found nothing.

The Popular Movement Recovers

Most of those interned under War Measures, including Art Young and Penny Simpson of the LSA/LSO, were soon released without charges. Opposition to the War Measures gathered momentum, finding expression in the defense effort for those few detainees who faced formal charges. Within three months, the military occupation was over. Despite continuing repression and secret police disruption, the civil liberties enjoyed before the crisis were largely restored.

The labour and peoples’ movement in Quebec, recovering from brutal repression, was on the march once more.

Related documentation

This informal account is based in part on the extensive archive of LSA/LSO articles on the War Measures Act episode, available at the Socialist History Project (posted by Ian Angus).

See also Marc Bonhomme’s article in the Socialist Project Bullet: The Events of October 1970: From Yesterday to Today.

For a comprehensive assessment of the “October Crisis” and its impact on Quebec, see Richard Fidler’s “Life on the Left.”

1 Available with other relevant documentation on the Socialist History Project web site.

2 Our comrade Ernie Tate played a key role in founding the Russell Tribunal, which he describes in the second volume of his memoir, Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s (London: Resistance Books, 2014).

Quebec’s October Crisis, 1970 – What today’s left learned from Ottawa’s turn to repression

By Richard Fidler

Fifty years ago this month the federal government, invoking the War Measures Act – its first use in peacetime – occupied Quebec with 12,000 troops, arrested without a warrant almost 500 citizens, and carried out 36,000 police searches of homes, organizations and publications.

Of the 497 trade unionists, artists, lawyers and left activists jailed, 435 were subsequently freed without charges, and 44 of the 62 charged were acquitted or had their prosecutions stayed. But October 1970 marked a turning point in the federalist response to Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” and the rapidly growing popular mobilization in favour of making Quebec an independent state.

The immediate pretext for these draconian acts was the kidnapping of a British trade commissioner and a Quebec cabinet minister by the FLQ (the Front de libération du Québec), a small band of revolutionary-minded youth – even though the police involved in the hostage search said so many arrests simply complicated their task.¹ This was soon followed by Ottawa’s fraudulent claims that it was actually suppressing an “apprehended insurrection” led by Parti Québécois leaders René Lévesque and Jacques Parizeau, along with Claude Ryan, then editor of Le Devoir, the only Quebec newspaper that opposed the war measures repression. Their crime: they had called on the federal government to negotiate the release of the hostages by their kidnappers.²

An immediate victim of the repression was the FRAP, the Front d’Action Politique, a municipal party founded by trade unions and community activists that was confronting Montréal mayor Jean Drapeau’s autocratic administration around a program of radical social reform and participatory democracy.³ The FRAP was polling up to 35% support leading up to the city election in November 1970. Drapeau joined with Quebec premier Robert Bourassa in asking for federal intervention. Although federal minister Jean Marchand described the FRAP as a “front” for the FLQ, the municipal party made clear that while it was sympathetic to the demands in the FLQ’s manifesto, it did not support its methods. In the election held under military occupation, the party did not elect any of its candidates although it still managed to poll an average 18% in the districts it contested.

But Ottawa and its provincial and municipal allies had bigger targets in mind. Chief of these was the PQ, which in the Quebec elections earlier that year had won 23% of the popular vote, although getting only seven seats, its leader René Lévesque being defeated. Founded in 1968, the PQ sought sovereignty for Quebec albeit in “association” with the Rest of Canada. Its strategy was in part shaped by the pattern of federal-Quebec relations throughout most of the 1960s, Ottawa responding with concessions at each stage to increasing Quebec demands for autonomy. Quebec desires for recognition going beyond its status as “a province like the others” were met with ongoing negotiations in search of constitutional adjustments (the Fulton-Favreau formula). When the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) was established, Quebec was allowed to constitute its own plan, the QPP, and to use the invested pension funds to build a Francophone bourgeoisie through the Caisse de Dépôt et Placements. A federal royal commission on “Bilingualism and Biculturalism” published detailed studies on the inferior ranking of Francophone Quebeckers in Canada’s economic and social order and proposed a reworking of Confederation to recognize the “equality of the two founding peoples.” Quebec was even given some representation in international diplomacy.

The PQ leaders hoped to push this further with their quest for sovereign status within a fundamentally reorganized pan-Canadian state that would afford them space in which to build an independent Francophone bourgeoisie, “Quebec Inc.,” looking primarily to the Quebec government to defend its interests.

However, with the election in 1968 of Pierre Trudeau as federal Liberal leader and prime minister, Ottawa’s approach veered sharply toward confrontation with Quebec. The Bi-Bi commission was shut down. And Trudeau seized on the FLQ’s actions to inflict some lasting political damage on the PQ and set the scene for strengthening the federal state in the face of the “separatist” threat. Successor legislation to the War Measures Act (introduced by the recently deceased John Turner, the Justice minister) reproduced most of its features and laid the basis for establishing a new security police force as recommended by the Royal Commission on Security in 1968.⁴ During the 1970s the RCMP’s Security Service engaged in break-ins, thefts of PQ membership lists and the files of left-wing publications, fingered left activists to employers and landlords, and even firebombed a barn frequented by left activists.⁵ The scandal-ridden Security Service was later replaced by an “independent” agency, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), which has recently added surveillance of Indigenous self-determination activists to its mandate.

A major step in Ottawa’s offensive was the 1982 “patriation” of Canada’s constitution, until then an Act of the British parliament. Overriding opposition from Quebec’s National Assembly, the new constitution included an amending formula that entrenched Quebec’s “equal” status as a province, not its reality as a nation, and imposed a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that was subsequently used by the courts to overrule key provisions of Quebec’s Charter of the French Language (Law 101). And the federal Liberals later helped to sabotage the Meech Lake Accord, designed to win Quebec’s assent to the new constitution, and still later, in the late 1990s and beyond, poured millions in federal funds into illegal campaigns to subvert Quebec nationalist expression (the “sponsorship scandal”).⁶

These “sticks” have of course been accompanied by the “carrot” of promoting major Quebec firms, especially in the engineering sector, through generous federal subsidies and legal protection to them in their many dubious transnational activities. Quebec Inc. is today characterized above all by its close interrelationship with Canadian, U.S. and other international capital. It can be relied on to oppose Quebec independence.

In 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada, responding to a request by the federal government for an opinion on Quebec’s right to “unilateral secession,” ruled (with little or no reference to previous jurisprudence) that while secession might be legal provided it was determined by a “clear majority” on a “clear question” (both terms undefined) in a referendum, this would entail an amendment to the existing Constitution the terms of which would have to be negotiated among “all parties to Confederation” – meaning Ottawa and the other provinces.⁷ This was followed by adoption of the Clarity Act, which established that the federal Parliament alone would determine the “clarity” of the question and a possible majority in a future Quebec referendum. Ottawa continues to hold the upper hand; when Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard, a staunch federalist, attempted to discuss current constitutional arrangements, in 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was quick to dismiss any attempt “to re-open Canada’s constitution.”⁸

Both referendums held by PQ governments conditioned Quebec sovereignty implicitly on a negotiated agreement with the federal regime. In 1980, voters were asked to support a Quebec government “proposal to negotiate a new agreement with the rest of Canada, based on the equality of nations.” In 1995, they were asked “Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership....” Although it indicated that failure to achieve such an agreement within a year could trigger unilateral secession, the reality was that any such partnership or agreement remained purely hypothetical, and unlikely to say the least.

In effect, the Parti Québécois longstanding strategy of creating a new sovereign bourgeois state in symbiotic partnership with Canada has been decisively undermined, although the party’s discomfiture has not yet resulted in the alienation of its major institutional allies such as the Quebec union centrals. Many years have gone by since the last popular mobilizations for sovereignty provoked by the demise of both the Meech Lake Accord and its follow-up, the 1992 Charlottetown Accord. In this sense, the shift in federal strategy that began with such dramatic effect in October 1970 was successful. This blockage of the traditional sovereigntist movement has understandably chilled pro-independence sentiment among Quebec’s population.

The PQ, its membership once a quarter-million but reduced today to just over 35,000, has reverted in recent years to an identitarian ethnic nationalism that fails to recognize let alone accommodate the polyethnic reality of modern Quebec. In the party’s recent leadership contest, all four candidates supported additional limits on immigration, and the party – along with its federal counterpart the Bloc Québécois – supported the Legault government’s Bill 21, imposing dress codes on public sector employees, a measure aimed primarily at hijab-wearing Muslim women. As Québec solidaire activist Benoit Renaud says in his recent book, “This is a nationalism that is in fact content with the limited powers of a provincial state and is perfectly compatible with Quebec’s remaining in this Canadian state that consistently refuses to recognize us.”⁹

It is a quite different story on the left, however. As another QS leader François Saillant documents in his excellent new book, Brève Histoire de la Gauche Politique au Québec,¹⁰ since the 1960s, and particularly since the early 1980s, with the demise of the old Mao-Stalinist parties,¹¹ the left in Quebec has tended to support Quebec independence largely because any progressive program of fundamental social change is unrealizeable within the current federal regime. This central state has exclusive jurisdiction over finance, banking, regulation of trade and commerce, issuance of currency, foreign affairs, the military, criminal law, the appointment of judges of the superior courts, etc. The provinces are generally limited to powers of a “merely local or private nature.” And Ottawa holds residual power over all matters not specifically allocated by the Constitution to the provinces, including Quebec. Thus it is a commonplace on the Quebec left to combine social emancipation with national emancipation.¹²

This is a lesson often lost on progressive opinion in English Canada, including by some Anglophone progressives in Quebec. Almost 20 years ago I attempted to explain this in replying to a critique of the Union des forces progressistes, a forerunner of today’s Québec solidaire. Although a bit dated on a few of its particulars, such as the level of popular support for independence, I think the substantive argument holds true today. It was first published in Canadian Dimension.¹³

* * *

In Defence of Quebec’s UFP

Eric Shragge and Andrea Levy (“The Union des forces progressistes in Quebec: Prospects and Pitfalls,” CD March-April 2003) cite a number of difficulties confronting the new left-wing political formation. Among these are lack of trade union support, diffidence by some activists in the “social left,” an “old-Left” style and rhetoric, etc.

But their main criticism of the UFP — that it is fundamentally wrong on the national question because it supports Quebec independence —  tells us more about the authors’ bias than it does about the UFP or the Quebec left.

Shragge and Levy argue that support for Quebec independence (1) curbs the UFP’s appeal to young activists, new immigrants and native peoples because (2) it fails to reflect the reality, that the Québécois are already “masters in their own house.” This error, they say, will be “decisive” to the UFP’s “political fate.”

Let’s begin with the second point. Yes, Quebec has made great strides in recent decades in enhancing the status and role of French and the Francophone majority within the province’s institutions and society as a whole. French is now the language of work. Income differentials between French and English have been sharply reduced. Quebec’s education and health systems now rank with the best in Canada. And all of this largely through the initiatives and efforts of Quebecers themselves, often in the face of resistance and even outright opposition by big business, the federal government and their courts.

These developments, themselves the product of a nationalist upsurge that began with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, far from eliminating national consciousness, have redefined it and stimulated a powerful pride in the accomplishments and capacities of Quebec society. The change is reflected in the way Quebecers describe themselves: as Québécois and no longer as “French Canadians.” Although many Quebecers — a small majority — still favour being part of Canada, most Quebecers look to the government in Quebec City as their first line of defence of their language and culture, the key defining features of this distinct society, and most want to enhance its role along these lines.

Quebec, while only a province under Canada’s constitution, is sociologically a nation and is seen as such by the vast majority of its residents. This nation is more than its language and culture, its “ethnicity”; it is the product of a long historical evolution of the peoples who inhabit the territory of Quebec. This new nation is not narrowly ethnic. As the UFP platform says, it is “the human community residing in Quebec province, having French as its official language of institutional and working communication, sharing a single set of laws and social conventions, and rich in its cultural diversity.”

Shragge and Levy seem to have a reductionist view of Quebec nationalism that conflates nation with language and ethnicity alone. There is no longer a national question in Quebec, they argue: “French is the official language, the economic elite bears names like Desjardins, Tellier and Martin, as do the members of the bureaucracy that runs Quebec’s state institutions. These issues are settled....” It is simply the “memory of English domination that fuels the longing for independence.”

I think this is a fundamental misreading of the reality. What fuels Quebec independence sentiment today in Quebec is not some distant “memory” of English domination but a deeply felt awareness that Canada’s current constitution and political system do not recognize Quebec for what it is —  a modern, vibrant, progressive nation that is open to the world, and not just a “province like the others” — and a determination to put an end to the constant, politically debilitating conflicts with Ottawa that this entails in terms of jurisdictional bickering, duplication and overlapping of social programs, fiscal deficit offloading, etc. Far from being settled, these issues continue to nag. In the last two decades alone, Quebec has seen the addition to the Canadian constitution of an amending formula that virtually rules out any change in its status through the normal negotiating process; a Charter of Rights that directly targets Quebec’s popular language legislation; and [Parliament’s adoption of] a federal “Clarity Bill” that would effectively dictate the terms of any future Quebec referendum on sovereignty, to name only the most egregious assaults on Quebec’s right to self-determination.

The Shragge-Levy trivialization of these issues is of absolutely no use in helping us understand the challenges facing the UFP as it seeks to broaden its support. For example, the UFP’s support for Quebec independence does not isolate it from Quebec’s trade unions, most of which are on record in support of sovereignty. That is why the unions support the Parti québécois! The PQ’s independentism is what primarily distinguishes it from the other capitalist parties, the Liberals and the ADQ.¹⁴

Most activists in the social movements are likewise sympathetic to sovereignty. Support for Quebec sovereignty in recent years has remained over 40% in poll after poll, and is strongest among the working people and youth to whom the UFP addresses its message. As for recent immigrants and minorities, the UFP’s star candidates in the recent election included such people as Amir Khadir, Omar Aktouf, Jill Hanley and David Fennario. They have no problem with the UFP’s pro-sovereignty position. In the left milieu, in fact, support for sovereignty is simply taken for granted; for most activists, that “issue is settled.”

There are some issues of nation and nationalism that are not settled, of course. An important one is the relationship between Quebec sovereignty and aboriginal self-government. The UFP platform, cited by Shragge and Levy, confines itself to recognizing “the right to self-determination of the First Nations up to and including their independence.” Possible approaches might entail formal recognition of full or partial sovereignty of Native peoples in those parts of the province — geographically very extensive — in which they are the majority. It is worth noting that Quebec is the only province in Canada to recognize in law the existence of a dozen aboriginal “nations,” and it is the only province to be signing modern-day treaties with its native people.

The UFP is aware that these and many other issues need further debate, both within the left and within the population as a whole. That is why its platform states that “independence is not an end in itself: rather, it is a means of making our goal for society a reality. This sovereignty of the people will find its expression in the election of a Constituent Assembly, mandated to draw up and to propose to the population, via referendum, a Constitution for a progressive, republican, secular and democratic Quebec.”

Finally, like many readers, I am sure, I am struck by the weird contrast between Canadian Dimension’s chronic campaign for “Canadian sovereignty” and its equally chronic inability to identify with the only mass democratic and progressive movement for sovereignty within the Canadian state: that of the Québécois.

The UFP is by far the most advanced expression in North America of a worldwide process now under way of “rebuilding the left.” It needs our solidarity, not our misunderstandings.

1 Jean-François Lisée, Insurrection appréhendée: le grand mensonge d’October 1970.

2 Just this month, Justin Trudeau incredibly reaffirmed this allegation. Asked by a journalist if he would apologize for the hundreds of arrests in 1970, Trudeau denounced “these revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the government.” (Le Devoir, 8 October, 2020). Ironically, Ryan was later leader of the Quebec Liberal party and led the federalist opponents of the PQ in the 1980 referendum.

3 The FRAP program (including a proposal for free public transit) was published in a 138-page book, Les Salariés au Pouvoir (not on-line).

4 See Robert Dumont, “Entire Left is Target of Bill.”

5 See Richard Fidler, “An anniversary that Ottawa would prefer not to celebrate.”

6 Michel David, “La première guerre,” Le Devoir 26 September, 2020.

7 Reference re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 S.C.R. 217, clause 88.

8 “Canada's Quebec wants constitutional talks despite Trudeau opposition.”

9 Benoit Renaud, Un Peuple Libre: Indépendance, laïcité et inclusion (Ecosociété 2020), p. 182.

10 Ecosociété 2020.

11 Primarily En Lutte/In Struggle and the Parti communiste ouvrier/Workers Communist Party, both of which opposed Quebec independence as a “bourgeois project.”

12 For more on this, see “Quebec independence a key to building the left in Canada.”

13 July 2003, Vol. 37 (4), at p. 7. In fairness to Andrea Levy, it should be noted that she is now an active member of Québec solidaire. When a similar criticism was levied against Québec solidaire’s independentism in the U.S. magazine Jacobin during the 2018 Quebec election, Levy joined with André Frappier in asking me to consider writing a reply to it. I regret that I did not.

14 Action démocratique du Québec, a forerunner of today’s Coalition Avenir Québec, the party that now forms the Quebec government.