Will the real Richard Bergeron please stand up?

Projet Montreal’s website seems to have whitewashed an element of its leader’s history.

While it trumpets a number of books Richard Bergeron has published - “Le livre noir de l’automobile” and “L’économie de l’automobile au Québec” - there’s no mention of his most recent treaty, “Les Quebecois au volant, c’est mortel.” The book deals primarily with Bergeron’s favourite bugaboo - the car - and how it has caused millions of deaths and injuries since its invention. He spends much of the book looking at the ways in which car manufacturers, in cahoots with governments everywhere, created cities built around the vehicles, decimating neighbourhoods and public transit systems in the process. But on p. 105, his book veers off course. Here’s what he writes:

“Personne ne sait ce qui s’est réellement passé le 11 septembre 2001. Nous avons tous vu à satiété deux avions de ligne percuter les tours jumelles du World Trade Center a New York. C’est bien là le seul événement dont nous soyons sûrs. Quant aux raisons qui ont motivé cette acte, elles nous demeurent inconnues. Pour ce qui est des deux autres avions qui se seraient écrasés l’un sur le Pentagone, à Washington, l’autre sur un champ, non loin de Pittsburg, en Pennsylvanie, on tombe à mon sens dans la farce macabre. Chacun a pu vérifier à des dizaines de reprises qu’un écrasement d’avion, de quelque facon qu’il se produise, produit toujours une abondance de débris. Or, ni au Pentagone ni en Pennsylvanie, personne n’a jamis vu le moindre débris d’avion. Je suis personnellement du genre à ne pas croire que des avions de 60 tonnes puissent se volatiliser. Il se peut que le fameux 11 septembre 2001, nous ayons simplement été témoins d’un acte de bandatisme d’État aux proportions titanesques.”

He was pilloried by the media when an enterprising journalist from the Journal de Montreal found that passage in his book. Bergeron is still sore about the criticism and refuses to be lumped in with common conspiracy theorists. “It’s not based on the ‘connerie’ that you see online,” he said. “I think there remain questions about what happened on 9/11. But it doesn’t matter now that we’ve moved on with Barack Obama. Historians will do that job in 50, 60 years.” Bergeron, who compares himself repeatedly with the great minds of the past century, mentioned Jane Jacobs, who once wrote somewhat favourably on Quebec independence. He also brought up Henry Ford, an entrepreneurial genius who nonetheless held anti-Semitic views. “With intellectuals you have to let them go further (in their ideas) than the regular population,” he quipped.