Front Burner - Introducing: Recall: How to Start a Revolution

Episode Date: September 12, 2020

The 1950s & 60s saw a wave of radical movements. Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. The Black Panthers. Quebec and Canada had the FLQ — a showdown that dissolved into crisis. By October 1970, there were soldiers in the streets, communities on edge, kidnapping and terror in the headlines. But those frightening weeks were just the crescendo of a wave of terror and violence that was nearly a decade in the making. This series will reveal the stories of that time through immersive storytelling and the people who lived it: the bomb disposal expert on defusing live explosives, the survivors of terror, their families, and the radicals themselves. More episodes are available at http://hyperurl.co/recallcbc

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey there. We have a special bonus for FrontBurner podcast subscribers. It's the first episode of Recall, How to Start a Revolution. The 1950s and 60s saw a wave of radical movements, from Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution to the Black Panthers. Recall explores the rise and fall of the FLQ in Quebec and Canada,

a showdown that dissolved into crisis. By October 1970, there were soldiers in the street, kidnapping and terror in the headlines. Listen to the stories of that time through the people who lived it, the bomb disposal expert on diffusing live explosives, the survivors of terror, their families, and the radicals themselves. We've got the first episode for you. Have a listen. In October of 1970, Canada was at the peak of a crisis,

a drama that made it feel as though the Federation was unraveling and our democracy was in peril. The first time I heard of the October crisis and everything that led up to it, it wasn't on the news or in history class. It was on this record that you're hearing. It's by a Calgary punk band called the Hot Nasties. The song is called October 7-0 and it alludes to hostages and murder and calling in the troops. And for a long time this song, badly dubbed on a mixtape from a friend,

contained the full extent of my knowledge of one of the most dramatic episodes in modern Canadian history. You see, I grew up in Anglophone in Vancouver, the other side of Canada, far away from the heart of the action. And as near as I could tell, the October crisis was about some really angry folks who wanted to leave Canada and make their own country where French was the language of the land. Well, that made no sense to my young mind. I mean, why would you not want to be part of the greatest country in the world? I'd eventually fill in details from more reliable sources.

But until I got to work on this series, I didn't know how much I didn't know. I didn't know that October crisis was actually shorthand for a seven-year escalation of tension and violence. But mostly I didn't know about the real people who made this history. And it was only when I started to meet those people that the history started to make sense. This series is about a radical separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec, the FLQ.

We're going to hear the history of that movement from the people who lived through it. And we're going to hear how a dream of equality, sovereignty, and liberation led to a nightmare of bombs, kidnapping and murder. I'm Jeff Turner and this is Recall, how to start a revolution. Chapter one, suicide commandos. Today the premier of Quebec saw the face of the enemy, a bearded young separatist arrested with a half-made bomb in his hand. It was the front of Quebec liberation. Long live Quebec!

A police motorcycle came and said, Hey! There's been a series of bombings in Westmount and one dead. Long live Quebec! Long live Quebec! Vive le Québec libre! Vive le Québec libre! I'm in the home of Thérèse Labey in suburban Montreal. She's a friendly grandma with a charming matter-of-factness about her. She seems comfortably settled into retirement. And in her utterly undramatic way,

she's walking me through her own very dramatic chapter in this history. When Thérèse LeBay arrived at work on May 5, 1966, it was nearing the end of the lunch hour. She was eight months pregnant and about to go on leave. It was meant to be a quick visit. I had agreed to come back to sign my termination letter and pick up my last paycheck. It was quiet in the office of the La Grenade shoe factory. Just a couple of the bosses and their secretary.

I was speaking with Madame Morin. She was a tiny woman, so delicate. She was a sweet, very sweet lady. And with the two Lagrenade brothers, and we chatted and chatted. To get into the building that day, Therese LeBay had had to cross a picket line, just as she'd done every day for more than a year.

Madame Morin was here, and I was here. Then the two Lagrenat brothers were at the back against the edge of the drawers. Then the little boy came to drop the box between Madame Morin and me. That little boy was in fact a skinny young man of 17. He'd arrived at the factory on the back of a scooter. When he appeared in the office, he was carrying a package about the size of a shoebox wrapped in brown paper.

Well, then one of the Lagrenat brothers asked him, What is it? This little boy answered, My boss is going to call you in five minutes. Henri Lagrenade would later testify that the kid told him it was a pair of shoes. It was actually a bomb. It wound up on his secretary's desk. Then came a phone call from someone who urged La Grenade to evacuate the premises.

No explanation, just a warning to get everyone out. This was more than a year into an ugly labor struggle, and the company had already received a number of threats, none of which had amounted to anything. Henri La Grenade ignored the warning. Whenever a bomb turned up anywhere in Montreal, this was the guy who got the call. I'm Robert Bob Côté. I'm 83 years old, retired from Montreal Police Department.

I've been six years with the army, 31 years with the police. In my police career, I spent 14 in the bomb squad. When I imagine a bomb squad technician, I picture an edgy, ice-blooded loner with a chip on his shoulder. Well, that's not Bob Cote. He's warm and gregarious, a fountain of stories. He's 83, but he's looking spry in his leather coat, wool cap, and tartan scarf. You'll get to know Bob in this series.

We spent a lot of time with him, in his home and on these Montreal streets where he experienced and made history. But back in 1966, around the time Therese LeBay was signing her papers to go on maternity leave, Bob Cote was three years into a new work assignment on the bomb squad. When I was selected to go on a special course in 1963, we thought it was a temporary situation, but in my case, it lasted for 14 years. When that temporary situation began, it seemed like little more than a nuisance. Molotov cocktails hurled at federal buildings, that sort of thing. But it escalated quickly. A bomb exploded today in a federal government building in downtown Montreal.

Today's activities show that the movement pledged to bring about Quebec's independence by violence if necessary is graduating in its sincerity and boldness. By early spring of 1963, it was getting hard to ignore the radical voices for separation. There was a flurry of bombings beginning in March, mostly aimed at symbolic targets, but others were a little more personal. The CNR and the police have confirmed that a section of track not far from Quebec City definitely was sabotaged ahead of the Prime Minister's train earlier in the day. The damaging of a section of track, apparently with dynamite,

has been blamed on the so-called suicide commandos. Suicide commandos. The term appeared in an early communiqué from the bombers, dated April 16, 1963. It read, in part, The suicide commandos of the FLQ are aiming principally at the complete destruction by sabotage of the colonial institutions, of all means of communication in the colonial language, and of the enterprises and commercial firms practicing discrimination against Quebecers. So now the world had a name for what had been an otherwise faceless, anonymous group behind the bombings. And though he didn't know it at the time, Bob Cote's name and career would become forever

entwined with the FLQ. During that period, 200 incidents have happened. 72 were actually bombs, and of these 72, I dismantled 31. Quite a good score. Quite a good score. Now keep in mind the nature of the job of the bomb squad in this period. Police weren't sending in robots with video cameras. They were living, breathing, sweating humans with their hands in a device that could reduce them to a stain on the ceiling. We did have some equipment, very rudimentary equipment. We had a shield, a metal shield, with poles.

At the end of these poles, we had tools, which were so crude that most of the time it did not work, but it made good pictures for the press. So most of the time, I have used small cutters, nail cutters. That's right, nail cutters for trimming your toenails. There was also something called a spooner suit, named for a fellow from the New York Bomb Squad in the 1930s. It was basically a bulletproof vest that covered the whole body. But it was cumbersome, and it made the delicate work of disarming explosives nearly

impossible. And according to Bob Cote, in the event that a bomb actually did blow up in your face, well, the spooner suit would merely add 85 pounds to the stretcher on which they would carry your corpse away. He can enjoy a little black humor about the job now, but it's with the full knowledge of the brutal risk of the profession. When a bomb exploded at an army recruiting office in downtown Montreal, it claimed the life of an elderly night watchman. It was April 20th, 1963. Wilfred O'Neill was 65 years old, a veteran of both world wars, and only days away from

retirement. He had a heart condition. That's why he was working the night shift. It was quieter then. The bomb that killed O'Neill was actually meant to destroy a statue of Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. But there were crowds in the square that night, so the bombers went looking for another target. They settled on a garbage can in an alleyway behind a Canadian Army recruitment centre. And that's where Wilfred O'Neill was making his rounds that night. A man that is born of a woman has but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower. O'Neill died instantly, the first victim of the FLQ.

A couple dozen people attended his military send-off. No politicians. O'Neill died instantly, the first victim of the FLQ. A couple dozen people attended his military send-off. No politicians. Who may we seek for succour but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins are justly displeased? That same day, a then 27-year-old Robert Côté was on that special bomb course in a suburb of Montreal. He'd actually heard an earlier explosion at the RCMP headquarters. It marked the beginning of the FLQ's weekend bombing campaign. Bob's first official day on the squad came less than a month later on May 17th. That day, Leo Plouffe, chief of the bomb squad,

had gathered the new members at a restaurant on St. Helens Island. We had lunch there. And as we were looking at the rudimentary equipment we had, motorcycle police came and said, hey, there's been a series of bombings in Westmount and one dead. At this point, you need to know a little bit about Westmount. Remember, at the root of the FLQ's cause was the perception, and this is well-founded in reality, that working-class Francophones were

sort of second-class citizens in their own home. They earned less than the minority Anglos, and if they wanted to advance their careers, they'd probably have to do it in English. Well, Westmount was historically an enclave for the Montreal Anglo elite, stately homes on leafy streets high on Mount Royal, looking down over the city, the home of old money. In other words, it was a natural place for Francophone separatists to plant bombs in mailboxes. At the time, Westmount was governed and policed independently of Montreal, so the military was responsible for any bombs set there, not the Montreal police.

That's why Sergeant Walter Ligia got the call. He was an army engineer, a part of the bomb squad. He was born in Poland, but like Bob Cote, he grew up in Point Saint-Charles, a working-class neighbourhood of Montreal. He joined the army in 1942. Now as you can imagine, the fraternity of Montreal bomb defusal technicians was

not a big one. We knew Rocky. He was a frequent visitor at headquarters. And I used to call him Monsieur Lejeu. He said, Bob, I'm from Pointe Saint-Charles. You call me Rocky. Okay, Rocky. So we became friends. By the time Walter Leisure reached the corner of West Mountain Lansdowne, he'd already disarmed two of the bombs in the neighbourhood, and his work was beginning to attract a crowd.

There's film from that day, and the scene looks strangely casual when you view it through a present-day lens. It seems like a pleasant spring afternoon. Firefighters, curious neighbors, reporters are standing around, and they're not exactly keeping their distance. Walter Ligia is kneeling in front of the box. He's got his hands in the open panel door. And then there's a blast, and the camera shakes.

And he spent nearly all of those 29 years in hospital. Ten bombs were planted in mailboxes that day. Seven of them detonated, one to devastating effect. This day is still remembered in Westmoreland as Black Friday. So just for the moment, put yourself in Bob Cote's shoes on that Black Friday. It's your first day on the job, the job that just put a friend in hospital for life. By May 5th, 1966, Robert Côté

had already been with the Montreal Police Bomb Squad through three remarkably busy years. Remarkable in part because no one had died on his watch, despite the growing proliferation and the sheer size of the bombs. That was about to change. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income. That's not a typo, 50%. That's

because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. money for cuts. There's a French-Canadian TV show called District 31. It's sort of a police soap opera. It runs Monday to Thursday at 7pm. And for millions of Quebecers, including

Thérèse LeBay, it's appointment television. And that's the reason we're hanging around a barbecue chicken joint on a cold December evening. We agreed to meet Thérèse at 7.30, and my producer Francis is convinced it's because Thérèse doesn't want us interrupting the show. Also, we're starving, and Francis is homesick for Saint-Hubert chicken. So we kill some time before we knock on Thérèse Labey's door in Saint-Jean-Vier de Mirabel. That other voice you hear is my producer Jessica. The little dog is happy to see us. The house is cozy with Christmas decorations. Around her neck, Thérèse LeBay wears a gold chain with a pendant that reads simply Maman, Mother.

At the dining room table, she's got a box in front of her that used to hold Christmas cards. There's a picture on the lid of Père Noël, Santa Claus. It's stuffed with newspaper clippings from 1966. They're all neat and crisp. They've hardly faded.

This is the building of H.B. Lagranat. 1966. They're all neat and crisp. They've hardly faded. Therese is showing us pictures of the shoe factory where she worked. She's taking us back to that spring day in 1966. You'll remember it's nearing the end of the lunch hour and a young man has just delivered a package to the office. It looks like a shoebox, and as Robert Côté said to me, what could be more normal than a shoebox in a shoe factory? Except for what was inside. One and a half sticks of dynamite, connected to a small clock and a battery.

Wired so that when the minute hand reached the desired time, it would contact a nail. That would complete the circuit and deliver a tiny little 9 volt current. Tiny, but plenty enough to fire the detonator cap and ignite the dynamite. So that's what's in the shoebox on the desk of La Grenade's secretary. Therese Morin was 64 years old. She'd never married. She'd been working for the La Grenade family for 47 years. Her sister would later tell a reporter that Morin had been rattled by the picket lines

but she felt loyal to her bosses, and she kept coming to work. So there she was, a box with a bomb in it between her and her heavily pregnant colleague, Thérèse LeBay, just feet away. The two women talking to one another across Morin's desk. It didn't take five minutes before it exploded. In the news footage from that day, it's a scene of destruction and chaos. There are men sweeping broken glass off the sidewalk.

On the west side of the building, there was a huge window that had been blown up. Smaller windows were shattered too, and you can see the mangled blinds flapping in the breeze. And when we entered, it was all full of blood. Inside the building, the camera shows a metal door hanging from its hinges, dented filing cabinets and desks. The floor is littered with paper, ash, a woman's shoe. You know, a really audible scene, difficult to describe, but you can easily imagine what happens

when dynamite blows up in your hands, see? At this, Bob Cote makes a morbid scraping gesture toward the ceiling. Therese Morin was killed instantly. The two Lagrenade brothers were injured. In the film, you see one of them walking to a waiting police car. He's got blood running down his face, and his clothing is hanging from him in shreds. It's just like in one of those old cartoons. Robert Côté is in the film, too. He's

coming in and out of the building, carrying evidence, bits of a desk, a typewriter. And there's Therese LeBay, her face bloodied, clearly in shock, being tucked into the back of a station wagon. I know someone got me out, but it's vague. I was taken to the hospital, Hotel Dieu. It's there that I woke up. When she came to, Thérèse LeBay remembered feeling the force of the explosion, but not much else. And that force was incredible. I had a purse, and you might not believe this, but my purse was closed. But the papers in my purse were all shredded. It's just as if rats had chewed them up.

At the hospital, she was finding it difficult to understand what was even happening. Her ears were buzzing. Doctors were concerned for the health of her unborn baby. It was the eyes and the ears. One ear without an eardrum. And the body, the metal. The pieces of metal that had entered my body. All that metal from the desk where the bomb had been placed,

well, it was now in pieces and buried in her body. Newspapers from the time reported that she'd been blinded. They were wrong, but she'd nearly lost her left eye. You can still make out the Y-shaped scar just above the eyelid where the shrapnel hit. And the ordeal didn't end the day she was discharged. It was painful. I spent three years hanging out in hospitals. There were surgeries to remove the bits of embedded metal,

more surgeries to transplant her blown eardrums, only one of which was successful. You can imagine all of that throwing her life into disarray. But life got busy, and there just wasn't any time to dwell on what had happened. So she simply closed the lid on her box of memories, and she put it away. Until now, anyway. Therese is flipping through a copy of Les Miroirs from the day after the bombing. On the cover of this lurid tabloid is a picture of her in her hospital bed. Her belly is huge, her hair is a mess, and there's a patch over her left eye.

She looks absolutely ravaged. But today she holds up the picture for us, and she's beaming. At the other end of the table, watching all of this, is Labey's son, Sylvain Sirouat. As a kid, Sylvain knew that his mom had lost her hearing in one of her ears, and he tells us he'd take advantage of that by sneaking up on her. He loved to just stand there and stare at her until she noticed him. It scared the hell out of her. Cruel tricks aside,

Sylvain wonders how she kept it to herself all these years. That's my producer Francis. He's confirming that Sylvain had never seen any of this before. It's the first time I've heard of this. I've never seen any black and yellow cutouts. It's totally unknown. For 53 years, Thérèse LeBay kept all of these things,

the clippings, the letters, the photos, hidden away in the Santa Claus box. They were even hidden from Sylvain, who you've probably figured out by now was in her womb the day of the bombing. And you might wonder how that baby, now a 53-year-old man, had never really heard the story of what happened to his mom, nor the details of the terrorist movement that had delivered the bomb that had so badly injured her. But history and memory are complicated things. Sylvain says he knew that

something had happened, but he didn't feel comfortable pushing for details. And as for Therese, well, like I said, she's very matter-of-fact. She says the faster you forget, the better it is. Does it surprise you at all that your mom had all this? Yep. Yep. Honestly, I didn't know. I didn't know that she had all those newspapers.

I didn't know. Like, we never used to talk about it, never asked questions about it. What's it like to see that picture, though, of your mother, very pregnant with you, and imagining what it is? I mean, pregnancy is not easy under the best conditions. What she must have gone through. I feel a little bit of anger because back then all the tools they had, there was no insurance, there was nothing. So basically you were poor and you had to live through it. But yeah, I feel angry a little bit for what she went through, to be honest with you. a little bit for what she went through, to be honest with you.

FLQ was, the idea was good, but the way it was done, but no, I feel angry, to be honest with you. I feel not comfortable with that. That speaks to the lasting power of the FLQ message for so many Quebecers. Sylvain and his mother could have died power of the FLQ message for so many Quebecers. Sylvain and his mother could have died because of the methods, but even he concedes that there was some virtue in some of their goals. Thérèse LeBay says that after the bombing, she just didn't give a lot of thought to the FLQ, nor to the irony that it had killed one of the workers that it professed to be fighting for.

It wasn't really targeted against me. It was the Front de Libération du Québec. But she's never stopped thinking about Madame Marais. I wonder why I didn't die and she did. We were there, so close to each other. She was blown away and me, I survived somehow. Seems like I had a little one to protect. My time had not arrived. The FLQ wouldn't claim responsibility for the attack until more than a month later, but the group was at the top of the suspect list from the moment the cops arrived on the scene.

The FLQ had a newsletter called La Vanguard, and at least once they'd written about the situation at La Grenade and the need for action. A coroner's inquest would later confirm the FLQ connection to the bombing, as well as the bomber's rationale for targeting the shoe factory. Police told me today that the bombing of strike-bound companies is designed to show the idle employees that the terrorists are on their side and that FLQ ranks are open to them. All right, what are we looking at?

Well, what used to be the Lugvanad Shoe Factory, you can see they've added on. It must have been fairly recent. That's quite new. All this stuff, it's turned into condominiums, which I guess eventually everything in Canada will be a condominium at some point. The name is still there, H. H. B. Lagranade, as Therese Labey would say it. And you can still see it's got a slightly Art Deco look to it,

2496 Rochelle. These are the windows. Well, the windows have been replaced, but at the time, these windows had all been blown out onto the street. I wonder if the people here know. It's kind of funny that the name is on the street. I wonder if the people here know. It's kind of funny that the name is on the building. I quite like that.

Yeah, it's like memorializing it, even if it's kind of an uncertain memory for people or an uncomfortable memory. Or an uncomfortable memory? That cat's still there. I think about Therese LeBay a lot. I think about how she welcomed us, these strangers, into her family home on a cold Quebec night. I think about how surprised she'd been to hear that anyone was the least bit interested in her story. I mean, it's not as though people

were banging down her door to hear what had happened to her. That brings us to a curious fact about this history. Inside Quebec, the FLQ has been a cultural obsession for decades. With each milestone anniversary, it's revisited with documentaries and feature spreads in newspapers. And over time, some of the bombers have gained retrospective status as kind of swashbuckling idealists. Some of them even made their way to the upper reaches of power in Quebec. So as far as terrorists go, public memory has been pretty kind to these guys.

After the initial drama of the Lagernade bombing, the media, the experts, the historians, well, they moved on. The site of the bombing is now a comfortable middle-class apartment. And somehow, Therese LeBay and her place in the story was forgotten. I didn't think it would come to an end after 50 years. It was over, it was over, that story. I don't have any memories that we like to remember, but look, it's over, it's over, we can't come back. But the past is the past, she says. Because Therese Morin had been killed, the case was handed over to the homicide squad.

By the time the lead detective arrived at La Granade later that afternoon, the coroner had already come and gone and taken the secretary's body with him. Three months went by. The detective's superiors were getting anxious. He needed a break in the case. He needed a name. And when a young man known for his ties to the FLQ was picked up for another crime, he got that name. So at one time he says, OK. He says, listen, this is not me that they're going to know. He says, you're going to tell me everything? He says, yes. That confession was like a dam breaking.

By the end of the night, the police knew the names not only of those behind the shoe factory bombing, but of some of the ideological leaders of the FLQ as well. We'll hear more about that investigation and its consequences in episode three. But coming up in Episode 2... How a Hungarian-born, Austro-German-raised veteran of the French Foreign Legion became a revolutionary soldier

in the fight for Quebec independence. That's coming up on the next episode of Recall, How to Start a Revolution. The series is produced by Jessica Lindsay Frances Plourd and me, Jeff Turner Our story editor is Chris O Our digital producer is Emily Connell Mixing by Lee Rosevear and Graham MacDonald Our executive producer is Arif Noorain

Thanks for listening.