Michel Bourdon

Michel Bourdon (September 19, 1943–November 29, 2004) was a union leader, journalist, and politician in the Canadian province of Quebec. During the 1970s, he played a major role in exposing corrupt practices in Quebec's construction industry. He later served in the National Assembly of Quebec from 1989 to 1996 as a member of the Parti Québécois (PQ).

Bourdon was married for a time to Louise Harel, herself a prominent Quebec politician. The pair had an amiable divorce and remained political allies in the years that followed. Their daughter, Catherine Harel-Bourdon, became chair of the Commission scolaire de Montréal in 2013.

Bourdon was born in Montreal and began working as a journalist with the Nouveau Journal at age sixteen. He later edited the Quartier Libre while attending the Université de Montréal.

He joined Radio-Canada in 1966 as a French-language television news reporter and subsequently became president of the Syndicat général du cinéma et de la télévision. In 1968, he was the primary spokesperson for a group of Radio-Canada journalists who went on strike to support a television reporter suspended for allegedly showing "anti-police bias" in reporting on the 1968 St-Jean-Baptiste Day riots. Bourdon and four other journalists later were given five-day suspensions for refusing to work during Radio-Canada's coverage of the 1968 Canadian federal election, which took place the day after the riots.

Bourdon was fired from Radio-Canada during the 1970 FLQ Crisis for "insubordination," after publicly accusing the station of censorship in its coverage of the event.

As vice-president of the Montreal council of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) in 1970, Bourdon endorsed Quebec independence and accused Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau of having imposed the War Measures Act on Quebec during the FLQ Crisis to weaken the constitutional Parti Québécois rather than the radical Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) paramilitary group. He also accused Trudeau of having put Quebec under military occupation with "means of terror incomparably superior to those of the FLQ." The following year, Bourdon took part in a ten-member citizens' commission that reviewed the Canadian government's response to the crisis.

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