1970
FLQ Manifesto
[issued by the Front de Libération du Quebec (Quebec Liberation
Front); read over CBC/Radio-Canada Oct. 8, 1970 as a condition
for the release of kidnapped British trade official James Cross]
The people in the Front de Liberation du Québec are neither
Messiahs nor modern-day Robin Hoods. They are a group of Quebec
workers who have decided to do everything they can to assure
that the people of Quebec take their destiny into their own
hands, once and for all.
The Front de Libération du Québec wants total independence
for Quebeckers; it wants to see them united in a free society, a
society purged for good of its gang of rapacious sharks, the big
bosses who dish out patronage and their henchmen, who have
turned Quebec into a private preserve of cheap labour and
unscrupulous exploitation.
The Front de Libération du Québec is not an aggressive
movement, but a response to the aggression organized by high
finance through its puppets, the federal and provincial
governments (the Brinks farce, Bill 69, the electoral map, the
so-called "social progress" [sic] tax, the Power Corporation,
medical insurance - for the doctors, the guys at Lapalme...)
The Front de Libération du Québec finances itself - through
voluntary (sic) taxes levied on the enterprises that exploit the
workers (banks, finance companies, etc....).
"The money powers of the status quo, the majority of the
traditional tutors of our people, have obtained from the voters
the reaction they hoped for, a step backwards rather than the
changes we have worked for as never before, the changes we will
continue to work for." (René Lévesque, April 29, 1970).
Once, we believed it worthwhile to channel our energy and our
impatience, in the apt words of René Lévesque, into the Parti
Québécois, but the Liberal victory shows that what is called
democracy in Quebec has always been, and still is, nothing but
the "democracy" of the rich. In this sense the victory of the
Liberal party is in fact nothing but the victory of the
Simard-Cotroni election- fixers. Consequently, we wash our hands
of the British parliamentary system; the Front de Libération du
Québec will never let itself be distracted by the electoral
crumbs that the Anglo-Saxon capitalists toss into the Quebec
barnyard every four years. Many Quebeckers have realized the
truth and are ready to take action. In the coming year Bourassa
is going to get what's coming to him: 100,000 revolutionary
workers, armed and organized!
Yes, there are reasons for the Liberal victory. Yes, there
are reasons for poverty, unemployment, slums, for the fact that
you, Mr. Bergeron of Visitation Street, and you too, Mr.
Legendre of Ville de Laval, who make F10,000 a year, do not feel
free in our country, Quebec.
Yes, there are reasons, the guys who work for Lord know them,
and so do the fishermen of the Gash, the workers on the North
Shore; the miners who work for Iron Ore, for Québec Cartier
Mining, for Noranda know these reasons too. The honest
workingmen at Cabano, the guys they tried to screw still one
more time, they know lots of reasons.
Yes, there are reasons why you, Mr. Tremblay of Panet Street
and you, Mr. Cloutier who work in construction in St. Jérôme,
can't afford "Golden Vessels" with all the jazzy music and the
sharp decor, like Drapeau the aristocrat, the guy who was so
concerned about slums that he had coloured billboards stuck up
in front of them so that the rich tourists couldn't see us in
our misery.
Yes, Madame Lemay of St. Hyacinthe, there art - reasons why
you can't afford a little junket to Florida like the rotten
judges and members of Parliament who travel on our money. The
good workers at Vickers and at Davie Shipbuilding, the ones who
were given no reason for being thrown out, know these reasons;
so do the guys at Murdochville that were smashed only because
they wanted to form a union, and whom the rotten judges forced
to pay over two million dollars because they had wanted to
exercise this elementary right. The guys of Murdochville are
familiar with this justice; they know lots of reasons. Yes,
there are reasons why you, Mr. Lachance of St. Marguerite
Street, go drowning your despair, your bitterness, and your rage
in Molson's horse piss. And you, the Lachance boy, with your
marijuana cigarettes...
Yes, there are reasons why you, the welfare cases, are kept
from generation to generation on public assistance. There are
lots of reasons, the workers for Domtar at Windsor and East
Angus know them; the workers for Squibb and Ayers, for the
Quebec Liquor Commission and for Seven-up and for Victoria
Precision, and the blue collar workers of Laval and of Montreal
and the guys at Lapalme know lots of reasons.
The workers at Dupont of Canada know some reasons too, even
if they will soon be able to express them only in English (thus
assimilated, they will swell the number of New Quebeckers, the
immigrants who are the darlings of Bill 69).
These reasons ought to have been understood by the policemen
of Montreal, the system's muscle; they ought to have realized
that we live in a terrorized society, because without their
force and their violence, everything fell apart on October 7.
We've had enough of a Canadian federalism which penalizes the
dairy farmers of Quebec to satisfy the requirements of the
Anglo-Saxons of the Commonwealth; which keeps the honest taxi
drivers of Montreal in a state of semi-slavery by shamefully
protecting the exclusive monopoly of the nauseating Murray Hill,
and its owner - the murderer Charles Hershorn and his son Paul
who, the night of October 7, repeatedly tore a .22 rifle out of
the hands of his employees to fire on the taxi drivers and
thereby mortally wounded Corporal Dumas, killed as a
demonstrator. Canadian federalism pursues a reckless import
policy, thereby throwing out of work the people who earn low
wages in the textile and shoe industries, the most downtrodden
people in Quebec, and all to line the pockets of a handful of
filthy "money-makers" in Cadillacs. We are fed up with a
federalism which classes the Quebec nation among the ethnic
minorities of Canada.
We, and more and more Quebeckers too, have had it with a
government of pussy-footers who perform a hundred and one tricks
to charm the American millionaires, begging them to come and
invest in Quebec, the Beautiful Province where thousands of
square miles of forests full of game and of lakes full of fish
are the exclusive property of these all-powerful lords of the
twentieth century. We are sick of a government in the hands of a
hypocrite like Bourassa who depends on Brinks armoured trucks,
an authentic symbol of the foreign occupation of Quebec, to keep
the poor Quebec "natives" fearful of that poverty and
unemployment to which we are so accustomed.
We are fed up with the taxes we pay that Ottawa's agent in
Quebec would give to the English-speaking bosses as an
"incentive" for them to speak French, to negotiate in French.
Repeat after me: "Cheap labour is main d'oeuvre à bon marché in
French."
We have had enough of promises of work and of prosperity,
when in fact we will always be the diligent servants and
bootlickers of the big shots, as long as there is a Westmount, a
Town of Mount Royal, a Hampstead, an Outremont, all these
veritable fortresses of the high finance of St. James Street and
Wall Street; we will be slaves until Quebeckers, all of us, have
used every means, including dynamite and guns, to drive out
these big bosses of the economy and of politics, who will stoop
to any action however base, the better to screw us.
We live in a society of terrorized slaves, terrorized by the
big bosses, Steinberg, Clark, Bronfman, Smith, Neopole, Timmins,
Geoffrion, J.L. Lévesque, Hershorn, Thompson, Nesbitt,
Desmarais, Kierans (next to these, Rémi Popol the Nightstick,
Drapeau the Dog, the Simards' Simple Simon and Trudeau the Pansy
are peanuts!).
We are terrorized by the Roman Capitalist Church, though this
is less and less true today (who owns the square where the Stock
Exchange was built?); terrorized by the payments owing to
Household Finance, by the advertising of the grand masters of
consumption, Eaton's, Simpson's, Morgan's, Steinberg's, General
Motors - terrorized by those exclusive clubs of science and
culture, the universities, and by their boss-directors Gaudry
and Dorais, and by the vice-boss Robert Shaw.
There are more and more of us who know and suffer under this
terrorist society, and the day is coming when all the Westmounts
of Quebec will disappear from the map.
Workers in industry, in mines and in the forests! Workers in
the service industries, teachers, students and unemployed! Take
what belongs to you, your jobs, your determination and your
freedom. And you, the workers at General Electric, you make your
factories run; you are the only ones able to produce; without
you, General Electric is nothing!
Workers of Quebec, begin from this day forward to take back
what is yours; take yourselves what belongs to you. Only you
know your factories, your machines, your hotels, your
universities, your unions; do not wait for some organization to
produce a miracle.
Make your revolution yourselves in your neighbourhoods, in
your places of work. If you don't do it yourselves, other
usurpers, technocrats or someone else, will replace the handful
of cigar-smokers we know today and everything will have to be
done all over again. Only you are capable of building a free
society.
We must struggle not individually but together, till victory
is obtained, with every means at our disposal, like the Patriots
of 1897-1898 (those whom Our Holy Mother Church hastened to
excommunicate, the better to sell out to British interests).
In the four corners of Quebec, may those who have been
disdainfully called lousy Frenchmen and alcoholics begin a
vigorous battle against those who have muzzled liberty and
justice; may they put out of commission all the professional
holdup artists and swindlers: bankers, businessmen, judges and
corrupt political wheeler-dealers....
We are Quebec workers and we are prepared to go all the way.
With the help of the entire population, we want to replace this
society of slaves by a free society, operating by itself and for
itself, a society open on the world. Our struggle can only be
victorious. A people that has awakened cannot long be kept in
misery and contempt.
Long live Free Quebec!
Long live our comrades the political prisoners!
Long live the Quebec Revolution!
Long live the Front de Liberation do Quebec!
***
Source: "The FLQ Manifesto," Marcel Rioux, Quebec in Question
(1971), tr. James Boake
