Trudeau as terrorist threat

Douglas Fisher wonders how the fascist young Pierre, advocating violent separatism, escaped action against him by Canadian security authorities during World War II.

I was immediately struck by some parallels between the Young Trudeau story and today's news.

Just last week, police in Toronto arrested 17 Muslim men and accused them of plotting violent acts against national figures and institutions. In Young Trudeau, we learn that during World War II there was in Montreal a ring of French-Canadian Roman Catholics with treasonous aims similar to those alleged in Toronto. And Trudeau, later cherished by many as our greatest prime minister, was its chief planner and manifesto writer -- while at the same time holding a second lieutenant's commission in the Canadian Army reserves!

This incredible story tells how Canada's "Abraham Lincoln" spent his formative years as a key member of this secret group called the "LX," dedicated to organizing a revolution. Members planned to overthrow the government of Quebec, separate Quebec from Canada, and set up a French-speaking Roman Catholic republic called "Laurentie." It was to be a "corporate" state, much like fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini...

There are three topics the authors unfortunately deal with only slightly: His relationship with his mother and her social relations with English Canadians; his romantic and sexual associations with women; and how he, a healthy young man in the army reserves, managed to evade overseas service during the war and instead leave for Harvard in 1944 despite a desperate shortage of infantry, including in Trudeau's own regiment, which precipitated the conscription crisis of 1944-45.

The big blank about Trudeau's war service ties in with something else historians of World War II will have to explain: The federal government's incompetent intelligence when it came to monitoring domestic threats to Canada. Not only did Trudeau speak boldly at public meetings, opposing Canada's participation in the war, his own files reveal him to have been the key philosopher and planner of a secret group dedicated to breaking up the federation.

How were he and his secret cohorts able to avoid arrest and internment? Their intentions, after all, far exceeded anything in the mind of Montreal's mayor, Camillien Houde, who was interned for most of the war.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at June 11, 2006 11:20 AM