The October Crisis represented one of the greatest challenges to Canadian Confederation, particularly the concept of the equality and unity of federal and provincial governments. If the Canadian project was, as several historians have argued, rooted in the Enlightenment idea of liberalism and the protection of individual human rights and freedoms, the federal government’s response to the crisis called into question the very idea of Canada. Just three short years after the celebration of its centennial year, perhaps best symbolized for the world by Montreal’s Expo 67, the country found itself in considerable disarray and on the verge of becoming a police state. No one foresaw in 1967 that the city which hosted one of the most successful world’s fairs would soon be surrounded by tanks and helicopters, its streets patrolled by the Canadian army. Though perhaps, in hindsight, Charles De Gaulle’s famous “Vive le Québec libre!”— yelled to an appreciative crowd from a balcony when he came to the city to visit Expo—offered a fleeting glimpse of some of the problems to follow.

October 1970 began normally enough. September, not untypically, had ushered in a warm Montreal autumn. The hapless Expos had finished at the bottom of the National League in what was only their second season in major league baseball. In contrast, the Canadiens of the National Hockey League were preparing for what turned out to be a Stanley Cup–winning season.

Little did anyone expect that a few days into October, Quebec—and, by extension, the entire country—would be plunged into a chain of events with major repercussions. Given the historical tensions between francophones and anglophones, which predated Confederation in 1867, it surprised no one that there were certain individuals and groups in Quebec that desired political autonomy and independence. What shocked many Canadians that October, however, was the level of resentment that existed among some of these groups, and the violence they carried out with the aim of terrorizing Canadian and anglophone institutions in the province to achieve that autonomy. As 1970 was nearing its end, Canadians in all regions watched the evening news on their television sets as the violence unfolded in the streets of Montreal. Significantly, these events demonstrated the relative popular support among francophones for Quebec independence. Just as significantly, the federal government's response demonstrated the degree of its opposition to that independence, going so far as to invoke the War Measures Act and severely, if temporarily, curtailing the rights of all Canadians.

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While English Canadians were aghast at the violence they were seeing on their television screens, French Canadian support for the FLQ seemed to be rising with each passing day. Such differing takes on the events further exposed the fault lines between the two founding communities, setting in motion repercussions that would, in many ways, culminate in the provincial referendum of October 30, 1995. Two days after Trudeau’s famous comments to the CBC reporter, for example, the trade union leader Michel Chartrand remarked at a rally that popular support for the FLQ was very high, adding, “We are going to win because there are more boys ready to shoot Members of Parliament than there are policemen.” The rally frightened many anglophone Quebecers in particular, and Canadians in general, who heard in such comments the threat of a full-blown insurrection in Quebec. In response, Trudeau implemented the War Measures Act, a statute of the Canadian Parliament that represented the federal means to respond to a declaration of war, invasion, or insurrection, and set out the types of emergency measures that the federal government could take as a result. Such measures included, but were not limited to, censorship, the suspension of habeas corpus (the right of a detained individual to have a judge confirm that the detention is legal), and the granting of wider-than-normal powers to the police. It is worth noting that the invocation of this act was not confined to Quebec, but included all of Canada, from Victoria, British Columbia, to St. John’s, Newfoundland.

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The facts of the October Crisis, including its prehistory in nationalist resentment, are relatively easy to recount, but its effect on the shaping of modern Canada is a little trickier to articulate. In part this stems from the date that one chooses to determine its importance. For example, if I chose October 5, the day that Cross was kidnapped, as the date that signals the beginning of the crisis, we could argue that it symbolizes the day subterranean tensions between francophone and anglophone Canada—tensions that, as we saw, predated Confederation—were exposed to the light of day. If Canada was to proceed as a nation, such tensions would have to be acknowledged and addressed using political processes as opposed to acts of violence. While the conflict ended fairly quickly—by January 1971 all was restored to normal in the sense that most detainees had been released and the War Measures Act was lifted—the tensions never disappeared. They were now out in the open for all Canadians to see.

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Reflecting on the October Crisis years later, Lorne Nystrom—at the time of the crisis a twenty-four-year-old rookie NDP MP from Saskatchewan, who, along with his fifteen NDP colleagues, voted against the implementation of the War Measures Act—argued that Trudeau’s response ultimately hurt the prime minister and Canada more generally. “If you were against the act,” he reminisced in 1990, “you were made to feel un-Canadian.” But, he said, Trudeau “lost the support of all those civil libertarians who had previously regarded him as one of their own, and I do not think he ever got it back.” In the same interview, he compared the situation in 1970 to that of the Oka crisis in the summer of 1990. The latter was a land dispute between the Mohawk Nation and the town of Oka, Quebec, over a proposed golf course. “When the War Measures Act was declared, there was an open debate about it. When the army was called in this summer [to Oka], there was not even a recall of the House to discuss the situation. So how far have we progressed in our respect for civil liberties?” For many Canadians, the October Crisis was about a quickly escalating situation between francophone and anglophone Canadians in Quebec. Despite the chaos and uncertainty surrounding those events, the situation was quickly dealt with. However, Trudeau’s “Just watch me” on October 13 has had a lasting significance on Canadian democracy and the rights and freedoms of individuals in Canada, stretching to the present and into the future.

An excerpt from 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, by Aaron W. Hughes (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2022).

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Learn more about 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada:

Revisiting ten notable days from recent history, Aaron W. Hughes invites readers to think about the tensions, events, and personalities that make Canada distinct. These indelible dates interweave to offer an account of the political, social, cultural, and demographic forces that have shaped the modern nation. The diverse episodes include the enactment of the War Measures Act, hockey’s Summit Series, the patriation of the Constitution, the Multiculturalism Act, the École Polytechnique Massacre, victories for gay rights, Quebec’s second referendum on secession, The Tragically Hip’s farewell concert, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and ongoing Black equality struggles. Each day represents a window on contemporary Canada, jumpstarting reflection and conversation about who we are as a nation and how we got here. Ten Days That Shaped Modern Canada is the perfect guide for all those curious about the forces that shape our country and about how we understand our place in the world.