March 24th 2025,

Canadian History was cancelled for today but I did have online lectures that are relevant. The first video lecture was about Pierre Trudeau. He was described as an intellect, journalist, and law professor. The liberals needed a Quebec leader and Trudeau was the best candidate for the job. When he was justice minister, Trudeau took homosexuality out of the criminal code, claiming the state had no business being in people’s bedrooms, and provided access to abortion. He would win leadership by 51% and this win could be attributed to TV as he was good at bing in front of a camera. He was popular with a small group of journalists and Canadians wanted their own version of JFK, I guess Trudeau was that. He didn’t kiss babies, he kissed their mothers and slid down banisters. Trudeau-mania was rampant and helped him get to the top of the leadership list. As leader he calls an election in 1968 which boost support for the Liberals and overwhelms the Conservatives. He also attacked the NDP for their “two nation approach” and challenged Quebec’s international interests.

During the St, Jean Baptiste day Parade students throw stones and bottles while Trudeau stands at the podium cursing out the separatists. Trudeau was very anti-Quebec nationalism. Because of this display English Canada likes him, so he wins the 1968 election by a landslide. His stance on Quebec was that it was different but not constitutionally. Quebec also did not speak for all French Canadians as there are Francophones living in other parts of the country. He prioritized French Canadians over Quebecois. Trudeau was seen as someone who put Quebec in its place, which is in Canada. This is a harsh statement, to put it mildly.

The next video was about the FLQ crisis which happened in 1970. The FLQ were the Front For the Liberation of Quebec and they would kidnap a British diplomat named Cross and a Quebec cabinet minister named Laporte. Cross was kidnapped first and the FLQs demands for release were to end all police searches, publish their manifesto, rehire Lapalme employees, liberate political prisoners, denounce the informer who led police to capture an FLQ cell, $500,000 in gold, and safe passage out of the country to Cuba. There were around 1000 raids conducted by police, but early on the FLQ were not seen as that big of a deal. When Laporte was kidnapped the military was sent in. This was also when the War Measures Act was passed by Trudeau. Soldiers were deployed, the press was censored, civil liberties suspended,and 500 people were arrested (62 indicted). Cross was released but Laporte would be murdered, his body found in the trunk of a Taxi. The captors were granted safe passage to Cuba. We were then shown that famous video of when Trudeau was confronted by the press over this situation. To me it seemed like he did not want to give the FLQ attention and brushed off the journalists’ concerns about the WMA as they saw “men with guns” as scary. This showed the paradox of how the libertarian (my professor’s words, not mine) Trudeau could launch massive repression, yet the public agreed with this decision anyone, the highest support came from Quebec.

The last video was about the Summit Series of 1972. Maybe stick around for this because it has to do with the USSR. During this time the Soviet Union was impressed with Trudeau’s rhetoric as they perceived it as making Canada more independent from the US. Because of this Trudeau was invited to Moscow. They believed they could find common ground with Trudeau due to the dangers of US influence and having a shared northern experience, although they knew Trudeau was still a bourgeoisie politician he was still better than other NATO leaders. Kosygin was then invited to Ottawa where he and Trudeau conceived of a Hockey game to strengthen relations as sports were used for that. This would also help with Canadian national unity if they won.

So this summit consisted of eight games, four in Canada and four in the USSR. It also allowed professional NHL players to participate, which never happens in international sports I guess, and would be a chance for the USSR to show that Communism was good, and the Canadians saw it as a way for the heroic capitalists to defeat the evil Commies. I am not joking. These games seemed like a nightmare because, when they went to Moscow, players went crazy. One of the Canadians knew one of the Soviets had a weak ankle so he would deliberately smack the hell out of him to take him out of the game. The Soviets employed “psychological warfare” (his words not mine) on the Canadians by harassing them at night in their hotel rooms. Huge brawls broke out, but in the end Paul Henderson would score the winning goal (the goal heard around the world is what my professor said), it was a narrow win at 4-3, I believe. The reason why we were even lectured on this is because my professor had a previous student who talked about how sports games could be very political and used this summit series as his example, I guess he wrote a paper on it too. I can only hope that my paper on fascism in Canada educates him just as much.

In French Revolution class we started by answering the question “was the revolution good for women?” First of all, this is just a bad research question because we don’t know what “good” means in this context and there are women who were affected differently. Women in France did not get the vote until after WWII, but during the revolution women exercised a lot of influence at key junctures across the political spectrum like the women’s march on Versailles. Sans-Culottes Women, like their male counterparts, supported the Terror and some would even cheer the loudest at the foot of the guillotine, these women were called Les Tricoteuses (bloodthirsty knitters). Working women were also the group that drew attention to food shortages during the revolution and would call for a “social republic” (welfare state).

We then learned about some feminist figures, the first was Olympe de Gouges who is described as a proto-feminist since the term did not exist back then. She was also an abolitionist and the self-educated daughter of a butcher. Gouges authored the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizens, which reflected what was said in the DRMC to demand equal rights for women based on reason. She revered Rousseau’s notion of a social contract but she obviously rejected his gender politics which limited women to the private sphere. She proposed her own social contract that would exist between an equal husband and wife.

From 1793 onwards, as the Terror is developing, there is backlash against the public woman as she is unnatural. The highest profile target of this ire is Marie-Antoinette. She was the quintessential counter-revolutionary: she was foreign, lived in luxury, was seen as promiscuous and a bad mother. During her trial she was not tried for counter-revolutionary treason like Louis, which she was most defiantly guilty of, but she was tried for “sexually corrupting” her own son. There was no evidence for this. Pamphlet pornography also made an appearance during the trial to showcase how much of a sexual deviant she was. These pamphlets did not tell the truth but that didn’t really matter.

The last woman that was talked about today was Charlotte Corday, also known as the “friend of the people.” She assassinated the journalist Marat as she blamed his bloodthirsty rhetoric for the purges. In a letter she called Marat as “a wild beast who was about to devour France with Fire of Civil War.” Before the revolutionary tribunal, she excused the murder as killing one man to save 100,000. My professor then brought up how in 2023 the French government blocked the sale of Corday’s 1793 defence of her actions. In truly of 1793 she was executed and this left a weird legacy as she would either be portrayed as a virtuous martyr or a hysterical enemy of the people. Gouges’ words were used here to highlight the tragic irony: “women have the right to mount the scaffold: they must likewise have the right to mount the rostrum.”

Political Science was not my favourite lecture, this has nothing to do with my professor and more so the topic which was about aging society in Japan. The WHO divides society into groups: 65 and over being 7% of the population means the society is aging; 14% means the society is aged; 21% is a super aged society. Japan is the world’s first super aged society. This means that the elderly are also overrepresented in politics. This is due to the fact that voter turnout of older people is higher than the young and the rural vote counts 2, 3, or even 6 times more than the urban vote. Theres hereditary things going on too, which I didn’t really understand. I think it is similar to the idea of the revolving door of politics. I am skipping a bit of my notes to get to more interesting bits, that being the Dankai generation. This is the generation born between 1947-49 and make up around 6% of the current population. These people are anti-American, anti-war, anti-nuclear, pro-Chinese (3rd wave movement), pro-Korea (guilt and sympathy over colonization), anti-alliance (no friendship with the US), and anti-imperialism. So all in all they are relatively progressive and are common good oriented. Class went on fora bit more but nothing worth writing here about.