Jacques Cossette-Trudel

Who is Jacques Cossette-Trudel?

Jacques Cossette-Trudel, communication counsellor and filmmaker.

Jacques Cossette-Trudel was the son of a senior Federal Government official with the Department of Energy during Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau's administration. While a student at the Université du Québec à Montréal he became active in left wing politics with the Groupe Marxiste Revolutionnaire, a Quebec based part of The Waffle, a radical wing of Canada's New Democratic Party.

In May 1968, he was deeply involved in Montreal in the organization of the student movement for the democratization of the education system. Soon after, Cossette-Trudel's views became more extreme and he joined the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) whose members were responsible for a decade of radical manifestos, bombings and armed robberies in the Province of Quebec.

While still a student, he met and married another radical leftist, Louise Lanctôt. During what became known as the October Crisis, as the leader of the FLQ's Liberation Cell, on October 5, 1970, Jacques Cossette-Trudel along with his wife Louise, her brother Jacques Lanctôt, Yves Langlois, Nigel Hamer, and Marc Carbonneau abducted James Cross, the British Trade Commissioner, from his Montreal home, demanding the release of 27 convicted FLQ militants and the publication of the group's political manifesto. The federal government, at the invitation of the Quebec provincial government, responded with the adoption of the War Measures Act. Under this law, 500 citizens were jailed and 10,000 Canadian soldiers were deployed on the streets of Montreal. Believing many of their fellow citizens would join an uprising, the goal of the FLQ was to create an independent socialist state based on the ideals of Fidel Castro's Cuba and the Algerian revolution.