According to Brian Peckford, former premier of Newfoundland and sympathizer of the “freedom convoy”, invoking the Emergency Measures Act to drive protesters out of downtown Ottawa is the equivalent of “killing a fly with a club”.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
As for him, Tommy Douglas, the first leader of the New Democratic Party, had judged, half a century ago, that enacting the War Measures Act to subdue a handful of felquistes, it was like brandishing “a club to crack a peanut”.
Bigger! Is the excessive handling of the club a bad habit within the Trudeau family?
The comparison between father and son, in any case, is practically inevitable. Before Justin Trudeau, never had a prime minister dared to invoke the Emergency Measures Actadopted in 1988. And for good reason: it is a law of last resort, which grants the government extraordinary powers.
Before 1988, this is the War Measures Act which was in effect. The last leader to invoke it was Pierre Elliott Trudeau, in the midst of the October crisis. Many Quebecers still shiver.
Comparison is inevitable, then, but like all comparisons, this one is flawed.
Do we really want to compare flies and peanuts? Plans to upset everyone: those who will protest that we want to compare simple demonstrators to terrorists…
And those who will rather be offended by the comparison between far-right cuckoo clocks and Quebecers imprisoned for no reason – including Pauline Julien, Gérald Godin, Gaston Miron and Michel Chartrand.
In short, in this perilous exercise, everything is a question of perspective.
For three weeks, we called on Justin Trudeau to do something. The situation was untenable. His inaction, inadmissible. Now that he finally moves by invoking the Emergency Measures Actwe conclude with… an acknowledgment of failure!
There are probably as many people who see a show of strength in the Prime Minister’s unprecedented move as there are people who see it as a show of weakness.
There are those who find that he lacks backbone and those who perceive in him the seed of a dictator.
There are those who accuse him of letting demonstrators sink into anarchy and those who accuse him of wanting to end the carnival, on the pretext that this can only inflame the conflict.
It’s banal, but fascinating: everyone judges the current crisis through their own telescope, their own ideological bubble, their own prejudices, unconscious or not.
The same goes for the October Crisis.
Some remember the Just watch me by Pierre Elliott Trudeau with nostalgia. “In beleaguered Anglophone Montreal, we applauded. Our hearts did not bleed at the sight of the soldiers; we welcomed them,” recalled Andrew Cohen in the Globe and Mail.
Others rather abhor the famous phrase. They remember everything that followed: the mass arrests, without a warrant or explanation. For 457 Quebecers, prison, without knowing what they were accused of, or when they would be released. The world as we knew it, which rocked without warning.
They remember the fear.
Any comparison is lame, I said. This one limps severely.
When Pierre Elliott Trudeau launched ” Just watch me on the steps of parliament on October 13, 1970, he had just made fun of sensitive souls (“ bleeding hearts ”) whose legs wobbled at the mere sight of soldier’s helmets.
No matter their state of mind, he continued sharply; the important thing was to restore law and order. Three days later, 8,500 soldiers were deployed in the streets of Montreal.
Fifty-two years later, what is announced on the streets of Ottawa has – fortunately – nothing to do with it. Justin Trudeau is convinced that we must “avoid at all costs” the deployment of soldiers against populations.
The Emergency Measures Act remains subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There will be no arbitrary arrests, suspensions of basic rights, or limits on freedom of expression or the freedom to demonstrate.
In short, Justin Trudeau is not at all in ” Just watch me “. On the contrary, he was careful to point out that the scope of the emergency measures would be “time-limited”, “geographically targeted”, “reasonable”…
We are far from the martial law announced by Fox News.
It must be believed that Justin Trudeau does not want to repeat the mistakes of his father. Already, he seems to soften his speech towards the fringe-minority-who-grunts.
Perhaps he realized that behind the radical protesters who are making a lot, a lot of noise, there are ordinary Canadians expressing their pandemic fatigue.
At the start of the October Crisis, many Quebecers shared the ideals of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). When Radio-Canada broadcast the manifesto, half of the listeners who commented on the radio thought that the document was full of common sense!
But public opinion changed as Quebec sank deeper into crisis. When Pierre Laporte was found dead in the trunk of his car on October 17, 1970, support for the FLQ collapsed.
Comparisons have their limits, but this story teaches us a thing or two: if, by some misfortune, we were to see something go wrong – and the seizure of an arms shipment in Alberta on Monday is not exactly a good omen – public opinion is in danger of shifting overnight.
And if the government did abuse its extraordinary powers, citizens would remember it for the next 50 years. Just watch them.