Pierre Trudeau,Neoliberalism,FLQ, And

Pierre Trudeau, Neoliberalism, FLQ, and “The New Democracy”. 

 A new novel, characterized in Quebec as “Hamelin’s Bomb” explodes into Canadian history.  La Constellation du Lynx probes deeply into Quebec culture and far beyond it, spanning the years from 1943 until today, shaping a vision of Neoliberalism at its most gothic – and pointing to a corporatized society announced with the FLQ crisis of 1970: The New Democracy.

The novel presents a (completed) search for an explanation of the truly ‘fantastic’ events of 1970.  It deals with the brutal imposition of the War Measures Act, the arrest and jailing (without rights) of literally hundreds of innocent people, the death of deputy premier Pierre Laporte at the hands of the FLQ … and of others, secretly, at the hands of the RCMP and ‘the Canadian State’.

The ‘search’ is presented by a novelistic two generation pair who are ‘students’ of the FLQ Crisis (la crise d’Octobre).  They seek the real reasons, the real politics, the real murderers, the real interests served by the draconian measures undertaken by ‘the State’ in 1970.

Louis Hamelin sets himself a huge task and - in a sense – fails heroically to achieve it.  He ‘fails heroically’, perhaps, for formal reasons (the kind of novel he writes) and for ideological reasons (the author’s own fundamental political position). 

In a way not signified by Hamelin, La Constellation du Lynx presents – in its raw repressiveness – a first major image of neoliberalism in Canada.  More of that farther on.

Any novel tied closely to recent history – and explaining it – is hemmed in by fact, chronology, the culture and ‘mood’ of the recorded hour.  Hamelin deals with those demands by breaking chronology – by going back and forth in time, by shifting focus, by shifting place.  The novel is – now – in the snowbound winter of rural Quebec, now in Jordan, now in 140 Collins Street Montreal, now in Mexico, now in England, now in a sweaty tavern near UQAM, now in the Abitibi region ….

The author is compared to Jacques Ferron, Marie Vargas Llosa, and Norman Mailer – in his novelistic use of real historical events and people.  He also pays homage to novelist Hubert Aquin in his attempt to use place as indicator of psychological reality … and of cultural memory loss (“trou de memoire”, the title of an Aquin novel).

La Constellation du Lynx is also a “thesis novel” – arguing for a particular reading of history and character.  It is, too, at one level, a symbolic novel.  The lynx of the starry constellation and of the Canadian northern wilds may have at least two symbolic purposes.  The first to show the need to “connect the dots” (the stars) in order to watch the obscure become plain, to see the amorphous scattering of lights take on form as a real, meaningful shape.

The second lynx image may be of the impassive, impenetrable, and inexplicable human condition: Being, that is, … that doesn’t fully know itself.

In his grand evocation of land, landscape, and appartenance (belonging) he invokes, as well, the special Quebec genre called the “roman de terroir”, badly translated as “the novel of the land”, also signifying character shaped by place and local conditions. Quebec “place” in this novel is muddied by “international” influence, the effects of travel, and the obsessive presence of U.S. commodity culture.

La Constellation du lynx is also a police novel (roman policier) in which the police, themselves, are an unknown to be discovered and identified as wrong-doer.

The mixture of all those kinds of novel would be hard for anyone to hold in play.  But the task is especially hard for Louis Hamelin who aims the novel, from the start, at its stunning revelation, its denouement:  the Bomb!

The novel tells us (Hamelin, of course, does not) that Pierre Laporte was intended and set up by “the State” to be murdered in order to shape public opinion.  Preparation for the ‘sudden’, ‘unexpected’ imposition of the War Measures Act began months before it was invoked.  The army and the police were, somehow, mustered and placed well before the crisis emerged.

[Experts at the time, and since, have argued the War Measures Act was unnecessary.  Law existed to cover all “security” measures required.]

James Cross, British Trade Officer, was probably a set-up kidnap, Cross having worked for British Intelligence (MI5).  And the whole drama inside the kidnap cells was under full surveillance by the RCMP – the Laporte cell was wired and recording almost everything said there.  All the time.  The drama could have been ended whenever Pierre Trudeau ordered it ended – without the murder of Pierre Laporte taking place.

The FLQ was infiltrated almost from the beginning, a few central felquistes being RCMP moles.

Quite outside the novel, Louis Fournier reports in his (earlier) book called FLQ, l’histoire d’une mouvement clandestin, that the RCMP created mock FLQ cells and blew up property in order to “manufacture the consent” of Canadians to draconian measures.  Fournier’s reporting is consistent with claims made by the novel, which argues the whole “crisis” was a ‘production’ to manufacture consent.

RCMP moles went to Jordan, the novel alleges, for “revolutionary” training – and through such links the person the novel calls Francis Braffort [Mario Bachand] was murdered in Paris by orders from ‘the Canadian State’.  Brafford is described in the novel as a “thinker of the terrorist movement, and would-be grand spokesman”.  He was only one of an uncertain number ‘taken care of’.

The novel’s treatment of Brafford’s murder is brief, somewhat disconnected, and in no way as specific as Michael McLoughlin’s account in his book Last Stop Paris.  McLoughlin names the murderers and a few of Trudeau’s close associates in Parliament involved in the murder.  McLoughlin’s years-long research appeared in 1998.  The named murderers remained silent, Critics (chosen?) panned the book.  It faded from view quickly.

Hamelin’s novel seems to shy away from that – one of the most audacious investigations of alleged State-organized murder in Canada. 

The novel’s shying away is only one of its strange aspects.

As an Anglophone who was “occupied” with the FLQ crisis at the time, I am uneasy with the way Hamelin, eleven years old at the time, recreates the whole milieu, the whole “culture” of the time.  Again and again the novel seems to belittle major characters in Quebec who supported independence, were Left in politics, and who fought the rampant corruption with which Pierre Laporte was said to be connected. 

The culture of Quebec (and all Canada) is different now than it was in 1970 … and Louis Hamelin may be too far from the period to grasp that fact.  Secondly, he may not be disposed – because of his unstated political position – to grant legitimacy to independentist actors. 

The felquistes, their supporters, and some other organizations in the province wanted the independence of Quebec.  As part of that they saw the necessity to go Left.  They were often bitterly anti-capitalist and anti-corruption (as the FLQ Manifesto makes clear).

If the corporate class in North America could have lived with an independent Quebec, that class could not live with an independent socialist Quebec.  And, indeed, when Rene Levesque later poured a gigantic quantity of capitalist water into the Left independentist wine, he was – nonetheless – called “the Castro of the North” (as even Pierre Trudeau was) by U.S. interests.

It was 1970.

The corporate class was beginning to strike back after the post-Second World War years of Labour strength, social liberalism, and advances in security for ordinary people in Canada (and the rest of the Western world). 

The neoliberal agenda was simple and clear.  Reduce the freedoms of the general population.  Increase profit for private corporations and the wealthy. Move private corporate interests into power (using the police, elected governments, the army when possible, and the courts).  Erode democracy.

Margaret Thatcher – determined campaigner for neoliberalism - became head of the British Conservative Party in 1975, and Prime Minister in 1979.

Neoliberalism became fully “mainstream”.

To support rule by private corporate power, the “consent” of the larger population has to be “manufactured” by lies, false threats to security, crisis incidents, and the production of phantom enemies.  The press and media have to become instruments of total deception, cover-up, and trivia.  They have to be employed to create a non-existent reality.  They were … and are.

What better target to launch a major neoliberal attack upon than the Quebec population, a minority emerging to a new consciousness with “the Quiet Revolution”, open to Left solutions, and seriously entertaining the idea of separate statehood.

Pierre Trudeau was not a fan of democracy, having told MP’s that fifty yards from Parliament they were nothings.  As an elitist he moved power away from the elected representatives of Canadians in Parliament to the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council, and the Treasury Board.  (Stephen Harper has built on the foundations Pierre Trudeau erected.)

An elitist, like Harper, Trudeau was perfectly situated to create a political crisis, to manufacture the murder of Pierre Laporte, to slander the active, intelligent Left of Quebec and to jail them in the hundreds, to mass the police and army … all in order to save Canadian unity, to guarantee continued corrupt private power and - to increase its dominance.

In a piece of grand neoliberal chicanery, Robert (“bou bou”) Bourassa, premier of Quebec, fled from his parliamentary offices and set up a fortress in a major Montreal hotel owned by a huge private corporation.  From there, surrounded by security, he was able to conduct his part of the battle against the (at most) ten felquistes who were fully known and constantly shadowed by the RCMP.

Pierre Trudeau, moreover, was, at the time, an Actonian anti-nationalist.  He believed, with the 19th century English Catholic intellectual, Lord Acton, that countries ought to dissolve boundaries and, little by little, move to a single, beautiful, harmoniously governed planet.  And so, for Trudeau, independence for Quebec – especially Left independence – was anathema.  He said around that time that he didn’t care who owned Canada as long as taxes were paid to support government. 

In the face of those realities, the novel (as I read it) treats the felquistes, all the independentists, - and, in fact, all the non-corporate actors -  with a strange lack of human understanding.

It is here that the difference between 1970 and now is so important.  The novel seems to fail to understand that difference. 

Yes, Woodstock.  Yes. The Quiet Revolution.  Yes. A release of sexual and social inhibitions (not only in Quebec).  Yes, a world of hippydom, drugs, travel, anti-establishment foolery.

But among the Quebecois (and Anglophones) in Canada there was a real intensity and passion about politics, political theory, the need for change – change towards the Left.  Among the truly political it drove them – whatever else they did with their lives.

In Anglophone Canada, for instance, there was the Waffle Movement within the NDP, (“Independence and Socialism”), which gained high profile.  More militantly, there was (in Ontario) the Canadian Liberation Movement founded about 1968.  The membership was mostly young, intense, militant, dedicated, activist, doctrinaire.  They organized demonstrations, public education, a publishing house.  (They published a translation of Leandre Bergeron’s Marxist-influenced handbook – A People’s History of Quebec. They published, as well, The History of Painting in Canada, Towards A People’s Art by Barry Lord.  He is described on the back cover as “directly involved in the struggle for the liberation of our country from U.S. control, and has joined in the fight for an independent, socialist Canada.”)

CLM was nationalist, anti-imperialist, Left.  When it broke up five or six years after formation, shattered by internal conflicts and intrigues, many considered it a gathering of wacko nut cases.  But that judgement needs very careful scrutiny.

Years after, very, very few CLMers would tell the real story of the group.  The culture in Canada shifted sharply – and they shifted with it.  The same seems to be the case with those involved with the FLQ.

The CLM parallel with the FLQ is important.  The generation that followed finds it almost impossible to comprehend the real, fierce, political dedication and education engaged in by Left political people in the 1960s and 1970s. During the years of the “FLQ Crisis”, I met and spoke with many Quebecers deeply involved with or concerned about the issues.  They were not like the characters Louis Hamelin presents in his novel.

Nowhere in its 600 pages does the novel provide space for a few felquistes and/or supporters to spend time making a serious case for their political position – as real people with beliefs that would push them to take hostages.  Nor does the novel give more than about three sentences to the FLQ Manifesto. 

The Manifesto did a great deal at the time to move the Quebec population to sympathy … and Pierre Trudeau to impose the War Measures Act.

The novel presents the felquistes and other major independentist characters as, perhaps, too often uncentred, alcohol using, drug-happy, politically myopic, unrealistic, self-indulgent, bizarre.  It does them, perhaps, and the whole period,  – a serious disservice in that dimension. 

In fact – one might say – that, perhaps, the Pierre Trudeau to Stephen Harper “manufacture of consent” has been all too effective.

Louis Hamelin’s chief thesis – that the FLQ Crisis was manufactured for the political purposes of Pierre Trudeau and the commercial purposes of the North American Corporate Class – demands attention and a careful reading of his novel.  In that reading perhaps the characterization of barely disguised people of the time becomes secondary, though I believe the novel would have greater power if they were allowed larger dimension.