“The Morin affair” has just returned to the news due to the broadcast, on the Vrai platform, of the investigative series Claude Morin. A dangerous game, directed by Flavie Payette-Renouf. For four episodes of approximately 45 minutes each, we follow journalists Antoine Robitaille and Dave Noël in their quest for the truth concerning the secret meetings that took place between Claude Morin and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police from 1975 to 1977.
This disturbing story, which was first revealed to the public in 1992 by journalist Normand Lester, is already widely known. Why, then, return to it? Because Morin, now 94 years old, agreed to entrust to Robitaille and Noël the personal diary he kept at the time and in which he recorded notes about his meetings with the Canadian secret services.
Morin had initially planned to allow access to his notebooks after his death. However, at the insistence of Robitaille, who was able to gain his trust, he agreed to entrust them to him.
Morin, clearly, is a wounded old man. In The Morin affair (Boréal, 2006), he already spoke of the affliction and distress that Lester’s revelations had caused him. Today, almost twenty years later, we can think that this pain persists and that Morin hoped, by entrusting his secret diary to two trusted journalists, to clear his reputation before dying.
However, even if A dangerous game tends to exonerate him, even if Morin is particularly eloquent, I fear that, for many, this is not enough. For many people, in fact, the figure of the spy has something exciting and that of the traitor, something reassuring, in that it gives them a clear conscience and simply explains the failure of their cause. Imagining, therefore, Morin as a spy and a traitor, even without proof, even on the basis of risky and malicious deductions, works well for many people. Finally, we have it, our story worthy of an American thriller!
In A dangerous game, Robitaille and Noël explore the issue, delve as far as possible and give voice to the still living actors of the time, as well as to Morin’s allies and adversaries. If they recognize, at the end, that gray areas remain, their conclusion nevertheless amounts to a verdict of not guilty. “I seriously think that he didn’t do that to deceive his side or make it fail,” Robitaille said in an interview with Montreal Journal, because, without the state system, there would have been no Lévesque government. »
I think the same. To write this column, I not only watched the series A game dangerousI also asked a few direct questions to Morin himself and reread the pages he devotes to the affair in I say it like I mean it (Boréal, 2014) and in The Morin affaira solid pro domo plea in which the ex-minister cuts to pieces, with a wealth of details and tremendous energy, the accusations made against him by Loraine Lagacé, Normand Lester, Pierre Godin, Pierre Duchesne and Pierre Dubuc.
My conclusion, despite the gray areas that will remain eternally: Morin is a great Quebecois, who never betrayed his homeland. He, of course, played with fire by accepting these secret and paid meetings with the RCMP, but nothing, especially not his political career, allows us to conclude that he did it against his party, against the sovereignist cause. and against his people. This is also the opinion, moreover, of René Lévesque, Denis Vaugeois and Louis Bernard, general secretary of the Executive Council under Lévesque.
Pierre Dubuc, director of The other journal, does not agree. He says it again in Claude Morin, a spy within of the Parti Québécois (Editions du Renouveau québécois, 2023, 120 pages). Morin, according to him, is a traitor who conspired, with the RCMP and the CIA, to bring about the failure of Quebec’s independence.
In the absence of convincing evidence, Dubuc falls back on a dubious syllogism. Morin secretly met with the RCMP, which gave rise to suspicions of collaboration with the federalist enemy. However, Morin was a stapist, and stapism led the independence movement to failure. So, Morin is a traitor. An ideological disagreement, however, cannot justify such an accusation, which Denis Vaugeois describes as pathetic.
Dubuc, moreover, gets his brushes mixed up. He first says that Morin collaborated with the RCMP for the benefit of Canadian federalists and then asserts that he rather collaborated with the CIA against these same federalists. Because Morin was a pragmatic sovereignist and not, like him, a radical left-wing separatist, Dubuc concludes that the father of stagism is deceitful.
As for me, in the final analysis, I want to tell Claude Morin that he retains all my admiration.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.