The oppressive year 1972 | Journalism

In hindsight, we tend to think that this painful episode was followed by a period of freedom and liberation. From post-October we jump right back into 1976 and the coming to power of Party Quebecoa.

But that’s not how things really happened. Instead, Quebec sank into a climate of suspicion in which leftist movements, “rebels” and “rebels” were kept under close scrutiny.

I’m telling you this because I’ve read a great article by Olivier Ducharme over the past few days, titled 1972 – Repression and political dispossession. This author had a good idea browsing the 1972 news.

This boring exercise today allows him to write: “In 1972, Quebec might not have been so ‘revolutionary’; however, he never strayed from it.”

He had this idea after discovering it in a bookstore Art and the state Film director Pierre Perrault signs a text condemning the censorship of the film at the end of 1972. 24 hours or more, to his colleague Jill Grollex. Judging that the film was “anti-capitalist”, the commissioner of the National Film Federation, Sidney Newman, banned the release of this film (the work was finally offered to the public in 1976).

During the events reported in this brief article (young readers won’t be lost), we realize that scissors and tabs come from both Ottawa and Quebec, where Robert Burassa is comfortably installed. We attack everything: culture, language, first nations, education and, above all, union work.

Because 1972 is the year of the famous strike that brought together in the same block 200,000 public and semi-public employees represented by CSN, FTQ and CEQ. An extraordinary confrontation began between the inter-union front and the government represented by the Minister of Public Service, Jean-Paul Lallier.

After an 11-day strike, called on April 11, a special law would force him to return to work. But above all, the climate of division was reinforced when the leaders of the three unions, Marcel Pepin, Louis Laberge and Yvonne Charbonneau, to the astonishment of the union members recommended an end to the strike.

This situation creates a split between the three bosses and the guild members who feel betrayed. Robert Bowers could not have hoped for the best.

This atmosphere of contention was also noted when FLQ player Pierre Vallier turned his back on FLQ to join the ranks of PQ. His inseparable friend, Charles Gagnon, who considers PQ “the nationalist faction of the Quebec bourgeoisie”, does not understand this decision at all. While panic prevails on the revolutionary left, within the AKP there is a certain distrust and uneasiness.

An important passage in the book deals with Partie Quebecwa’s “socialism”. For Pierre Valier, emancipation passes through socialism. Where is it written that the Labor Party wants the emergence of socialism? asks the author.

According to Olivier Ducharme, the question of independence advocated by the AK Party has made us lose sight of an “other left”, an anti-capitalist left, less electoral, less “looking” by the criteria adopted by Partey Quebecwa.

There is also a great deal of contempt in this work, particularly that expressed by a certain elite in the face of the rise of a terrifying, identity-based art. Already, in 1968, Michel Tremblay was dismembered when creating Sisters in Law.

In 1972, the playwright would be faced with the lack of openness of the Minister of Cultural Affairs, Claire Kirkland-Casgren (who confirmed in the same year that the French-speaking Radio Canada channel was a hotbed of separatists and radicals), when the -ci would refuse to send the part Sisters In Law In Paris.

In March 1972, a ticket signed in Montreal Magazine. We can conclude from this that, according to the Minister, only documents written in the “International French” language should be submitted outside Quebec.

This disdain for playful culture also accompanies the creation of the piece orange green by Claude Gauvreau. Among the fiery exchanges that followed its creation, in the winter of 1972, we note the history of Claude Yasmine, in Montreal Magazinewho was shocked by the stripping scene by Los Gilbolt.

The play’s director, Jean-Pierre Ronvard, gives a strong response to him duty Which he concluded harshly: “Please believe in my deepest contempt.” »

The part of the book dealing with First Nations begins with “The Case maple leaf » This series produced by Quebec, France, Switzerland and Belgium that had the ambition to tell in 13 episodes the story of a family, the Peelrus family, from 1535 to 1970. The image we make of the indigenous peoples angered characters such as Max Gros-Louis and Bernard Assiniwi, who described the scenario as “disgusting”. The reels of this series undoubtedly joined those of Radisson And the Dippervillewhile still keeping their share of clichés and racism hidden on a tablet.

This work is full of events (like the famous blue-collar strike in Montreal that paralyzed the city by refusing to clear snow from the streets and forbidding garbage collection) and conflicts of all kinds: First Nations independence, women’s rights (he chronicles these pub snooping movements), environmental protection, struggle associative.

Fifty years later, much of the land has been covered. But we do realize (and thus interest in revisiting the past) that the same sites are still open to us.

Olivier Ducharme does not hide it. This article is accompanied by an opinion. He reviewed and collected the events of 1972 to tell us that we must continue to fight these battles. In conclusion, he addressed the words of Pierre Perrault who believed that “freedom is an act that violates prohibition”.

Olivier Ducharme wrote: “Struggles must become ‘intolerable’ in the eyes of the various forces. We must all become ‘intolerable’.”

1972 – Repression and political dispossession

Olivier Ducharme

environmental community

352 pages