The Murray-Hill riot, also known as Montreal's night of terror, was the culmination of 16 hours of unrest in Montreal, Quebec during a strike by the Montreal police on 7 October 1969.
Background
Police were motivated to strike because of difficult working conditions caused by disarming FLQ-planted bombs and patrolling frequent protests. Montreal police also wanted higher pay, commensurate with police earnings in Toronto. In addition, Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau, who had been elected as a reformer who had promised to "clean up the city" by cracking down on corruption, turned out to be no different from his predecessors and left many people disillusioned. Drapeau's focus on grandiose projects such as Expo 67, instead of trying to improve the daily lives of Montrealers, had also added to the frustration. The journalist Nick Auf der Maur wrote that by 1969, the working class of Montreal had a feeling that Drapeau cared only about building the gleaming modernistic skyscrapers that dominated the city's skyline and was indifferent to its concerns and needs.
The police wanted an annual salary for a constable to go from $7,300 to $9,200 and charged that policing in Montreal was more dangerous than in Toronto, with two officers being killed in the line of duty in 1968, and that the frequent rioting between French-Canadians and English-Canadians in Montreal in 1968 and 1969 added to the danger. Between February 1968 and April 1969, there were 41 gangland murders in Montreal, which was more than in the previous 15 years combined, as a younger generation of French-Canadian criminals sought to challenge the power of the Mafia, which had traditionally dominated the Montreal underworld.
To many, the monopoly held by the Murray-Hill company was symptomatic of Drapeau's rule, in which those with power and influence, but not others, such as the working-class taxi drivers, obtained favours from the city. The Murray-Hill company's owners were English-Canadians, but most of the taxi drivers were French-Canadians, which added to the tension. The taxi drivers had formed the Mouvement de Libération du Taxi (MLT) in September 1968 to protest their rage at the lucrative airport taxi route being monopolised by one corporation at their expense. The Mouvement de Libération du Taxi was loosely linked to the FLQ, which argued that the French-Canadian working class of Montreal was being exploited by English-Canadian capitalists, which justified a violent revolution to make Quebec into an independent socialist nation.
Civil unrest leading to the police strike
Overall, there were 75 murders in Montreal in 1968, which gave the city the reputation as the "murder capital of Canada." Rioting on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day on 24 June 1968 was triggered by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's, their bête noire, visit to the city angering Quebec separatists. Then came demonstrations by cégep students demanding more placements in the universities and taxi drivers protesting the monopoly of the Murray-Hill company's taxis and buses at the Dorval Airport. On 30 October 1968, roughly 1,000 protesters were led or inspired by the MLT, blockaded Dorval Airport with 250 taxis, and burned Murray-Hill company vehicles when they were presented with the opportunity. As a show of support for the taxi drivers, the FLQ had planted a bomb in a Murray-Hill bus, which was defused by the police before it could go off, and had blown up the home of one of the owners of the Murray-Hill company in Westmount. In the first six months of 1969, there were 93 bank robberies in Montreal, compared to 48 bank robberies in the first six months of 1968. In January and February 1969, the FLQ staged 10 terrorist bombings in Montreal. Between August 1968 and February 1969, there were 75 bombings linked to the FLQ. In February 1969, the FLQ set off bombs at the Montreal Stock Market (injuring 28 people) and at the offices of the Queen's Printer in Montreal.