Montreal’s Night of Terror
By: Grant Piper
Tags: Montreal, Canada, History, Law Enforcement, Police

Montreal’s Night of Terror

A dark glimpse into a world without law enforcement

On the morning of October 7th, 1969, both the police department and fire departments in Montreal, Canada, went on strike. The first responders were upset by their recent working conditions. Unknown to most people today, in the 1960s, Quebec was struggling with a violent separatist group known as the Front de libération du Québec. The police officers at the time decided to strike for higher wages in the face of the increased danger.

On that brisk autumn day in 1969, over 3,700 members of the police in Montreal walked off the job. They were tired of disarming bombs, being harassed on the streets, and having to deal with frequent riots and unrest caused by the separatist split in the province, especially since there were rumors that officers in much calmer Toronto were getting paid substantially more money.

Instead of entering a new utopia in which a metropolis governs itself peacefully without the aid of law enforcement, the city rapidly descended into chaos. The strike was only to last one day, but one day was all it took for disaster to strike.

The Early Hours

The strike officially started at 8:00 AM local time, and the police slowly emptied out of their normal stations and posts to go and conduct “a day of study.” A witness to the events, Steven Plinker, said that it only took a couple of hours for things to start to go south. By his information, the first bank was robbed at 11:00 AM.

By 12:00 PM, noon, many of the shops in the city center had boarded up to prevent looting. Jewelers took their valuables out of the window, and many business owners called it quits for the day.

That afternoon saw a steady uptick in crime, including an abnormal amount of bank robbery attempts throughout the city, but no widespread unrest had been reported.

The city was uneasy, but there were those who were planning on capitalizing on the absence of the police.

Nightfall

Photo by Donovan Valdivia on Unsplash

Around 6:00 PM, a group of angry taxi drivers converged on city hall to protest what they saw as an unfair contract that the city had given to a rival company. Montreal had contracted the Murray-Hill limousine company to have exclusive rights to airport picks ups. In an age before Uber and Lyft, this was a serious source of revenue for average taxi drivers, and being forcibly shut out of the market had enraged a large portion of the city’s average driver.

The crowd migrated from town hall to the main garage of the Murray-Hill limousine service with the intent of burning down their rival’s place of business. Seeing the large group of men with arson in their hearts, surrounding business owners, including the owners of Murray-Hill, began to arm themselves in preparation to defend their business.

What came next was utter chaos.

The Riots Begin

Photo by Flavio Gasperini on Unsplash

As the mob began to approach the Murray-Hill garage, someone opened fire on the crowd. The security personnel defending Murray-Hill were armed primarily with shotguns, but there were snipers on the roof of the garage as well. Once the gunfire started, the mob got out of control.

As reported by the CBC:

Gunfire erupted between armed protesters and security guards, and four buses were set on fire. As seen in this clip, one of those flaming buses ploughed through a garage door.

The two groups exchanged fire as the angry taxi drivers attempted to destroy the garage and overpower the armed security that was protecting the place. In the melee, a Quebec man, Robert Dumas, was shot and killed by a sniper on the roof. He turned out to be an off duty police corporal.

In light of the gunfire, the mob spread out and began to move down the streets in downtown ransacking and looting storefronts, restaurants, and hotels along their route. Without any opposition from government officials or police, more disgruntled people poured into the streets to join in the destruction.

Seeing the disorder erupting in Montreal, the Canadian National Assembly met in the middle of the night and passed a bill compelling the police to return to work. When that did not get the police back on the streets, they opted to send in the army instead.

Around midnight, the Canadian army rolled into Montreal to secure the streets from the rioters and looters. Once the army was deployed, order slowly returned to the city after hours of absolute chaos.

It took less than twenty four hours for the lack of police presence in Montreal to reap devastating effects.

Aftermath

Photo by ev on Unsplash

The situation ended with 108 people arrested, 30 people injured by gunfire, and one dead. There were millions of dollars in damages to local businesses.

The police in Montreal ended up getting their raise, and in a few short years, they were being paid substantially more than they had been in 1969. The Murry-Hill limousine company lost its exclusive rights to airport pickups in Montreal.

A reporter who was on the ground at the time would later recall:

“The bunch of us had thrown in our lot with something called the Mouvement de libération de taxi, a group dedicated to ridding the airport of its Murray Hill limousine monopoly… It seems that all it took back then to organize a full-scale riot in Montreal was a suggestion and lots of beer.”

You can watch the original broadcast by the CBC from the night of October 8th, 1969, here.