The first volume of the recent biography of Jacques Parizeau by Pierre Duchesne has some very revelatory passages, but the brief chapter on the October Crisis 1970 is in good part obscurantism, revisionism and failing to tell the whole story.
Parizeau is very frank in revealing details of the rift between himself, as President of the Executive Council of the Parti Québécois' and René Lévesque, the party leader. For example, immediately before the Crisis, Parizeau had properly counselled that the PQ support the adoption of Medicare in Quebec, which almost all the other provinces had put in force, rather than to take the politically easy course of supporting the specialist doctors, which Lévesque wanted to do.
Parizeau would also have it, however, that during the Crisis he did not go along with Lévesque's leadership. In particular, Parizeau passes lightly over his role in the famous press conference and petition of 16 "eminent personalities" during the week when both Cross and Laporte were being held hostage. He fails to mention that instead of supporting the government, as he had on Medicare, he and the other petitioners proposed the release of the 23 convicted F.L.Q. terrorists, bombers and murderers, whom they called "political prisoners", and whom they did not condemn. They added that only Quebec should be involved in the Crisis, as though Ottawa and the rest of Canada did not have a legitimate interest in the threat of Quebec separating through terrorism.
Although a signatory of the petition, Parizeau now suggests that he was only the "switchboard operator"## between Lévesque, Claude Ryan, Camille Laurin, (Parliamentary Leader of the P.Q.), the seven leading union leaders, the four social science professors and a cooperative leader. In other words, the document was not his confection.
The October Crisis was a black moment for the Parti Québécois, because the actions of its leaders had caused the party to lose the support of many of its members and most of the public. The major part of the chapter is an explanation of damage control by Parizeau, which he describes well and in which, apparently, Lévesque did not take much part.
The Parti Québécois strategy was to shift the whole story away from the F.L.Q., the kidnappings, the murder and the opportunistic acts of the party itself, and instead to claim a lack of justification for the imposition of the War Measures Act.
But, even here, Parizeau is not fully forthcoming and fails to mention that, if 497 persons were arrested under the Act, imposition of the Act did not cause a loss of all civil rights. In fact, most of the detainees were soon released, all had the right to be recompensed up to $30,000 by the ombudsman, as many in fact were. Nor did the Act outlaw the right to hold public meetings, post signs, speak, broadcast, write or publish against the government or even against the Act itself. Only support of the F.L.Q. was banned.
Perhaps the major omission in the Duchesne text is a discussion of the so-called parallel, provisional or coalition government. Parizeau had always protested that no such a proposal had been considered, or if it did, he had no part in it. But Carole de Vault, Parizeau's party organizer and mistress, has declared in her book, The Informer, that Parizeau, who was making phone calls from her apartment, told her that there were persons, who were ready to set up a parallel or provisional government. Thus he told her, "your apartment will be historic, because you will able to say that the parallel government began here."*** The next day the 16 "eminent personalities" released their famous petition.
If the biography reveals a split between Parizeau and Lévesque, it is Lévesque who had the last say. In his "Memoirs", published in 1986, while personally extricating himself from any involvement in the conspiracy, he writes: ******
"…some honorable and well-known citizens, Claude Ryan among them, embarked on a solution. They were even ready, it appears, to envisage the perspective of a coalition government to strengthen backbones that seemed visibly yielding on the Quebec side."
One of those persons was, very likely, Jacques Parizeau.
William Tetley, QC
Professor, McGill Law Faculty
Minister in the Bourassa Cabinet during the October Crisis
## Pierre Duchesne, at p. 566
*** Carole deVault with William Johnson, "The Informer", Fleet Books, 1982 at p.94; Michael McLoughlin, "Last Stop Paris", Viking, 1998 at p.144
****** René Lévesque, "Memoirs", McClellan &Stewart, 1986 at p. 245