Word: quebecs
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Police arrested Bernard Lortie, a 19-year-old student and a member of the Chernier cell of the Front de Liberation du Quebec, in an apartment near Montreal University last Friday...
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's response was drastic. Promising to "root out the cancer of an armed revolutionary movement," he rejected the demands, called out troops to patrol Ottawa, the capital, and Quebec Province, and finally invoked emergency police powers under Canada's 1914 War Measures Act, which had never before been used in time of peace. If Trudeau was tough, the F.L.Q. terrorists were barbaric. They strangled Laporte, apparently by twisting a thin gold chain he wore around his neck, then stuffed his body in the trunk...
...murder of the 49-year-old Laporte, like Trudeau a French-Canadian and an opponent of the Quebec separatist movement, stunned the nation. Mail and phone calls flooding into Ottawa ran 97% in favor of the Prime Minister's tough stance. Some 2,000 Canadians gathered on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to sing the national anthem, O Canada; the House of Commons approved the invocation of the War Measures Act by an overwhelming 190-16 margin...
During the week, Trudeau's government repeatedly cited three reasons for its tough action, and each seemed to have at least some validity. First, Ottawa felt it had to counter what one official called "an erosion of public opinion" in Quebec, whose French-Canadian population might have embraced the separatist creed more warmly than ever had the government wavered in the face of the F.L.Q. challenge; that fear was heightened by the fact that Montreal is holding municipal elections this week. Second, Ottawa wanted to reassert the principle of federalism as strongly as possible. Finally, there was the F.L.Q. itself...
...Canadian drama indicates that today's urban guerrillas merely bring new techniques to old battles?atavistic tribal struggles that would hardly be noticed except in a world shrunken by communications satellites and other electronic marvels. Quebec's F.L.Q. dates only from 1962, but French-Canadian nationalism goes back two centuries. Pierre Trudeau himself was close to Quebec radical movements in the 1950s, but he later decided that what separatism really meant was simply a long step back to Quebec's feudal past. In a tough 1964 essay, Trudeau let the Quebec separatists have it. "The truth is," he wrote, "that...