Reply #16: This information is beginning to bubble to the surface.

[reprehensor]

Apparently even Canada couldn't resist the lure of Agent Provacteurism.

It seems the RCMP had heavily infiltrated the FLQ, and encouraged the members of FLQ to be more radical than just "blowing up mailboxes".

"On Oct. 5, 1970, members of the FLQ kidnapped British diplomat James Cross. The Mounties had thoroughly infiltrated the organization years earlier, yet the situation was not deemed sufficiently urgent to prevent Premier Robert Bourassa from flying to New York to woo American investors. However, with the kidnapping of Pierre Laporte (and two days before his murder), things took on a feverish quality.

Suddenly Bourassa, Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau and the director of the Montreal police were all writing letters to Ottawa recommending emergency powers. Jean Marchand, Trudeau's cabinet minister, claimed there were 3,000 heavily armed terrorists in Quebec, with hundreds of pounds of dynamite stashed away, who planned to establish a provisional government. (Never shy about maximizing a political advantage, Drapeau chimed in with something to the effect that his opponents in the municipal elections were a front for the FLQ.)

One has to wonder: What new intelligence (if that's the word) initiated the transition from what was calmly perceived as a desperate gesture on the part of a marginal group, to outright hysteria? Where could it have come from if not the RCMP?

I was in Vancouver at the time, where the only whiff we got of the War Measures Act was a threat on the part of our mayor to impose compulsory haircuts on hippies; still, it does point to a certain capriciousness about how the measures were interpreted. My friend with theatrical ties to Che Guevara remembers an OPP cruiser at the bottom of his driveway outside Brussels, Ont. (that hive of political unrest), questioning anyone who came in or out. Obviously, neither of the above intrusions can be blamed on Trudeau; rather, they seem symptomatic of a tier of flaky Canadian officials in a state of panic, acting out their badly informed predilections."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/series/trudeau/jmgraydaywhe_oct11.html

And it only gets worse. At this point there is not much info online about the assassination of an FLQ member in Paris, staged as an inter-FLQ shootout, by the RCMP.

But it happened.