Word: quebecs
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...police and militiamen swept through Quebec in a week-long blitz that involved 1600 raids and bagged more than 375 prisoners, it became clear that the government was carrying out a well-coordinated strategy of political terror. Very few of those arrested could be directly linked to the FLQ; most were a broad assortment of politicians, labor leaders and other public figures who sympathized with the underground terrorist group but did not endorse its activities...
WHAT TRUDEAU challenged, in effect, was a separatist movement in Quebec that had begun in the early '60's and was rapidly gaining strength and respectability in electoral circles as well as in terrorist cliques. One of the early groups, the Parti Quebecois, had attracted a significant province-wide following and won nearly 25 per cent of the popular vote in Quebec's elections last April. Another party, the two-year-old Front d'Action Politique, had been threatening to topple the administration of Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau in the municipal elections last Sunday...
...itself was founded in 1960. Its movement had been a confused struggle that few people in Quebec really understood; it had begun with arson and bank robberies, progressed to bombings with the explosion at a strike-bound shoe factory in 1966, and escalated to the political kidnappings of earlier this month. The FLQ was always a self-consciously underground group, rarely offering any explanation of what it did, never attempting to build an above-ground political base. Its acts were characterized in the Canadian media as those of mad and reckless terrorists...
...Vallieres, published an autobiography in 1967 which became the first comprehensive statement of the FLQ's methods and goals. Vallieres wrote Negres Blancs d'Amerique in the Manhattan House of Detention, where he spent four months after a protest in front of the United Nations building in New York. Quebec, since the establishment of the first trading post in Quebec by Champlain in 1608, has always been submitted to the interests of the ruling classes of the imperialist countries-first France, then England, and now the United States," Vallieres wrote in Negres Blancs. "It is by force...
...this time that the FLQ first became an overtly political entity with whom many French Canadians in Quebec could identify. And the need for some kind of political movement among French Canadians there had long existed. The French comprise 85 per cent of Quebec's population, yet they are the victims of severe economic and social discrimination: paid less, poorly housed, heavily unemployed. A provincial survey revealed last year that an English-speaking resident of Quebec earns roughly twice as much as one whose native tongue is French. In this context, the kidnapping of the Quebec Labor Minister...