Month: October 2020

Fifty years ago today marked the start of the October Crisis, a pivotal moment in Canadian history. Half a century later, we’re no closer to the story of what really led to the kidnapping of James Cross, the imposition of the War Measures Act and the truth surrounding Pierre Laporte’s murder.

The following is one of my contributions to Fish Wrapped, David Sherman’s anthology of Canadian journalism published by Guernica Editions this past spring. The usual public events that would have accompanied its publication were drowned in the chaos of the COVID pandemic.

By day, I was a sociology sophomore at Loyola College. At night, I was a Montreal Gazette police reporter. I spent most of my shift working the phones, asking cops whether they had anything going on. Usually the answer was nothing. Occasionally I’d write a filler on a holdup. Once in a while I’d get a tip on a big story, usually ending up reassigned to a general reporter. We had a term for it: bigfooted.

The Gazette police desk competed fiercely with our opponents at the Montreal Star. Usually, we beat them because we worked our butts off. The police desk was the newsroom’s go-to Rolodex. We knew how to get the names of owners, and occupants, neighbours, addresses and phone numbers. We called next of kin. We had an ancient bell wired to the fire department’s alert system. We chased sirens with our Bearcat police scanners cranked up. 

We were three of us on the Gazette police desk — Eddie Collister, Albert Noël and me, the rookie. Collister was terrific at talking to people. He could reach police brass and mob lawyers. His contacts were everywhere. He would meet a Station 10 detective in the privacy of a X-rated film house near Atwater and a Mafia mouthpiece above a drug den. Albert and I had worked together at the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, where I spent a summer learning Quebec’s official language from its glorious women. When he quit the Chronicle to join the Gazette, Albert didn’t drive and I was still picking up québécois French, so we’d double team — Albert because the cops took to him like a brother, and me because I had a fast car and a camera.

I was between classes on that Monday when my Pagette beeped. I ran for the closest pay phone and called the desk. Eddie answered. “A British diplomat (James Cross) has been kidnapped from his house on Redpath Crescent. How fast can you get over there?”

“Twenty minutes, tops.” 

The poor man’s Maserati, my burgundy Volvo 123GT with the whip antenna poking out of the centre of the roof, was illegally parked nearby. I shot around the foot of the mountain, then past the Montreal General as I headed for the ritzy enclave of brick half-timbered homes a brisk walk from downtown. The street outside 1297 Redpath Crescent was packed with reporters, photographers and cameramen. The high point of the stakeout was watching the cops apprehend two men engaged in a personal activity on the mountain. By then it had gotten too cold to sleep in the car so I headed back to the newsroom.

Gazette photographer Garth Pritchard was asleep on my desk, a Montreal phone book as his pillow. He’d turned down the police radio; I turned it back up. He woke up spouting threats and grabbing for his photo gear. We jumped into the Volvo. I cranked up the Bearcat and we headed across the Jacques Cartier Bridge to Montreal’s South Shore.

We had no clue what we were looking for. We drove streets we didn’t know, looking for police activity, something, anything.

It was past midnight when Garth put his hand on the gearshift. “Duffer, this is stupid. We don’t know what we’re looking for. Let’s go get Dilallo burgers.”

As it turned out, we didn’t have to go looking for news. For that first week we ran — to the SQ’s brutalist bunker on Parthenais, to RCMP headquarters in Westmount, to CBC studios in the old Ford Hotel where an announcer read the FLQ manifesto, to Canadian Army command at Longue Pointe. By the end of that long first week, we came to realize the cops had no more idea of what they should be looking for than we did. I didn’t return to university for the rest of 1970.

On the 10th, four Chenier cell members snatched Quebec’s deputy premier, labour and immigration minister Pierre Laporte while he was tossing a football with his nephew. A week into the crisis, the Gazette police desk was a 24/7 operation; we napped and ate on the fly as Ottawa and Quebec fought over how far society should go in appeasing terrorists to free Cross and Laporte. By now, the newsroom was spread so thin that I was assigned to cover pro-negotiation rallies and demonstrations at Centre Paul-Sauvé and Université de Montréal. I saw for myself the groundswell of support for the FLQ, for negotiating the release of 23 convicted terrorists in exchange for the lives of Cross and Laporte, for a provisional government to replace Trudeau and Bourassa.

Oct. 15 was a Thursday; at around 10 p.m., I got a call from a usually reliable source — Claudia, the gun-toting wife of SQ tactical squad’s Albert Lisacek: get my ass down to the entrance to the underground garage at the SQ’s Parthenais bunker.

Others got similar tips. When I got to the garage, reporters and photogs were gathering. The word in the crowd was that we could expect a huge police operation. We huddled for warmth in the shelter of warehouse loading docks until 5 a.m. Friday, when an armada of police cruisers roared up the ramp to mark the official start of the War Measures Act’s imposition. By noon on Oct. 16, 1,200 police officers had arrested approximately 450 individuals and carried out 170 searches.

That Saturday I was taking a few hours off with my date. We were watching Love Story at Place Bonaventure when my Pagette went off. I called the desk. No answer. I called the newsroom. They’d found Laporte’s body in the trunk of a car near the St. Hubert airport on the South Shore. Pritchard was there. He had photos of Laporte’s body. 

The next night we received another call from Mrs. Albert. Drive to St. Hubert’s Armstrong Blvd. Investigators had found the house where Laporte had been executed. We jumped in the Volvo. Garth was riding shotgun. TorStar photog Graham Bezant was in the back seat. I saw an SQ cruiser and pulled in behind it as men in plainclothes swarmed us. I rolled down the window and was digging for my driver’s licence when the cop on Garth’s side told us to freeze. Bezant, who didn’t speak French, reached into his jacket. The passenger-side cop cocked his .38 and put it to Garth’s head. 

Suddenly, we heard Lisacek’s familiar voice: “What the fuck are you boys doing here? Good thing my guys were feeling relaxed. You could be dead.” He told us a Volvo like mine had been posted to the SQ watch list after a patrol saw one cruising through Longueuil the night Cross was kidnapped.

I asked Garth if he was okay.

“I will be once I get my hands around your throat. You were laughing, you moron. You thought it was funny.”

— from Fish Wrapped: True Confessions from Newsrooms Past, Guernica Editions, May 2020

With today’s closure of Bellevue for repaving, the only alternative to Cameron and Montée Cadieux is Montée Manson, especially for motorists bound for the Oka ferry. So I biked over to Hudson’s oldest road to watch the rally.

Montée Manson stretches for about three kilometres between Main Road and the traffic light on Harwood Blvd. at Bédard. There’s a consensus among local historians that the road predates the Conquest and likely follows a track that existed before the European invasion. If so, Montée Manson hasn’t seen much improvement in all that time. It’s your typical rutted, muddy farm road, wide enough for a tractor and haywagon, but certainly not for two-way traffic most of its length. Apart from the approaches to the train-a-day-each-way exo rail crossing, it is unpaved. It’s not ploughed in winter, giving snowmobilers and ATVers a route to and from the Lake of Two Mountains. This time of the year, hunters make up most of the out-of-town traffic.

Over the years, there’s been talk of making Montée Manson into a useable thoroughfare. A 2006 plan called for ending the AMT line at a transport terminus to serve St. Lazare and Hudson commuters. That would have allowed the line west of there to be converted into a recreational corridor. Of course, Vaudreuil-Dorion mayor Guy Pilon didn’t like it. He still wants everything to terminate at the grossly congested terminus on de la Gare and he sits on the CMM public transit committee. Hudson’s train may be a deuce, but it’s a wild card in this poker game. There may never be a Montée Manson terminus, but there will be a railway crossing as long as there’s a train.

Latterly, Hudson has come under pressure from the Vaudreuil-Soulanges MRC to upgrade Montée Manson. About a third of the way down from Bédard, there’s a concrete culvert that can no longer handle the flow of water coming down from St. Lazare, Added to that is the runoff from adjacent farm fields since the advent of government subsidies for agricultural drainage. It allows farmers to work their fields earlier, but all that runoff has to go somewhere.

The result is a spectacularly muddy and potholed stretch of maybe 500 yards. You can tell the drivers redirected to Montée Manson by their GPS plotters. They’re the folks sitting bolt upright, white knuckles death-gripping the steering wheel at 10 km/h as they try to avoid the massive washouts in their once-pristine vehicles.

Then there are the locals. A woman at the wheel of a white GMC Yukon drove the gauntlet of mud like it was any Hudson street. Not fast, not slow, just steady.

The daredevils revel in the challenge of blasting through the gumbo. My favourite photo from today, at the top of this page, was the sport in the black pickup who gunned it so he could splash me as he barrelled through the filth. I was already filthy, so I stood my ground to get the shot. He reminded me of Hudson’s great rallies and wonderful times driving roads like this.

A minority wants Montée Manson kept open. If we do nothing, the culvert will eventually wash out. Replacing it represents a cost to Hudson taxpayers of somewhere north of $200,000, and that’s to keep it as a muddy three-season farm road. Widening, draining and repairing the surface would easily swallow a million bucks and that doesn’t include paving. Even gravel roads need annual maintenance — grading, adding gravel, spraying dust suppressants in summer and ploughing in winter.

Add to that the cost of patrolling and cleanup, because roads in uninhabited areas become dumps for those who have no scruples against dumping construction waste, junk and trash to avoid having to truck it to an eco-centre or pay to have it removed. A pile of junk is an open invitation for more piles.

Mayor Jamie and I are among those who think Montée Manson should be closed and turned into a linear park. Farmers with fields adjacent to the road could be given keys to the gate and responsibility for ensuring that nobody else has vehicular access. It would be open to pedestrians and cyclists. That failing culvert could be replaced with something less expensive than the structure the MRC wants us to pay for.

I guess the question is whether we’re losing something if we close Montée Manson to vehicle traffic. I don’t think so, and I suspect the majority of Hudson taxpayers would agree it’s the best path forward. There’s something timeless about Montée Manson, especially when there’s no traffic. I’ve felt the same feeling on the Old Gosford Road between Quebec City and Sherbrooke, on the Old Stagecoach Road between Knowlton and Lake Memphremagog. There’s something magic in walking a path used over the centuries.

In the mist that settles into the hollows after a fall shower, one can conjure up visions of native families, French and English soldiers and settlers, making their way to and from the protected bay that gives onto their highway, the Ottawa River. A road like this deserves better than traffic in a hurry to get elsewhere.