Reply #7: I Agree [View All]

That a lot of people agreed with the action taken.
However, we were told that the reason the decision was taken was that Bourassa felt that he did not have control and that there was an imminent danger. Subsequent events have proved that this was wrong. There was a joke that if you put Bourassa in a room and gave him two glasses of water and told him that one of the glasses contained a deadly poison, that when you came back to the room later he would be found dead. Both glasses still full of water and he died of dehydration.

As for the War Measures Act it resulted in many people being rounded up, thrown into prison and resenting the federal government action that had resulted from the premier being afraid to take action. As the Prime Minister, he probably had to make the decision. It was accepted and praised in most of Canada. However, that does not make it correct.

Since very few people were watching what was going on in Quebec in the late fifties and sixties, outside of headlines of molotov cocktails, there was little understanding of the actual goings ons. It was there that the RCMP were using dirty tricks, like burning barns to gain acceptance into different groups. So how many headlines were instigated by the RCMP. There were reports, unconfirmed in the media, of US agents relaying info from different groups and police agencies to the separatists groups to gain acceptance.

So how does one evaluate that a decision was wrong. I know that I would probably have had to make the same decision had I been in his shoes.

Looking back from the year 2004 it appears to me that the decision was wrong, but maybe in another 100 years it will be seen to have been correct.


Edited for grammar.