Never forgetting that one day Quebec might become a separate French-speaking state, free of outside

domination. Well, a number of times on this podcast, we've tried to make Canadian history come alive,

and we're going to try to do it again. It's a quixotic struggle, always tilting towards those

windmills trying to make Canadian history come alive, but Luke believes it can be done.

And do we have a story for you today? I think this is the one that's going to do it.

Our non-Canadian listeners may not know about the October crisis, but within Canada, it still looms very large.

We watched a documentary from the National Film Board of Canada called Action, the October Crisis of 1970.

We'll tell you about the documentary, but I'll just give a brief summarizing of what exactly the October crisis was.

In October 1970, a militant separatist group in the province of Quebec, which was called the Front de Liberation de Quebec, more commonly known as the FLQ, kidnapped two people, a British diplomat, James Cross, and the provincial labor minister, Pierre Laporte, who was subsequently murdered.

This was the culmination of a decade or so of increasingly fraught tension between French and English Canada, although tensions between

French and English Canada are really baked into the country's DNA. It also led to Canada's federal

government, led by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, invoking the War Measures Act. This was an emergency

measure that the government was able to use to suspend civil liberty, either during times of war,

invasion, or insurrection. And this would have fallen under the category of insurrection.

The War Measures Act was used during the Second World War, but the October crisis was the only time

it was ever used in peacetime. In 1988, it was repealed and replaced with something called the

Emergencies Act. But this use of the War Measures Act, this suspension of civil liberties during

peacetime, continues to be a defining moment in Canadian history. And I'll just jump in here to say that

the Emergencies Act, the successor legislation to the War Measures

Act, was in fact used for the first time in peacetime, just a few months ago. It's been forgotten

because, you know, Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of that same week. But the government of Justin

Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act because they said it was necessary to deal with the recent occupation

...