Canadians (45 page)

It was at Batoche that the second rebellion took root. Riel by now was far more radical, claiming that God was speaking to him and calling himself the “Prophet of the New World.” He declared that a “provisional government” was now in place for the Métis and that it, not Ottawa, would be deciding matters for the vast area that was still part of the Northwest Territories, as Saskatchewan wouldn't get provincial status until 1905.

Concern in Ottawa was sufficient that a second military force was dispatched—this time the newly formed North West Mounted Police, who were able to travel by the new rail system.

There was a profound difference between the 1870 and 1885 uprisings. The first Riel “government” was set up in an isolated area very difficult to reach and, significantly, not even a part of the young Dominion but rather the land of the Hudson's Bay Company. The second uprising was in an area being flooded by immigrant settlers, now easily reachable by rail. Most importantly, Riel was doing it in Canada proper this time. To claim his government was taking over matters was interpreted as treason.

Known as the Northwest Rebellion, this second uprising included Plains Indians who'd been starving from lack of buffalo to hunt. Native leaders like Cree chief Big Bear and Blackfoot chief Crowfoot were furious with Ottawa for what they considered ill treatment of Natives by Indian Department workers. Riel was actually tapping into the first wave of Western alienation—destitute Natives, angry white settlers who'd been led to believe the railroad was going through the area, Métis who felt their rights were being denied—and his ten-point Revolutionary Bill of Rights found wide acceptance. He became president; buffalo hunter and guide Gabriel Dumont his commander. They took prisoners and occupied the village of Duck Lake. The police, bolstered by locals, moved toward the lake only to be met by Dumont's forces. The Mounties retreated, but not until nine volunteers and three police had been killed. Dumont, a brilliant field general, lost five Métis and one Native fighter.

Ottawa sent almost three thousand soldiers by train, most of them Ontario militia, and combined with Western forces they soon counted some five thousand. There were more skirmishes and more deaths, including a dozen men from the North West Mounted Police at Frog Lake. The government cut off rations to Big Bear's people and his band, after which one of Big Bear's followers shot and killed the local Indian agent. The warriors later killed two priests and six other whites. Big Bear had tried to calm matters but it was too late. The army was moving in fast.

Riel and Dumont differed on where they might best make a stand, and Dumont, the more aggressive, won the argument. At the Battle of Batoche, Dumont led three hundred Métis and Natives in a well-organized defence that lasted until they ran out of ammunition and were forced to fire nails from their rifles. More troops were brought in, as well as a gunboat to attack Batoche, and fighting soon broke out again. The bolstered Canadian forces finally overran the rebels, claiming to have killed fifty-one of them, and on May 15 Riel surrendered and Dumont fled the country.

General Frederick Middleton, who had led the Protestant volunteers from Ontario, sent off a note to Big Bear in early June, claiming, “I have utterly defeated Riel at Batoche with great loss, and have made Prisoners of Riel, Poundmaker, and his principal chief.” He called for Big Bear to surrender. “If you do not, I shall pursue and destroy you, and your band, or drive you into the woods to starve.” Big Bear fled for a while, but, acutely aware that his starving people could not last, surrendered.

Riel's trial for high treason was held in Regina. His lawyers argued insanity and said he was delusional—his secretary had won acquittal by reasons of insanity—but Riel's remarkable address to the jury made many wonder if he could possibly be dismissed merely as a madman. On September 18 he was found guilty. Poundmaker and Big Bear were given three years, while other Natives received various sentences. Eleven were tried and convicted of murder for the Frog Lake massacre and eight were eventually hanged.

While the jury in Regina did convict Riel of treason, they did not wish to see him hanged. “We, on the jury, recommend mercy,” the foreman told the court. “The prisoner was guilty and we could not excuse his actions. But, at the same time, we felt that the government had not done
its duty. It did nothing about the grievances of the Métis. If it had, there would never have been a second Riel rebellion.”

Quebec certainly didn't wish to see Riel hanged. He was a hero in French Canada now, defender of Church and language. Ontario, however, felt a little differently. “Strangle Riel with the French flag!” the
Toronto News
called in an editorial. “That is the only use that rag can have in this country.”

Pressure was enormous to have Scott's execution avenged, and after various appeals and despite a medical report in which one physician found Riel “insane” and the other two “excitable,” Macdonald's cabinet decided in favour of hanging. The Church in Quebec was outraged.

Macdonald showed surprisingly little understanding of how Riel would continue to play out in the country that Macdonald himself had had such a large role in creating. Having helped put together the coalition that allowed French and English to work together for Confederation, more might have been expected of him. But no. “He shall hang,” the prime minister said at one point with rather great prescience, “though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.”

On November 16, 1885, the rope was placed around Louis Riel's neck and the trap door sprung.

He is still twisting.

ON THAT DAY the noose would also tighten around Macdonald's party. From then on the Conservatives would have, at best, a fragile and complicated relationship with a Quebec they had once taken for granted. Sir John A. Macdonald, writes Bowering, “was feeling the fires that would threaten to scorch every prime minister from now on—the heat provided by friction between Quebec French and Ontario English.”

The effect of Louis Riel on a country that wouldn't even let him take his seat in Parliament was, and remains, extraordinary. Wilfrid Laurier, perhaps the greatest prime minister of all, launched his career by passionately denouncing the federal government's decision to let Riel hang. Quebeckers by and large switched their allegiances from Cartier's Conservative
bleus
to Laurier's Liberal
rouges
. And, of course, the Riel incident still reverberates in the West, among Natives and Métis who
feel their rights have never been upheld as promised and even among many non-Natives who continue to feel Ottawa treats them as a colony that, every once in a while, needs some discipline.

All traceable to one man who called himself “The Prophet of the New World.”

One begins to see how Margaret Atwood saw this great French–English dichotomy in her
Two-Headed Poems:
that we aren't strangers to each other so much as a “pressure on the inside of the skull.” And that pressure periodically flashes into a full-bore migraine. The trigger can be major— as it was in the Conscription Crisis, in the demise of Meech Lake, and in the October Crisis.

The October Crisis of 1970 was the culmination of years of ferment. In 1963 five bombs exploded in mailboxes located in anglophone neighbourhoods. In 1967 French president Charles de Gaulle, on a state visit during Centennial Year, shouted
“Vive le Quebec Libre!”
from a balcony and won himself a quick invitation from Prime Minister Pearson to exit the country and a lasting place in the heart of sovereigntists.

By 1970 the Front de Libération du Québec had been blamed for more than two hundred bomb blasts and five deaths. That fall the FLQ captured British diplomat James Cross and Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, who was later found murdered, whereupon Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called out the army and instituted the War Measures Act. New Democratic leader Tommy Douglas, who voted against the use of the act, told the House of Commons that “the Government is using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.”

Cross was found alive, the FLQ cell proved far smaller than believed, and the War Measures Act was dropped. Six years later, on November 15, 1976, René Lévesque's Parti Québécois, committed to the separation of a sovereign Quebec from the rest of Canada, defeated the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa. Civil unrest by a minority had evolved into political statement by the majority.

At other times, the issue that starts the temples pounding is somewhat less dramatic, even minor. The sponsorship scandal, while hardly minor, involved very few people and relatively little money. “The notion that
Quebeckers would separate from Canada because of the $100 million sponsorship scandal in Ottawa is ridiculous and, frankly, galling,” said a
Globe and Mail
editorial at the time. “Countries do not throw themselves onto a sharp knife over such things. Ethnic cleansing, slavery, oppression, battles for scarce land, denial of the right to self-expression—these are what tear nations asunder.”

But Canada does often throw itself onto a sharp knife over such things. In 2006 an event occurred in Montreal that seemed as far removed from provincial politics as it was possible to get: the September shootings at Dawson College. It was a stunning tragedy, a gun-crazed young man deciding to go out in a blaze and take several innocents with him.

It could have been so much worse. Policemen happened to be at the English-language CEGEP on another matter when Kimveer Gill—who called himself “The Angel of Death” on his personal website—parked his vehicle, got out, and marched into the campus cafeteria firing a semi-automatic rifle at will. The police, fortunately, stopped him from more damage, but even so, one young student was dead and nineteen injured, some seriously, before Gill fatally shot himself in the head and the rampage was over.

It was a shocking but seemingly straightforward story. It was compared to other such school assaults. Much was made of the Goth underworld Gill so admired and the hatred found on his website. The entire country appeared to embrace Montreal at this time of such distress.

The shootings took place on a Wednesday afternoon. On Saturday
The Globe and Mail
ran a detailed re-creation of the tragedy by senior writer Jan Wong, herself a former Montrealer. She happened to muse about the origins of Gill's enormous anger and tied his fury to that of previous Montreal killers: the Concordia University engineering professor who'd shot four colleagues to death in 1992 and the infamous December 6, 1989, attack at l'École Polytechnique that left fourteen young women dead at the hands of another young man wielding another automatic weapon. All three killers, Wong noted, had a relatively recent immigrant connection. And then there were Quebec's long-controversial language laws.

“What many outsiders don't realize,” Wong wrote, “is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city. It hasn't just taken a toll on long-time anglophones, it's affected immigrants too.”

She did not for a moment claim that the killers weren't disturbed. “But,” she said, “it is also true that in all of these cases, the perpetrator was not pure
laine,
the argot for a ‘pure' francophone. Elsewhere to talk of racial purity is repugnant. Not in Quebec.”

In a column, that might have been fair comment, though not many columnists would care to tie such furious violence to language. Wong's piece, however, was a news feature. The explosion was intense.

L'Affaire Wong led to calls in the House of Commons for an apology to the people of Quebec. Premier Jean Charest wrote an angry letter to
The Globe and Mail
. The prime minister himself wrote in to say that Wong's interpretation was “patently absurd and without foundation.” The paper apologized.

It shouldn't just be people who go on stress leave—sometimes countries need it too.

Not long after, Liberal leadership front-runner Michael Ignatieff happened to say on a French-language television program that, in his opinion, Quebec was a “nation.” It wasn't an unusual statement—other candidates had at times said much the same—but he said he would stand with a resolution coming up through the party ranks from the Quebec wing calling for a vote at the party convention.

Again, in a matter of hours the fragile egg that is Canada seemed on the verge of rolling off the stove. Ignatieff was widely ridiculed for calling for Quebec to be recognized as a nation within a province within a country—sort of a Canadian version of Churchill's famous description of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It was a misstep that, weeks later, surely contributed to his coming up short in the Liberal Party leadership race.

Ignatieff, seemingly unaware of having done so, had just pushed one of the country's most-wired hot buttons. His error, it seemed, lay in having been outside the country during Canada's torturous constitutional
wrangling and the heated debates over Meech and Charlottetown. He would have read about those years, studied them, and even written about them. But what he seemed not to comprehend was that this wasn't an
intellectual
issue—a great many feel Quebec can think of itself as anything it wishes, within the context of Canada—so much as it had become a purely
emotional
one in the years following Meech. There was no appetite for constitutional talk, no stomach for even its consideration.

The Bloc Québécois, unsurprisingly, considered Ignatieff's remarks a gift horse, and party leader Gilles Duceppe promptly introduced a motion in the House of Common calling for just such recognition. The panic was instant. The country, the doomsayers shouted, was back in the handbasket. The sky was falling. The end was nigh.

A few days later Prime Minister Harper finessed the Bloc by introducing the government's own motion recognizing the Québécois as a “nation within a united Canada.” The shadings were obvious: not the province of Quebec but the Québécois people, not within Canada but within a united Canada.