ENGLAND'S SEEN OF CLUBS VISITS gueneo
. By Re ‘Brock |
QUEBEC CITY, Québec -- Inside the ornate Red Chamber of the _ legislature on October 10, Québec'ts Prime Minister Jean Lesage was addressing. his guest of honor, Britain's Queen Elizabeth: . ,
he. true democracy will fight for. freedom of speech for its detractors so. that problems will be aired in public. -It will always be ready to question its own.ideas, to revise its. judgment and not to.tear. apart, pillory, or to describe as traitors to the. country those who have the courage and perhaps the temerity to differ in. opinions with it openly. Democracy must assure freedom of speech to everyone, even the adversaries of freedom of speech."
Outside, at. that moment, scores: or Helmeted riot police, wielding heavy oak batons, thrashed right and left at French-Canadian separatist demonstrators whose only crime had been to chant, as the Queen's heavily guarded limousine speeded by the seditious _Stogans "Te. Québec | aux Québécois" and “Québec. Libre,"
The previous night, Québec's largest separatist party, Le Rassemblement pour 1! Indépendance Nationale CRIN], had held its biggest meeting to date in this. usually conservative city. About 2,000 members and sympathizers heard RIN leaders Pierre Bourgault and Guy Pouliot protest the Queen's presence: in Québec.
After the rally, they filed out in disciplined formation, as directed by the RIN's husky ‘service d'ordre,' to march toward a designated location, point "X," in fact the. legislative assembly...
But they never got there; ‘the police ‘suddenly pulled Bourgault into a nearby garage and closed the doors on him. Emerging pale and upset twenty.minutes later, he ordered the restless crowd to disperse, claiming the police had threatened to use troops to break up the peaceful demonstration. by force if necessary. The demonstrators promptly disbanded. Most “of them stayed home the next day.
But some were intensely disappointed at what they. felt was a sell-out by the RIN leadership. Among them_were members of the mili+ tant Front Républicain pour 1'Indépendance [FRI] led by the former Montreal prize-fighter Reggie Chartrand. This. group of not more . than 25 workers and unemployed youth provided the initial core for the. spontaneous demonstrations which | dogged the Royal party . the next day.
_. The police reacted in the most brutal way. Wherever a few youth gathered, the cops would wade in, swinging their cluks indis-..
criminately, striking innocent bystanders and journalists: as well -as’-. demonstrators. The youth were outnumbered by police as much as four to one. By day's end, almost fifty had been arrested; six journalists had been hospitalized; and the population of Québec City had turned against their own police force. With more than a thousand journalists present, people the world over learned for the first time of the treatment suffered by Québec | ‘indépendantis tos ."
The events in Québec were nothing new for the: separatists, On Queen Victoria Day this year, no less. than 300 youth were arrested’ in Montreal for demonstrating at the Monument to the 12 Martyrs of the 1837 Revolt. (The martyrs were hanged by the British colonial régime.) On Labor. Day nearly eighty members of Chartrand's “Cheval-~: iers de 1!Indépendance" were arrested in a mass demonstration in © Montreal's: Lafontaine Park. Their crime -~ to set fire to a British flag. vo
The FRI headquarters have been raided by police, and files destroyed. For selling Québec Libre in the streets (like the big dailies), FRI members have been ned in excess of $100.
On Confederation Day, July 1, ninety young separatists in Montreal alone were picked up and held incommunicado without charges _ for twenty-four hours. The police calmly dismissed this brazen violation of elementary civil rights with the cynical explanation: "Preventative Detentions."
The journalists, too, & became involved. By midafternoon they were going in delegations to the police to demand an end to the violence, Of the many incidents I witnessed personally, ‘one speaks for all.
In an alley just across from the Chateau Frontenac, five French-Canadian reporters came upon an RCMP [Royal. Canadian Mounted Police] plainclothesman trying to handeurt a struggling youth whom he wags: kneeling One
In response to the detective's demands to "eal. the police,' ‘one newsman exclaimed: "No, you cops have been provoking trouble all day, and I'm fed up with this senseless brutality."
Another said, “wy don't you feds go back to Ottawa; we don't want you here!"
When the cop claimed that the young man ‘had "wanted to plant a bomb in the Chateau Frontenac," the reporters moved in. They pulled the cop away, tearing his coat*°and knocking his handcuffs to the ground. The youth promptly ran away. “These guys think they're in Russia, t one of the reporters said. .
For the Ottawa.and Québec governments, the Queen's visit was unrewarding. The population boycotted the ceremonies and parades
-1l-
almost completely -- those few who joined the crowd of journalists and 4,000 uniformed police and plainclothesmen were mostly of English origin. (The bourgeois 150,000-member Catholic St-Jean-Baptiste Society called on the population to stay home, neither demonstrating for nor against the monarchy.) Québéc was an armed camp, with all access roads. blocked by police barricades. Dogs, horses, armoured cars, tear gas, fire hoses, and four recently purchased machine guns... were held in readiness. ;
The separatists won a significant moral victory, and many residents of Québec who formerly looked askance at them (the Québec City region includes less than 300 of the RIN official membership of 7,000) are now solidarizing with the movement. And the separatists won their first understanding from English-Canadian journalists.
But within the separatist movement, the RIN leadership, particularly the “left wing" Bourgault, is now coming under increasingly heavy attack -- not so much because of bowing to police intimidation the night before as for failing to organize mass protests the following day. The RIN left the protests to the courageous young men and women who, despite the police violence, never gave up their .calls for a “Québec Libre. Only the widespread protests against the police prevented a debacle for the separatist movement. As for the .leftwing intellectuals who speak condescendingly of “patiently penetrating each milieu as agitators and educators" -- they were nowhere in evidence. .
The whole affair served to underline once again the basic organizational weakness of the separatist and socialist movements here. Spectacular actions can't replace solid organization, The real heroes of the day were the demonstrating youth who, in the. space of a few hours, threw up an improvised leadership, and nearly ran the police ragged by nightfall.
SOCIALIST LEAGUE EQUNDED.. IN MONTREAL