Quebec's Remorseless Shame

Paul Rose was the leader of the Chénier cell of the FLQ. (Radio-Canada)

Immediately after the abduction of Quebec's deputy premier and Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte, a letter written by him as a prisoner of the FLQ was received by then-Premier Robert Bourassa, where Mr. Laporte gave warning that those who had kidnapped him were prepared to kill him.  Quebec, he wrote, was on the precipice of a "blood-bath". "After me, it will be a third, a fourth and a fifth", he wrote. 

Mr. Laporte did not live to see his 50th year; on October 17, 1970, Paul Rose wrote a communique stating that the FLQ had "executed" the "Minister of Unemployment and Assimilation".  Years later, in an interview with Le Devoir, he stated: "I regret nothing: 1970, the abductions, the prison, the suffering, nothing. I did what I had to do. Placed before the same circumstances today, I would do exactly the same thing. I will never deny what I did and what happened. It was not a youthful indiscretion."

This was the man who led the Front de liberatuion du Quebec, dedicated to violence and terrorism, in their fanatical dedication to the separation of Quebec from Canada. The abduction of British trade commissioner James Cross led then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to enact the War Measures Act to cope with the situation of 200 minor bombings in Montreal by the FLQ, mostly in anglophone areas of the city, delivering home the message of their mission.

For his heinous crime, Paul Rose is admired and cited as an example of heroic courage by some in Quebec. "We did this because we believed in the advancement of society", Paul Rose claimed sanctimoniously, and this statement endeared him to the sovereigntists who still today applaud his tactical genius on their behalf. "The day I was sentenced to life in prison my mother, my friend ... told me, 'Paul, I'm proud of you", he said on temporary release from prison to delivery his mother's funeral eulogy.

At the 1982 Parti Quebecois convention his brother, Jacques Rose, also jailed for the Laporte kidnapping was given a thunderous ovation. Using his famous shrug, Rene Levesque called the episode an "outbreak of delirium".  A Radio Canada report in 2010 claimed that Mr. Laporte had been "accidentally" strangled. Truth was that a coroner's inquest finding he had been strangled with the help of the gold religious medal he wore, corroborated a wire-tapped conversation between Rose and his lawyer, that he had "finished" off Mr. Laporte with his own gold chain.

At the 40th anniversary of the October Crisis, a former National Assembly member, Raymond Garneau said in 2010 that to "see the assassin Paul Rose interviewed on the CBC French network, one could believe that murderers were victims and victims murderers."  And on the death of Mr. Rose at age 69, of a stroke in Montreal's Sacre-Coeur Hospital, his body not stuffed hastily into the trunk of a car as Mr. Laporte's had been at age 49, Radio Canada reported "the activist, political scientist and trade unionist" had died.

And finally, Quebec Solidaire, an highly-activist separatist party with two seats in Quebec's National Assembly, offered their sincere condolences to the family of Paul Rose. "Throughout his life, Paul Rose remained convinced of the need to fight for the national liberation and social emancipation of the people of Quebec. He chose, after the tragic events of October 1970, to continue that fight through democracy and citizen involvement", they wrote, in sympathy.

The "tragic events of October 1970"?  "...democracy and citizen involvement?" They memorialize an belligerently violent secessionist, an arsonist, bomb-maker, murderer.  Le Devoir did their part by honouring him in memoriam as a "prominent figure in the history of contemporary Quebec".  This is a newspaper where, before becoming a politician, Pierre Laporte had worked as a reform-inspired parliamentary correspondent in the 1950s.

Mildly put: for shame...!