Mountie Morass

Dirty tricks in Quebec

On his first pilgrimage to Paris since the election of his secessionist Parti Queb&3233;cois a year ago, Quebec's Premier Rene Levesque was embraced last week with rare homage. President Valery Giscard d'Estaing invested Levesque, to his surprise, as a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and assured him of France's "understanding, confidence and support," whatever Quebec's future course. At the National Assembly, Levesque's arrival was via the Napoleon steps, an entrance last used by Louis XVIII in 1814, and he was accorded the unusual honor of addressing the Deputies. Levesque did not disguise his emotion. Said he: "It is more and more sure that a new country will appear, democratically, on the map."

In fact, it is still far from certain that Levesque will be able to persuade his 6 million fellow Quebeckers to vote for his formula of independence -- a "sovereign" Quebec in a new economic association with Canada -- in a plebiscite that is likely to be held in 1979. But, while basking in the glow of his Paris reception, Levesque came in for an unlikely political windfall at home.

In Ottawa, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was seriously embarrassed by the disclosure of illegal behavior by the Security Service of the famed Royal Canadian Mounted Police. All of the incidents went back to 1972-73, when the Mounties were still smarting over the failure of their intelligence during Quebec's terrorist crisis of 1970. Then two cells of the Front de Liberation du Quebec kidnaped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and murdered Quebec's Labor Minister Pierre Laporte. According to evidence now be ing heard by a Quebec government inquiry, the Mounties were determined not to be caught short again. Among other things, an elite Mountie dirty tricks squad staged a break-in at a leftist Montreal news agency, and stole dynamite from a construction firm, apparently to convey the impression that terrorists were again running amuck.

In a far more serious incident, on Jan. 9, 1973, the Mounties broke into a Parti Queb&3233;cois office in Montreal. According to federal Solicitor General Francis Fox, the Mounties lifted computer tapes containing the P.Q.'s membership list and financial records and copied the documents before surreptitiously returning them. It seemed a pointless burglary, since the Mounties apparently learned nothing that they could not have found out as easily by perfectly legal means. What enraged the federal opposition parties, and dismayed Trudeau's Liberals, was not simply that the Mounties had operated beyond the law but that they felt free to spy on a legal, democratically constituted political party. "What is happening in this country?" cried anguished New Democratic M.P. Stuart Leggatt. "Th government should try to distinguish be tween subversion and political dissent."

Amid the angry scenes in the Commons, Trudeau protested that he was a surprised as anyone else by the Mounties escapades, a line of argument that left him open to the damaging charge of having failed properly to supervise the force. In France, Rene Levesque observed tartly "We knew from the very beginning that a lot of these jerks were around. For a champion of democracy like Mr. Trudeau, to have that kind of a police political instrument should be a nightmare."

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