The FLQ: A Canadian Insurgency
Abstract
Canada was shaken by separatist violence 25 years ago when a group calling itself the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) was nearing the end of a nearly 10-year bombing and bank-robbing spree that was about to turn even more violent. In October 1970, a British diplomat and Quebec government minister were kidnapped. The diplomat, James Cross, was released unharmed 59 days later, and his captors were allowed to fly to Cuba. But the FLQ cell holding the minister, Pierre Laporte, strangled him to death on October 17th. Ottawa meanwhile had invoked the rarely used War Measures Act to flood the province of Quebec with troops and summarily arrest 497 people, the vast majority of whom were shown to have had nothing to do with the violence. After considerable police bungling, the FLQ was finally broken up and its members imprisoned or exiled. More than two decades later, the "October Crisis" continues to provoke debate in Canada. A controversial 1994 movie called "October" re-examines the Laporte kidnapping from the point of view of the kidnappers, and has been attacked by some Canadian politicians for justifying Laporte's murder. The invocation of the War Measures Act has been condemned with the benefit of hindsight as an excessive violation of civil rights. An imminent referendum on whether the province of Quebec should secede from the rest of the Canadian federation has brought the FLQ crisis back into focus, if only to serve as a contrast to more than 20 years of peaceful political movement since the FLQ's reign of terror. The purpose of this paper is to examine the FLQ using the O'Neill framework for evaluating insurgencies. Questions to be addressed include what conditions allowed the FLQ to organize, how the government eventually defeated it, and why similar insurgencies have not sprung up to replace it given continued political instability in Quebec. A central premise of this paper is that violence in Quebec should be of central interest to U.S. policy makers.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1995
- Accession Number
- ADA441035
Entities
People
- Stephen R. Kelly
Organizations
- National War College