MISSING LYNX and Ho Ho Ho...

I get sooo little time to blog, but if I don't write this, my head will explode... and I don't want that to happen right before Christmas.

Those of us who have never depended on the Montreal Gazette to do our thinking for us, have always suspected that the FLQ crisis was not as it appeared -- even though it was forbidden (in polite society) to ask obvious questions.

All that has changed in the past few months, but as usual, English Montreal slumbers on, reading Rover Arts, and waiting for Barney's Version to hit the theatres.

I, too, will be seeing Barney's Version, although I don't expect it to be as revealing as Louis Hamelin's amazing novel -- this season's real literary event, and possibly the most important book by a Quebec writer that I've read in my lifetime.

I know most Montreal anglos will never open, let alone read, this 600-page "brick" (as translator Sheila Fischman calls it) -- couched in dense witty joual, and packed with characters rescued from the freezer chest of news and police reports of 40 years ago.

I can't think of an English publisher that would pay to have it translated, either, or who would attempt to dump it into Canada's shrinking book-buying market, which still prefers reassuring Canadiana -- like How The Scots Invented Canada -- they certainly did -- and coffee table books that foster the Grand Delusion that we really are a great country intrepidly crawling on our hands and knees towards independence from the Queen,

That's a pity, because it shows us up as the nation of card-carrying schizophrenics we really are.

Therefore Louis Hamelin's stunning masterpiece of investigation and reflection will probably only be read in Quebec, where its message will only be partially heard. That's not surprising because -- as some may recall -- soon after the October crisis, Pierre Vallières proposed the shocking theory that the events that brought on the War Measures Act and changed our history forever, were really an elaborate police operation designed to devastate and demonize the legitimate nationalist movement in Quebec --

Vallières' theory was naturally ridiculed and demonized in its turn, most loudly in the Montreal Gazette by writers like MNA William Tetley (remember him?) in editorials that claimed the facts of the case absolutely proved otherwise.

Well, it turns out, Tetley was a windbag, all along -- something I somehow sensed at the time even though I didn't read the Gazette. The facts of the case tell a different story, after all, something much closer to Vallières' Version.

Which we will not be seeing in the theatres this Christmas.

So here it is: The expanding case for the RCMP and military being behind the murder of the cabinet minister. Some of these little nuggets (coated in suspicion and ready for deep frying) will give some people indigestion. Many were gathered from reading Louis Hamelin's brilliant novel, LA CONSTELLATION DU LYNX. Others come from my own perusal of timelines and reports, dating back to those days in October, when I was a young woman, fresh from the suburbs, exploring the fleshpots of rue Panet in Montreal's east end where I roomed with a friend whose left-wing Jewish boyfriend only dreamed of getting arrested and locked up in Parthenais Prison. He had spent the previous summer hitching around Quebec, and had ended up at the Maison des Pêcheurs in Gaspésie where the Rose brothers began their exciting adventure. Everyone turned up there that summer -- even nice Jewish boys, along with undercover agents of the SQ, the RCMP and those whose livelihood depended on being able to blend in with the hippies.


Here are the highlights of the case that ought to fire anyone's imagination -- if anyone still has an imagination, that is:

Let's take them one by one, in no particular order (at least for now: this is a blog, after all, and a work in progress):

Try this one:

Canadian troops were already in place in Quebec and on full alert a week before James Cross was kidnapped on October 5, 1970. I want you to think about that for a minute or two before you read the rest of this. An 'invasion' of Quebec was apparently planned -- by at least certain elements in English Canada, or its armed forces -- days before the triggering event, the kidnap of the British Trade Commissioner, had even occurred.

Have you got that? Are you wondering why you didn't know that? So am I --

Do read on. And Happy Holidays to you all!



HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY:

A news leak during the crisis revealed that the RCMP was aware of the whereabouts of the FLQ kidnappers and was keeping track of them

Mysterious tenants living next door to the hideout where Pierre Laporte was held on Armstrong Street, at St Hubert military base, were likely police informers or others carrying out surveillance of the kidnappers.

The RCMP fumbled the ball, big time, when it failed to pass on the communique from the Liberation cell calling on the Chénier cell to refrain from killing Laporte. These and other strange discrepancies in the official story have festered in the back of our minds since October 1970, and the inquiries that followed, including the one into Organized Crime, and RCMP's use of "dirty tricks" that often blurred the boundaries between it and the criminal underworld.

Many of us have been mystified by the strange suddenness with which the authorities gave into some FLQ cell members request to go into exile -- definitely a win-win solution for b oth sides, since it added to Canadians' rage at Quebec while preventing journalists from accessing them for their version of the events, the true nature of their involvement, past histories -- all of which would have shed light on the secret behaviour of our intelligence agencies...

Some of us also recall the inquiry into RCMP dirty tricks which revealed the extent of police use of a network of informers and agents provocateurs in controlling (and even creating) FLQ cells before and after October 1970

But to me the most telling, bizarre detail of this whole dark mystery was the decision by the Cheney cell to hide out with their captive, Pierre Laporte, in a house they had recently rented right next door to Saint Hubert Air Force base, a few kms south of Montreal. Of course, if I were a kidnapper being sought by the police and armed forces, the first place I'd choose to lay low would be an area patrolled by radar and crawling with soldiers. Not just any military base but one of two NORAD centres for North America, one which had been the site of MKULTRA mind control experiments on children going back to the early 1950s...

Is an imagine beginning to form at the bottom of the sink of chemicals in the dark room of your mind, O Sixties Child?

How about the fact that all three members of the Cheney cell -- Paul and Jacques Rose, and their crony Francis Simard, had grown up in the general neighbourhood of the base, which could perhaps explain why the area they called home seemed like a "safe" place to hide.

Another odd detail that struck me when I read this, is that kidnapper Francis Simard happened to be exactly the right age for the MKULTRA mind control experiments done on children -- at Saint Hubert base.

Francis Simard was 6 years old in 1953, the same age as a friend of mine whose AF father enrolled her in first grade in that special class at Saint Hubert AF base, a few months after MKULTRA came into existence. It was Cameron's friend Allen Dulles who signed it into operation -- Allen Dulles who sometimes summered on Lake Massawippi, in the eastern townships. Allen Dulles, the CIA director who helped mastermind Operation Paperclip, which brought former Nazi scientists to North America and set them to work for the military in projects like the one at Saint Hubert base.

I also find it fascinating that the very first FLQ bombs exploding in Westmount coincided with the collapse of the MKULTRA project at McGill in 1963. Just when a smokescreen was needed to cover up a huge program of criminal research which harmed literally thousands of unwitting Montrealers, and others, BANG! BANG! Bombs start going off in mailboxes and the evil terrorist organization known as the Front de Libération du Québec suddenly grabs all the headlines.

When have we seen this before?

It's also fascinating that the supposed creator of the FLQ, was not even Quebecois - but a Belgian "resistance fighter" and probable police spy...

I find it fascinating that the fledgling FLQ, a ragtag band of confused druggies and longhaired student revolutionaries, some barely out of high school, were able to carry out a series of extremely successful raids on military armouries and other heavily guarded targets -- almost makes you think they had some inside help.

And that years later, such a fuss was made and continues to be made over De Gaulle's famous "Vive le Quebec libre" remark -- although he followed it up with a less audible "Vive le Canada" -- which didn't stop the Anglo establishment from manufacturing a diplomatic incident to justify a crackdown on "separatists" -- but really, who are the real separatists? The people of Quebec who cheered the speech, or the masters of Divide and Rule?

Finally, I am astonished that most of my peers who did not leave Quebec in the stampede to escape a new Nazi Germany controlled by Péquiste madmen (and women), still seem to accept the official story although when you look at it under a microscope it's crawling with bugs.

Given what I know about the MKULTRA program, I see a high likelihood the FLQ was an intelligence creation, a false flag operation modelled on so many others that came out of the fertile minds of military strategists, and that CIA-funded psychiatrists like Dr. Ewen Cameron played a role in getting it up and running.

In a declassified 1956 MKULTRA memo, Dr. Cameron mentions his rewarding work with 'POWS' for the Air Force -- the closest AF base to Cameron was St Hubert, and then there's Plattsburgh, up the road from his residence in Albany.

What are the odds that Cameron was involved in the secret US military electronic warfare experiments on French Canadian children enrolled in classes on the base?

I'd say, quite high.

Especially considering these secret experiments, according to my sources, aimed at scrambling the children's brainwaves and eventually controlling their behaviour.


It amazes me that no one knows this, but it amazes me less that writing a book about it can get one in trouble with the people who run our publishing scene here in Canada, the world's largest human laboratory (after Siberia).

But once you peruse the documents and read the wealth of material available on MKULTRA, the events of our recent history begin to make a whole new, horrible kind of sense.

I really wish it were possible to bring this material into the light of public debate -- while I also realize it would provoke a collective nervous breakdown for many of my colleagues, not unlike the collective shock we all received when Pierre Laporte died.

I don't know a remedy for the shock of realizing your career, relationships, politicial beliefs, and network of social connections is built on a massive fabrication, designed by the military and intelligence services to divide and control us all.

If I were one of the people who have, for decades, found employment and "meaning" by acting as agents of the same Canadian government (and its secretive organizations) that implemented the false flag terrorist event known as the October Crisis -- I would not be reading this blog. I would be trying to rid my mind of the parasitic fear that has fuelled so many of my personal initiatives over the years, as I carried out my functions.

Hey, it happens to the best of us -- right? We can all be unwitting police informers, agents provocateurs -- the financial pressures and ambitions that motivate all of us, not to mention the techniques, have been in use for decades, if not milennia. We can all be mind controlled and inducted into activities that, when you lift up the cover or unfurl the curtain, turn out to be not in the best interests of the majority --

That's putting it mildly.

When you have an entire minority indoctrinated in the belief that the Canadian government and military saved us from French Canadian Nazis, when in reality the provable Nazis take their orders from Ottawa, Washington and London -- you have a recipe for social stagnation and collective incoherence.

And that's what we have, here in Montreal, after four decades of living in the aftermath in one of the great deceptions of modern history.

Military Secrets

In the same month that I read Louis Hamelin's stunning new novel, LA CONSTELLATION DU LYNX, whose plot dissects the layers of disinformation like bandages wrapping the mummified corpse of Labor Minister Pierre Laporte -- I also learned something else that didn't exactly shock me (I'm much too old for that) although it confirmed what I already sensed:

The RCMP is in charge of vetting judges for the annual Governor General's literary awards.

That's right. Before you can be chosen to decide which Canadians books and authors are deserving of the coveted $20,000 prize,you have to be "liked" by the men and women in funny red uniforms who always get their man ... and who have been implicated in numerous scandals since their early days

Nor was I surprised, because a while back I learned (accidentally, while browsing the Foreword to a novel by Ray Smith) that some of Canada's most powerful literary editors come from military backgrounds, ie the US army, Black Watch Regiment, and RAF.

I find this funny -- not "funny" as in "ROFLMAO" but funny as in "Whoah" -- is there a country in the free world which puts the police and military in charge of culture? Isn't this a policy we would expect from a dictatorship rather than a democracy? Are artists and writers made from the same material as soldiers? And if so, why wasn't I told that back in university when I signed up for my first creative writing seminar in fiction with Malcolm Foster?

Ray Smith's list was only partial, because it was a list of his personal friends who happened to all be ex-military men, as he is himself. I am sure there are plenty of other movers and shakers in the small, small world of Canadian publishing that have clearance from the police and military to mould our thinking. They may not be military types,exactly, but people like Anne Collins of Harper Collins (who played a fairy tale princess in a movie before she worked for Saturday Night and went on to head one of Canada's largest branch plant publishing firms) are clearly also involved in the selection process that ensures the book-buying public reads and knows mainly what our leaders want us to read and know.

I was reminded of the time, back in 1989, when I was asked to give a workshop in Kingston, Ontario, the home of the Governor General's awards and also of an important military base.

In 1989, a Kingston publisher, Quarry Press, had just brought out my first novel, and I was invited to speak at a "fiction conference" they had organized late in November. The conference itself turned out to be a fiction. Four people paid the hefty $900 fee to attend -- they were the "audience." The rest of us -- writers and editors -- were paid to be there. There were so few people in the room, I can name almost all of them: John Metcalf, Leon Rooke, Kent Thompson, Bob Hilderley, Geof Hancock, Charles Foran, David Helwig and his daughter Maggie, Douglas Glover, Diane Schoemperlein, Marilyn Mohr, Wayne Grady, and a few others including Robert Richard who was then head of Writing and Publishing at the Canada Council.

I was asked to talk about the Canadian Urban Novel, and because I am no academic, and had little time to prepare, I decided to improvise on Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen. My talk was rambling and wide-ranging. I was not sure it made much sense. I focused on certain "visionary" passages, like the speech by the Old Indian Chief who advises Canadians to "dream their future." No critic that I know of has ever been able to make much sense of Beautiful Losers, so I was in good company. I talked about the effect the book had had on me, in my early twenties in Montreal, because it described a hallucinatory city populated by mental patients, deranged psychiatrists, abused orphans and aboriginal ghosts, lurking under the potholed pavement and decaying financial facades. It was contemporary, aimed at my generation, and long passages from it stuck in my mind as a call to awaken, rise up, take up arms against a secretive enemy. As I explained all this, I watched the faces of my audience, especially of the editors, and noticed they did not look pleased.

Later, some of them actually moved to Montreal -- it was hard not to notice this sudden influx, as they also took up the few positions available in Anglo journalism -- and over the next 5 to 10 years, it was clear they were very busy, networking at the Gazette, gradually turning Montreal's marginal literary scene into a depressing extension of the one in Toronto. Some people like being colonized, and they definitely had their supporters in high places. Soon, Montreal's Anglo elite were throwing their weight behind a literary scene they had ignored back in the days when it was just local, and more authentic.

All that happened 20 years ago - ancient history.

While the official Can Lit scene has moved into town and flourished in the sunlight, those of us who found ourselves more marginalized than ever, went deeper underground and took up research. And what we have learned from all this digging turns out to be very interesting.

One thing we know, that everyone needs to know, is the central role played by military intelligence in the creation of the cultural phenomenon known as Can Lit:
a topic that wold take some time to elaborate.

One thing we know about the military: they don't waste their time on trivia. If they're involved in our national publishing scene, to the point of even vetting competitions, there is a need for them to be there.

There has to be something to hide. And it has to be something big.

Hmm. Let me guess.

(TO BE CONTINUED)