Summary:In the first six episodes of this series, we examined the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the Quebec Rebellion; the Trudeau government’s initial efforts to suppress the FLQ uprising; the Waskaganish firefight; the surprise FLQ attack on Kearns; the summer 1971 Sherbrooke bombing campaign; the “Two Days Of Tears” engagement between FLQ and CDF forces near Saint-Gabriel in the fall of 1971; and the FLQ’s bungled “All Saints’ Day” offensive. In this chapter we’ll review the FLQ sniper attacks which terrorized much of Quebec during February and March of 1972.

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While the various histories of the Quebec Rebellion which have been published since the guerrilla war ended in 1974 may contradict one another on many other points, they are in unanimous agreement on this matter: the snipers who fought in the ranks of the FLQ insurgent army were some of the deadliest marksmen the world has ever seen. And it wasn’t only on the battlefield that the snipers made their presence felt-- during February and March of 1972 they were also employed in a series of terror attacks on Quebec’s civil population whose memory can still freeze one’s blood even today. These sniper attacks, in addition to helping put the rebel movement in disrepute after the civil war was over, aroused popular anger among Canada’s English-speaking citizens that would neutralize any effort that the Trudeau government’s critics might make to change its policies for dealing with the insurgents.

In fact, one prominent conservative critic of Trudeau’s strategy for fighting the FLQ would later acknowledge in an interview with the venerable news magazine Maclean’s that the sniper attacks had made it harder for him to get his case heard in the Canadian media. Trudeau’s government enjoyed a level of support in the midst of the FLQ sniper attacks it hadn’t known before those attacks began and would find hard to match after they ended. And if an FLQ sniper should happen to have the bad luck to get captured by CDF regular troops, chances were those soldiers would feel little inclination to observe the niceties of the Geneva Convention unless specifically instructed by their officers to do so. And even then there were those troops who regarded it as their personal business to administer vigilante justice against captured FLQ snipers regardless of what the higher-ups said. The number of courts- martial convened for assault and battery, murder, and attempted murder among CDF personnel would nearly triple in the period during and right after which the sniper attacks happened.

Planning for the sniper raids had actually been going on since late August of 1971, but it wasn’t until the All Saints’ Day campaign collapsed that the FLQ leadership began to give serious consideration to implementing those plans. And even then it would take the FLQ until late January to get people into place to begin carrying out the first wave of sniper attacks. Once they were in place, however, they would individually and collectively wreak havoc on Canada’s national psyche before they were finally stopped.

The sniper campaign opened on February 11th, 1972 when an RCMP constable on routine patrol near Sherbrooke was suddenly gunned down in broad daylight as he was getting back in his car after changing a tire. Two shots were fired, but the first was quite sufficient to kill the unfortunate constable; it pierced his heart and severed a critical artery, causing him to bleed out in just seconds. The gruesome killing sent shock waves throughout the entire RCMP and was the lead story on CBC-TV’s evening news that same night. It also got extensive coverage in the U.S. media, and even caught the attention of London’s notorious Fleet Street tabloids, one of whom erroneously dubbed the shooter “the Montreal sniper” even though the killing had happened well outside the Montreal city limits.

The dust had barely settled from the first shooting when the second one took place less than two days later. A sergeant attached to a Canadian Defenses Forces recruiting station near the Ontario provincial border was gunned down as he was entering a Tim Hortons restaurant to get coffee for himself and his men; when photos of the slain sergeant made the front pages of Toronto and Ottawa newspapers the morning after the sergeant’s death, it added fresh fuel to the fire of anti-FLQ sentiment in Canada and further hardened the Trudeau government’s resolve to smash the FLQ insurgency.

Some of the more strident anti-FLQ members of the Canadian parliament, in fact, openly advocated retaliating for the FLQ sniper attacks by sending CDF snipers to kill FLQ supporters. The proposal came to nothing, partly because even Trudeau felt that it was a bit too vengeful and partly because there simply weren’t enough snipers in the CDF’s ranks to make it work. There was the small matter of the risk of innocent civilians getting caught in the crossfire to consider on top of that--  and whatever else Trudeau’s senior ministers might quarrel about, they were in unanimous agreement that getting civilians needlessly killed was too high a price to pay for any kind of victory over the FLQ, even a decisive one. So the idea was tabled, although as the civil war dragged on there were numerous attempts to revive it.

By the end of February at least fifteen people had been killed and three others wounded by FLQ sniper attacks, and in the first week of March the body count climbed higher still as the snipers commenced targeting journalists critical of the insurgents’ goals. If the FLQ’s goal in attacking those journalists was to silence those who dared to speak out against the rebel group, however, their tactics backfired in the most ironic way possible: on March 7th every major newspaper across Quebec, English-speaking and French-speaking alike, published stinging editorials denouncing the snipers as (in the words of the Montreal Gazette)”monsters of the worst kind” and demanding that any insurgent caught engaged in sniper attacks be summarily imprisoned for life. TV editorials denouncing the FLQ, which had been fairly frequent even before the sniper attacks began, became a nightly staple on the CBC’s evening newscasts while CBC’s radio arm cleared two-hour blocks on its Wednesday and Saturday night program schedules in order to make room for a series of interviews with the survivors of those killed in the sniper raids. Even left-leaning collegiate student magazines that had previously backed the Quebec separatist movement’s aspirations for an independent Quebecois nation began to turn against the FLQ, which led to an outbreak of bomb attacks on the campuses of the province’s major universities.

The bomb attacks in turn led to a much-increased CDF presence on Quebec’s streets. This alarmed the FLQ high command, which had hoped that the bombings combined with the sniper attacks might intimidate the Trudeau government into finally capitulating to its demands for a separate Quebecois nation. But Trudeau was more determined than ever to squash the insurgency in its tracks-- and proved it on March 1st by authorizing a series of air strikes against suspected sniper hideouts near the town of Fleurimont. In spite of intense ground fire from FLQ riflemen, the CDF attack jets succeeded in taking out all but one of the sniper nests; one of the few FLQ guerrillas to survive the CDF air strikes later told a British journalist those raids were a key factor in the FLQ main leadership’s eventual decision to terminate the sniper campaign.

In the years after the Quebec Rebellion ended, some ex-FLQ people would cite these bombings, and the sniper campaign, as key examples of emotional considerations overriding sound military instincts. While a furious debate still rages as to whether this was true concerning the sniper attacks, there can be no doubt that the FLQ senior command let frustration cloud their thinking in regard to the campus bombings. The bomb attacks backfired badly on the rebels, alienating students at the very point in the war when the FLQ was in dire need of their support. One Montreal university students’ council was so incensed by the FLQ’s actions its members voted unanimously to leave Quebec and relocate to the United States if the insurgents won the civil war.  Although they never had to make good on that pledge, as it turned, nonetheless their resolution spoke volumes about the disenchantment and outrage which a growing number Quebec’s younger citizens felt about the FLQ’s cause...

To Be Continued