Hopefully, Quebecers will not fall for this blatant attempt to rewrite history.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on November 2, 2020.

OTTAWA—October is a huge month in Quebec history.

It has been a half century since the October Crisis, which saw a deputy premier murdered and a diplomat kidnapped by the Front de libération du Québec.

It has been a quarter century since the referendum which took Quebec to the brink of a divorce from the rest of the country. Historians and filmmakers are busy interpreting both those events through today’s lens.

It is not surprising that the Bloc Québécois is also trying to influence the narrative 50 years after the fact tabling a resolution calling for the House to “demand an official apology from the prime minister on behalf of the government of Canada for the enactment, on Oct. 16, 1970, of the War Measures Act and the use of the army against Quebec’s civilian population to arbitrarily arrest, detain without charge and intimidate nearly 500 innocent (Quebecers).”

The resolution was handily defeated Thursday, but it served the Bloc’s purpose. The debate gave the party an opportunity to cast the separatists in the victim role, victimization at the hands of the bully Canada, the behemoth that is responsible for all harm to the Quebec nation.

What the resolution fails to mention, and what separatists would like everyone to simply forget, is that the request for the army to intervene actually came from the City of Montreal and the Quebec government of the day.

It also fails to capture the feeling of fear that gripped the province when FLQ cells were working to plant mail bombs that killed several people and culminated in an explosion at the Montreal stock exchange that injured 28 people.

Instead, “You cannot pretend to be deeply in love with Quebec without respecting this desire of Quebecers to receive some apologies from Her Majesty’s government,” was the explanation given by Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet in defence of the motion.

Two elements of his statement bear analysis. First, his claim that it was the “desire of Quebecers” to receive apologi(es) plural.

The Bloc is usually very successful in portraying its views as the gold standard for the thinking of all Quebecers. But in this day of pandemics, I doubt very much that revisionist history is the primary preoccupation of the people.

Second is the reference to “Her Majesty’s government.” Last time I looked the Canadian government was led by a Quebecer who lives in Quebec, not England. But the reference to the Queen is just one more attempt by separatists to convince Quebecers that their destiny is still in the hands of the bloody English.

The same time the Bloc was debating its motion in Parliament, the son of one of the terrorists got sympathetic full-page coverage in The Globe and Mail covering a documentary he made about his “gentle” father Paul Rose.

According to Rose’s son, his killer instinct sprung from living in acute poverty while English-speaking neighbours were all living high off the hog. The story of Rose’s upbringing could just as easily have been the story of prime minister Jean Chrétien, who grew up in a family of 15 on the wrong side of the hill in Shawinigan.

Yet Chrétien turned those early years into leadership and did not set up a terrorist cell with the intention to inflict mayhem on anglos. My own father grew up in abject poverty in northern Ontario, complete with rickets, a bone disease caused by malnutrition. As a child in Hamilton, on my way to Catholic school I was spit on, beat up and called “cat licker” on a daily basis. But that experience made me believe more strongly in the power of diversity.

The Rose documentary views the FLQ from the sympathetic eye of a son. But there is zero recognition of the pain of Pierre Laporte’s family. That does not fit the narrative.

Fifty years ago, Quebec was a very different place, francophones were treated as second-class citizens in their own homes. The same could be said for other minorities in many parts of the country. Witness the shameful treatment of gays and lesbians in that period and later.

Now the same spurned citizens have been premiers and prime ministers.

The country has changed, and we do a disservice to history by rehashing one-sided old grievances.

The wedge politics strategy in the Bloc strategy is self-evident. But, as we have witnessed south of the border, wedge politics can work.

Hopefully, Quebecers will not fall for this blatant attempt to rewrite history.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By Sheila Copps

First published in The Hill Times on August 13, 2018.

OTTAWA—You cannot learn from history by hiding it.

The decision by Victoria City Council to get rid of a statue of our first prime minister does nothing for truth and reconciliation.

It repeats the same errors made by past generations, who believed the best way to deal with a difficult issue was to hide from it.

Teen pregnancy? Send the offending young mother away and do not allow her to hold her baby in case they bond in the first few moments of life.

Spousal abuse? Suck it up buttercup, your marital vows included good and bad, and after all, how bad can it be?

Non-heterosexual relationships? Hide them in the closet for fear their sexual orientation will contaminate the rest of us.

Racism? Simply the state of things between dominant whites and everyone else.

Mentally handicapped? Stamp it out through sterilization.

Deculturalization? It is the white man’s way or the door way.

One does not have to reach too far into the past to find blatant examples of discrimination that would not be tolerated today.

Back in the eighties, there was a move afoot to modernize the Indian Act, and abolish sexual discrimination enshrined in the legislation.

At that time, an aboriginal woman who married a white man lost her status. The same punishment did not apply for an aboriginal man who married a white woman.

Pure, unadulterated gender bias.

The biggest opponents to ending the discrimination were neither the bureaucrats nor the politicians but rather the aboriginal chiefs who refused to extend band rights to women who married outside their race.

Just this spring, the courts overturned a local Mohawk band decision in Kahnawake that required First Nations people who married whites to get off tribal land. The “Marry Out, Get Out” law prohibits people who marry non-natives from living in the community. The Mohawk Council says the move to expel mixed-marriage families safeguards Mohawk land and culture.

But Justice Thomas Davis ruled otherwise, saying the policy violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ban on family discrimination. Mohawk council spokesperson Joe Delaronde insisted the community’s membership laws are an internal community matter. “Our position has been that these types of matters are not to be decided by outside courts,” Delaronde said in response to the decision. “We’re very independent here and we say it’s our law and our business.”

He framed the membership law as part of the Mohawk struggle against assimilation.

“When a place like Kahnawake stands up for itself we seem like radical bad guys when really, all we’re doing is trying to protect what little we have,” he said. “It’s a survival mechanism.”

The same argument was used by racists to defend segregation and oppose interracial dating, which they claimed would dilute the white race.

Today, no one would tolerate racism but some have no problem explaining away the obvious discrimination in Kahnawake.

The search and destroy mission targeting Sir John A. Macdonald does nothing to redress past wrongs. Instead, it stokes the flames of division by refusing to embrace the true meaning of reconciliation.

Nelson Mandela, a stirring example of real reconciliation, invited his own prison guard to the inauguration of his presidency.

Our first prime minister was not perfect. By many accounts, he was an alcoholic who suffered from racist tendencies that translated themselves into horrible public policy. That was part of his legacy.

Macdonald also had the vision to link a new nation from Atlantic to Pacific, making an indelible mark on our collective identity and creating a country which is the envy of the world.

The answer should be to educate everyone on the positive and negative aspects of his political leadership without obliterating the significant accomplishment of creating Canada.

Last summer, some were mourning Canada’s 150th birthday, focussing on imperfections that have beleaguered our past. Our collective treatment of indigenous peoples was disgraceful.

So is our continuing sexism, where women in the paid work force are still paid only seventy-four per cent of what men receive.

All discrimination should end, and that is the job of current and future leaders.

But each change happens by moving in a positive direction.

Removing traces of our history, however chequered, does not change them.

Much has changed since Macdonald railed on in Parliament against Indigenous peoples.

It would be a mistake to define his place in history only by mistakes. Our first prime minister did some things worth remembering.

The colonial construct called Canada is one of them.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.