- Reaction score
- 13,442
- Points
- 1,010
I am certain that M. Blanchet will be happy, for his part, to apologize for the Murder M. Laporte and the kidnapping of Mr. Cross. You know- the acts that sparked the War Measures Act....
Stand by for another Gemini Award worthy performance by our chief drama teacher. The question is will he play the righteously indignant son defending his family or the apologetic son making amends for family sins?FJAG said:I have a one finger response for M. Blanchet and another for M. Trudeau if he goes along with this foolishness.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/war-measures-act-apology-pierre-trudeau_ca_5f999db1c5b6aab57a0ea5f9
[emoji814]inhand:
Old Sweat said:A sidebar, and perhaps FJAG also recalls this, the Feds were most annoyed when a mayor in BC, perhaps in Vancouver, used the War Measures Act to clean out a "hippie colony" in one area of his city. Technically he was acting within his authority under the act, but rather than being as right as rain, he was just about as wrong as freezing rain.
Old Sweat said:A sidebar, and perhaps FJAG also recalls this, the Feds were most annoyed when a mayor in BC, perhaps in Vancouver, used the War Measures Act to clean out a "hippie colony" in one area of his city. Technically he was acting within his authority under the act, but rather than being as right as rain, he was just about as wrong as freezing rain.
SeaKingTacco said:I am certain that M. Blanchet will be happy, for his part, to apologize for the Murder M. Laporte and the kidnapping of Mr. Cross. You know- the acts that sparked the War Measures Act....
The other lesson is that it is a slippery slope that links collective fear with the selective fear of minority communities.
There was a time, not so long ago in this country, when it was fashionable in some quarters to suggest that if one scratched the surface of a francophone Canadian one would likely find a Quebec nationalist and, under that veneer, a separatist, and, below that latter surface, a potential terrorist.
It is on the basis of that dubious rationale that scores of law-abiding Quebecers were arrested without cause under the War Measures Act in the fall of 1970 and that Canada’s security services gave themselves a licence to play dirty tricks on legal organizations such as the Parti Québécois over the same period.
It was not limited to Quebec. When École secondaire Étienne-Brûlé, Toronto’s first French-language public high school opened in 1970, some of its opponents — including a few North York neighbours — considered it little more than a training school for terrorists!
CloudCover said:Mulroney in 1988 re: Japanese apology.
Old Sweat said:A sidebar, and perhaps FJAG also recalls this, the Feds were most annoyed when a mayor in BC, perhaps in Vancouver, used the War Measures Act to clean out a "hippie colony" in one area of his city. Technically he was acting within his authority under the act, but rather than being as right as rain, he was just about as wrong as freezing rain.
The British diplomat whose kidnapping in 1970 by radical Quebec separatists triggered the October Crisis has died. James Richard Cross was 99.
His death, from COVID-19, was confirmed Wednesday by his son-in-law, John Stringer.
Cross spent 59 days in captivity after armed members of the Front de libération du Québec barged into his Montreal home on Oct. 5, 1970.
A Polaroid taken by the FLQ of Cross playing solitaire while sitting on a crate ostensibly full of dynamite is among the most iconic photos in Canadian history, representative of the moment when Quebec appeared to be teetering on the brink of insurrection.
Throughout the ordeal, however, Cross displayed a sense of calm that often impressed his kidnappers, and may have ensured his survival.
"Cross was calmer than us," Jacques Lanctôt, who headed the FLQ cell that kidnapped him, told a CBC podcast last year.
Cross acknowledged afterward he had tried to remain friendly with his captors, joking with them and inquiring about their political beliefs. But that, he recalled, was merely a survival tactic.
"I hated the lot of them and would have cheerfully killed them if the opportunity arose," the diplomat said in an 1995 account of the kidnapping that is part of an oral history project at Cambridge University.
. . .