with an ongoing strike at British Columbia Penitentiary, a strike that would spread to Collins Bay and Joyceville Institution in Ontario. Involuntary transfers resulting from protests and strikes inside would then help spread word of the struggle across the country. After the death of prison organizer Robert Landers in 1976 in Millhaven segregation, August 10 would come to be known as Prisoners Justice Day or PJD, and continues to be a major day of mourning and protest at jails and prisons across Canada.

The 1970s in Quebec

As an introduction to writing about this period of time in prisons in Quebec, it is necessary to give some Quebec specific context. In the 1960s, the popular movement for Quebec separatism was heating up. In 1970, the Front de Liberation de Quebec(FLQ), an armed national liberation group, carried out two kidnappings, one of which ended in the assassination of Pierre LaPorte. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (the current Prime Minister’s father) passed the War Measures Act and sent the army into Quebec, which resulted in the arrest of around 500 people in Montreal and the surrounding areas. The culmination of this struggle was the election of the Parti Quebecois to power in the provincial government in 1976. Some folks affiliated with the FLQ ended up in the federal jails in Quebec while some sought asylum in Cuba. This atmosphere of struggle created a context for the struggle inside prisons in Quebec as people involved in movements on the outside ended up in prison and movements on the inside heated up