Executive committee vice-chairman André Lavallée says he's never denied his association with the FLQ. Photograph by: MARCOS TOWNSEND, THE GAZETTE, The Gazette
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For an organization that's been defunct for decades, the Front de Liberation du Québec is having a busy month.
Last week's fuss about the reading of the FLQ's preposterous manifesto on the Plains of Abraham was followed yesterday by news that André Lavallée, vice-chairman of Montreal's executive committee, and so the No. 3 man at city hall, joined the FLQ in 1971, and took part in the FLQ robbery of a church-hall bingo.
This news about Lavallée, the borough mayor of Rosemont-La Petite Patrie, was not so much uncovered as revived by La Presse. Lavallée had been outed 28 years ago, in Jean Keable's report on the tactics police used to discredit the FLQ, subsequent to the 1970 October Crisis.
The new story becomes the latest in a litany of woes for Mayor Gérald Tremblay, who is up for re-election this fall, and he chose quickly to ride this out, declaring early yesterday though an aide that he still has "complete confidence" in Lavallée.
That's interesting. This might not hurt Lavallée in his east-side borough, but Tremblay is running city wide, and many Montrealers will no longer have any confidence at all in Lavallée. True, the "cell" Lavallée joined as a 19-year-old was thoroughly infiltrated, and a police informant chose the bingo hall to rob. True, the "terrorists" in question were unarmed, having ditched their toy gun. True, they got away with just $31.90 and some bingo cards, because the police had warned the parish priest. Today the whole adventure generates laughter, not terror.
In 1971, however, nobody was laughing. Pierre Laporte was dead, Quebec's establishment had been shaken by a terrible scare, and all Canadians remained shocked and horrified by the kidnappings and tumult of the previous October. Choosing to join the FLQ at that time was not a trivial act.
But how will Montrealers respond to this link between a frightening bit of history and the current city-hall campaign? Everyone likes to believe in redemption and second chances, but how far should that extend? Everyone understands that a 19-year-old's judgment can be bad. Everyone, for that matter, has bits of personal history we wouldn't want to see on Page One of La Presse. And Tremblay's main rival, Louise Harel, is unlikely to make much of this story: Lavallée was a senior aide in her office when she was municipal-affairs minister from 1999 to 2003.
The closest precedent we can recall involves Marc Snyder, who in 2002 was a former mayoral press aide who had moved on to take charge of candidate selection for the then-fast-rising Action démocratique du Quebec. When a newspaper exposed his conviction, 15 years earlier at 18, for robbing a convenience store, Snyder was dumped from that important post and his career suffered a nasty setback. (He's now a press aide at city hall.)
In that case, as in this one, the original offence was bad enough, but burying the facts so as to move up the political ladder made things worse. Strikingly, Lavallée took exactly the wrong line this week, expressing disappointment that the story has emerged. Blaming the messenger is hardly the tone of someone genuinely repentant.
Membership in the FLQ can hardly be passed off as merely a youthful peccadillo. But imagine that Lavallée had been first to revive the news of his FLQ days, say in a campaign speech in the last election. Imagine that he had used the opportunity to explain how much he has learned since 1971, and how wrong violence is ... then there would be no story this week.
But that didn't happen. Coupled with his silence about it, Lavallée's FLQ membership is no small matter. Ultimately the voters will decide how serious Lavallée's quasi-secret past is. But the moral ought to be clear to all: The cover-up can get you into more trouble than the mistake you're trying to hide.