Newly obtained documents reveal that Pierre Trudeau's government didn't have the RCMP's backing to trigger the War Measures Act in 1970

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As the government of Justin Trudeau appeals January’s Federal Court decision that found his invocation of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to be unlawful, history is repeating itself in uncanny ways. Newly obtained records from 1970 show that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, like his son, also didn’t meet the legal threshold to invoke emergency legislation used to quell a national crisis.

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On Oct. 16, 1970, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau announced that, at around 4 a.m. that morning, his cabinet had invoked the War Measures Act. A terrorist group possibly numbering in the thousands was about to overthrow the Quebec government. The only way to stop this feared insurrection was by suspending ancient civil liberties like the right against unlawful imprisonment, allowing police to make mass arrests of suspected members and hold them for weeks without seeing a judge.

The situation was indeed serious. The separatist Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) that had terrorized Quebec with bombings in the 1960s had kidnapped Quebec’s labour and immigration minister, Pierre Laporte, and the British trade commissioner, James Cross. Laporte was later killed.

But not only was there never any apprehended insurrection (a legal requirement to invoke the War Measures Act), Pierre Trudeau was wilfully blind to whether one existed. This is apparent from formerly secret testimony by then-commissioner of the RCMP William Higgitt, which was obtained through an access to information request by the........

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