Intelligence reports, newspaper clippings, threatening letters… thousands of pages of secret Canadian intelligence files on the Quebec independence movement in the 1960s and 1970s are now easily accessible online on the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) website.
“You are going to change your English company name […]otherwise we will destroy your establishment by bomb, fire or otherwise, around the beginning of April 1964. This is very serious,” we can read in a handwritten letter received by a business in Quebec.
Another intelligence note sheds further light on this threat, signed by the “Quebec Liberation Army”: “all the letters seem to have been written by the same person, which seems to tell us that we are dealing with a deranged person.” [crackpot] rather than a terrorist organization, although the latter possibility cannot be entirely ruled out.”
These documents are among thousands of partially redacted pages from the Canadian government’s investigation files into the Quebec “separatist threat” that have already been produced by the access to information service and of which it is now possible to download a copy.
Library and Archives Canada, the repository of these documents, became this summer the third federal institution to publish the entire contents of its old requests on the Web. The 2.5 million pages that are to be put online by the end of 2024-2025 may satisfy the curious, but probably do not contain any real revelations, estimates a historian.
Documented in English
Like almost all the documents on the subject, these documents are written in English, even those from Quebec and documenting its highly monitored “extremist” movement. They show the efforts of investigators from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s “C” Division (Quebec) to document the constellation of different subversive groups in the 1960s and 1970s and separate the jokers from the real “terrorists.”
Among the typewritten memos, often annotated by hand and stamped “secret,” the one from April 17, 1973, documents the lack of international support enjoyed by the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). “Like Cuba, Algeria is more concerned with maintaining its commercial ties with Canada than with helping Quebec terrorists,” analyzes the inspector responsible for drawing up the list of known FLQ members whose trail leads abroad.
Already ten years earlier, in 1963, a document to be delivered “in person” to the Minister of Justice at the time, Lionel Chevrier, detailed in English everything the government knew about the FLQ, “a newly formed militant organization, apparently engaged in acts of sabotage and terrorism.”
Documentary evidence of the climate of paranoia that reigned at the Ottawa headquarters, numerous reports of tailing and surveillance of alleged FLQ members were produced in the years that followed. For example, we note all the people met by Pierre Bourgault, president of the Rally for National Independence, during his trip to Paris in November 1967. The reader is ordered “not to disseminate” the information.
The file goes back at least to the early 1960s. It contains numerous newspaper clippings on the subject, often accompanied by their English translation. In December 1960, for example, The duty aired an advertisement for a group called The Knights of Independence, an intelligence memo warns.
Not all archives
As soon as he learned of the proactive disclosure of these historical documents, UQAM history professor Yves Gingras went to see if they had been “butchered” by redaction. To his great disappointment, most of the documents had been. Library and Archives Canada blacked out passages containing personal information or confidential information obtained from another government, for example, as required by law.
Putting these documents on the Internet “is a good idea,” the expert says. However, he points out that this information has already been provided to the authors of the requests and therefore probably does not contain any new information for historians.
“There are probably many other documents in the boxes [de Bibliothèque et] Archives that have never been requested, so researchers still have to go to Ottawa and dig through them themselves” for more comprehensive information, he explains to the Duty.
According to Yves Gingras, the proactive disclosure of these documents can, however, form the basis of research or serve to study the themes that have been most popular among those requesting documents over time. For example, documents were requested on the National Unity Party of the fascist Adrien Arcand in the 1940s, or on the MK-ULTRA program of the Allan Memorial Institute in the 1950s.
Until recently, it was necessary to request completed old access to information requests from Library and Archives Canada, a service offered by all federal departments and agencies. However, these “informal requests” involve the work of civil servants and some delays.
In a written response to the Dutythe Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, the department responsible for the access to information system, specifies that LAC’s specific mandate allows it to disseminate these documents in their original language, unlike other departments. The federal government has given instructions to make all information on its website available in both official languages, including old access to information requests.