Original Broadcaster Captioning (Enhanced). Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:03an informed choice.
00:00:19If you're on the outside of Quebec looking in,
00:00:21last night's provincial election result might seem
00:00:25surprising. CBC is projecting A Patsy Quebecois government.
00:00:30This is a dramatic turn around for the party and a political
00:00:34resurrection, but maybe also worrying if you
00:00:38see Quebec as inseparably Canadian. Model said he will
00:00:42hold a referendum on Quebec's independence. He is quite
00:00:46assertive, very dedicated to
00:00:48the sovereigntist movement and the idea of a referendum
00:00:52and the courageous battle of francophones to protect their
00:00:56language and culture will succeed when they have their
00:01:00own country. Because if you look at any opinion poll from
00:01:04the last 1015 years, you would have been led to
00:01:07believe Quebeckers do not want independence. This is a
00:01:11compilation of legit polls on La Prueba, La Souffrance,
00:01:15Echec support for Quebec sovereignty. It's almost never
00:01:18been more clear than it is now that far more Quebecers would
00:01:22vote, you know, on a referendum to quit Canada
00:01:26than would vote yes. And yet they just elected a political
00:01:30party, the Pepsi Quebecois, as a minority government, yes,
00:01:34but still whose core identity is wrapped around this notion
00:01:38of Quebec becoming its own country. How did that happen?
00:01:41How did a separatist party when a government mandate if most
00:01:46Quebecers don't want to separate?
00:01:53If you're trying to understand how the PQ goes from zero to
00:01:57hero in just one election cycle, it helps to understand the
00:02:01catastrophic crash out of the party they're replacing.
00:02:05Historically, Quebec has been a 2 horse race,
00:02:08the separatist Pepsi Quebecois against the Federalist Liberals.
00:02:12But 2018 was the year the Coalition Avenir Quebec came up
00:02:17the middle. CBC is projecting it will be a CAQ
00:02:20majority government. This was fresh eyed Francois Lugo after
00:02:24having spent years as the leader of a third place party.
00:02:28But his winning recipe was in finding this third way where
00:02:32you could both accept and reject both federalism and
00:02:36separatism, staying in Canada while
00:02:39demanding more as a province. This was Quebec nationalism for
00:02:43Francois logo and his government. He tried to bring a
00:02:47new approach, not necessarily looking on separating from
00:02:51Canada, not necessarily staying within
00:02:54Canada, but trying to get as much power
00:02:56with autonomy to get as much power from the federal
00:03:00government. So 2018 they win power and four years after that,
00:03:04when they're up for reelection, their campaign slogan becomes
00:03:08continual, let's continue, let's keep going. And they
00:03:11crush it even harder. They managed to win 90 of 125 total
00:03:15seats, which is way bigger a majority
00:03:18than any government ever needs. Total blowout. Then it
00:03:21all goes downhill. It went from failure to failure in El care,
00:03:26in education and infrastructure. Anytime they wanted to launch a
00:03:31new initiative, it failed on its face. So the
00:03:34second mandate was really abysmal. There was never just
00:03:38one reason why everything went so wrong for the CAQ,
00:03:42but one of the biggest and earliest was this broken
00:03:46promise of 1/3 link, this multibillion dollar tunnel
00:03:50connecting Quebec City to Levy
00:03:52crossing the Saint Lawrence. The CQ very abruptly abandoned
00:03:56the part of it that would have allowed cars to drive it,
00:03:59opting instead to make this tunnel for public transit only.
00:04:03So much for solving the traffic problem. And this broken
00:04:07promise was almost like a death in the family,
00:04:11the sweet component of deception.
00:04:16Kali. Yeah,
00:04:19just sweet
00:04:22choice. It haunted the party for years and even today it is
00:04:26debated. It's been changed. It's still very much in a
00:04:30planning phase. It's not great. Like I said,
00:04:33this is but one thing and there are others. Like in the run up
00:04:38to advanced voting, this CAQ claim of election
00:04:41interference by some meddling Americans. But that turned out
00:04:46to be way overblown. It backfired,
00:04:48looked like a party in panic mode, trying to cry.
00:04:52Both stoke a fire. It reeked of desperation. The last straw
00:04:57that the on the camel's back was his idea of interference on
00:05:02the part of the US and the Quebec election. And it's
00:05:07something that the party had initiated,
00:05:10invented to create a
00:05:12situation of other crisis of or anxiety. One survey published
00:05:16just two days before election night would suggest 77% of
00:05:19Quebeckers Suet Arshan jammed the government. They hope for a
00:05:23change of government and for a new party to lead Quebec.
00:05:27That's the key issue was an election about change but
00:05:30showing a dissatisfaction towards the incumbent,
00:05:34telling to the incumbent, OK, maybe you want to do something
00:05:38to to change the situation, but we don't see the result. We
00:05:41don't see
00:05:43the outcome. And so you had the CAQ in government imploding.
00:05:46The Liberals couldn't really capitalize. They had their own
00:05:51leadership struggle only months before the election,
00:05:55leaderless again. And while the CAQ was hemorrhaging support,
00:05:59it was all four other political parties scrambling for seats.
00:06:04They all saw massive gains come election night,
00:06:07with the CAQ losing every single one of its seats,
00:06:11but one political party
00:06:13would manage to pick up most of those pieces.
00:06:21I'll admit it's a bit funny to explain to you how one party
00:06:25won by telling you, well, it's because the other party
00:06:29lost. I get it. So while the whole change election thing is
00:06:33real, it is extremely hard for any
00:06:36political party in Canada to just waltz into a third mandate
00:06:40after eight years in power. Much credit is owed for the
00:06:44PQ's win to its leader, nicknamed PSP.
00:06:48Lamont, always seen as a young leader
00:06:50kind of dynamic, I would say. Also an
00:06:52intellectual. He likes the role of being a dander dog,
00:06:56and so he doesn't attract the spotlight on him,
00:06:59but he is kind of comfortable in that position. It's hard to
00:07:02overstate how strategically Paul St. Pierre Plamondon
00:07:06seemed to hit the right notes at just the right time,
00:07:09while Quebeckers were questioning not just how tired
00:07:12they were of the CAQ, but whether they could even
00:07:16trust them. Plamondon's campaign slogan
00:07:18would be as unsubtle as possible. Lashua de la
00:07:21confiance, the choice of trust. He also
00:07:24positioned himself as a fighter at a time when maybe Canadians
00:07:28broadly including Quebeckers, might feel like they'd want one
00:07:32in a leader. And there were absolutely battles Ramondo and
00:07:36the PQ felt were worth fighting. The party wanted to extend
00:07:40secularism rules and the fight over religious symbols to
00:07:44younger children. Lamont would explicitly connect overcrowding
00:07:48at schools
00:07:49and in the housing market to immigration. Too much,
00:07:52too broken a system. And surveys would continue to show
00:07:56that Quebeckers did and do feel threatened in several ways. The
00:08:00feeling that the French language is threatened is at an
00:08:04all time high, 76%, and the perception that English
00:08:07Canadians consider francophones as inferior also high 69%. They
00:08:12apply more, don't probably wanted to either
00:08:15create a class, create some frustration. They
00:08:18wanted to spark something.
00:08:19The strategy we spoke about how to alienate, frustrate,
00:08:24provoke as so that he could use that to buffer his claims. You
00:08:29create a dynamic, it's US versus them. So it's
00:08:32not surprising that a key part of the PQ's messaging would be
00:08:36around taking on Canada itself. One of Plamondon's early
00:08:40campaign pledges was to scrap the provinces minister
00:08:44responsible for relations with the rest of Canada,
00:08:47replacing it with a minister of independence. Which brings us
00:08:52to the elephant in the room. How do you persuade
00:08:55a province full of people who don't want separation to vote
00:08:59for your separatist party? Well, ironically,
00:09:02you separate those two things from each other.
00:09:07Wait for U.S. President Donald Trump to leave the White House
00:09:11and so his party won't hold a referendum before January 20th,
00:09:152029. To Plamondon's credit, he has always been very direct
00:09:20and consistent about his belief that Quebec should be its own
00:09:24country. But in promising to shelve the question of holding
00:09:28a referendum for at least two years in change,
00:09:31he managed to convince enough people that you can vote for
00:09:35the PQ without voting for separation.
00:09:38And anyway, savvy voters would have known,
00:09:40even if you don't put much stock in that promise. Minority
00:09:44governments, as the EQ has now, don't tend to last that long.
00:09:48There may very well be another election before Trump is out of
00:09:51office and before the PQ can hold a referendum. Plus,
00:09:54with only one other party in the National Assembly
00:09:57supporting sovereignty, there's not even any guarantee
00:10:01a minority government could scrape together the votes to
00:10:04hold a referendum at all. And even if it did,
00:10:06wouldn't the outcome, according to
00:10:09all the polling we've ever seen simply be a resounding no?
00:10:12Vote for the Q does not mean this at least support for the
00:10:15referendum. People were just so fed up and they wanted some
00:10:19change and the one that was able to channel that change and
00:10:22get the voters frustration was a passkey for most voters. They
00:10:26know the drill. Meaning that OK, we'll vote for the party
00:10:30require will like the program, we like the leader,
00:10:32etcetera. If I found them comes, we just simply will vote
00:10:36against it and that will be the end of the story.
00:10:39What you have in Quebec right now is a province that has just
00:10:43completely upended the political hierarchy. The CQ
00:10:46government reduced to zero seats,
00:10:48no longer even able to hold official party status in the
00:10:52legislature, and the party that was four
00:10:55years ago absolutely decimated, rising from the ashes. But not
00:10:59because Quebeckers suddenly changed their mind about
00:11:02separation. I think they're just convinced that's an issue
00:11:06for another day. Exactly which day, though, we shall
00:11:13no.
00:13:17It is absolutely shocking that the people on this plane
00:13:20survived.
00:13:22Look, this is video taken by a
00:13:25passenger. Pure panic onboard fly Dubai flight 1073 after the
00:13:29copilot of the plane allegedly stabbed the pilot. The entire
00:13:34plane at this point at grave risk of crashing and everyone
00:13:38was screaming, there were children crying.
00:13:41Except a whole series of things happen. Highly improbable,
00:13:45almost impossible, it seems to me
00:13:49as a commercial.
00:13:54All of these incredible things together end up saving
00:13:58everybody's life against all odds. And I'm going to show you
00:14:01how
00:14:07there were more than 170 people on board this flight,
00:14:10which is a daily flight running from Dubai International in the
00:14:14United Arab Emirates to Ben Gurion International near Tel
00:14:18Aviv in Israel. This is what that flight path normally looks
00:14:22like. It's about a three hour flight,
00:14:25except on September 30th, things would take a very abrupt
00:14:28turn here. But when I say abrupt turn,
00:14:31I don't mean left or right, I mean down.
00:14:34At around 8:21 AM local time over Saudi airspace,
00:14:37the plane lost altitude more than 17,
00:14:40000 feet in under a minute and it speed up dramatically as it
00:14:45pitched towards the earth
00:14:49Jordanian border. Suddenly the aircraft dropped a massive
00:14:53massive turbulence for 2030 seconds. We know now what was
00:14:57happening around this time was the planes copilot allegedly
00:15:01attacking the planes captain nearly killing him. The
00:15:05struggle beginning after he stabbed the other pilot and
00:15:09sent the jet plunging thousands of meters in just seconds. At
00:15:13this point, with the attacker taking
00:15:16control, potentially looking to crash
00:15:18the plane, the only way that people on
00:15:21board survive is if the captain survives. And improbably,
00:15:25he does. This is him, Captain Smith Matcha from India.
00:15:28He somehow manages to survive a surprise attack from an armed
00:15:33assailant in close quarters while flying a plane. But he's
00:15:37down and in a real bad way. One of the passengers,
00:15:40a dentist would later tell CNN. Much other suffered massive
00:15:44blood loss, was severely wounded. He was
00:15:47covered in cuts, his head,
00:15:49his hands, they were practically sliced
00:15:52open, almost severed in two.
00:15:53Historically when 1 pilot turns on the other. There are clear
00:15:58examples where this ends in disaster for everybody on board.
00:16:02In 2015, Germanwings flight 9525,
00:16:04the copilot locks the captain out of the cockpit when he
00:16:08leaves to use the bathroom. He then manually steers the plane
00:16:12into a rapid descent, crashing into the French Alps.
00:16:16Everybody on board dies. Or just a couple years before that,
00:16:20in 2013, same thing, except this time it's the
00:16:23captain on a flight from Mozambique who locks the
00:16:26copilot out of the cockpit. He crashes the plane into a
00:16:30National Park in Namibia, once again killing everybody on
00:16:34board. But this time, Captain Matcha survives the
00:16:37attack from his copilot and manages to do one other
00:16:41incredible thing that's single handedly triggers a series of
00:16:45events that keep that plane in the air.
00:16:52So imagine the copilot is believed to have attacked the
00:16:56captain with some sort of stabbing weapon,
00:16:59leaves him bleeding on the ground. I've seen multiple
00:17:03reports that he was so grievously wounded he was on
00:17:07the verge of passing out completely even that he did at
00:17:10one point, but just before he did he
00:17:13somehow unlocks the cockpit door. They redesigned airplanes
00:17:17to, in fact, create
00:17:19this impenetrable door between the cabin and the cockpit. That
00:17:23door remains locked from the incident. Problem with
00:17:26yesterday is that the threat did not come from the cabinet.
00:17:30This is the critical point at which the entire arc of this
00:17:33crisis pivots. It's where passengers begin to realize not
00:17:37just that something has gone terribly wrong,
00:17:40but that they can do something about it.
00:17:43The plane just started going up and down,
00:17:46says 1 passenger. We started hearing screams. The plane,
00:17:49according to those on board, nose dived at a sickening angle.
00:17:53Overhead bins popped open and luggage flew out. Other
00:17:57accounts spoke of incredible G forces almost pinning
00:18:00passengers to their seats as the plane itself plunged and
00:18:04leveled repeatedly. It was like the craziest Holocaust that you
00:18:08ever did, but like, multiplied by
00:18:11father. It felt like something really wrong is happening here.
00:18:15So for some passengers to have overcome this chaos and to have
00:18:19the instinct to burst into the cockpit to see what was wrong,
00:18:24Yet another incredible development,
00:18:26without which I don't know how this plane survives. Eventually,
00:18:30one man bursts in and grabs the assailant, the copilot,
00:18:34from behind. Yes,
00:18:38the first Beta beta message.
00:18:44That's one of the many heroes of this story. By all accounts,
00:18:48wrestling control of the plane from the alleged hijacker
00:18:52happened very quickly. The dentist I mentioned earlier,
00:18:56he says he tied the attacker up using headphone cords and
00:19:00plastic zip ties. He then started tending to the wounded
00:19:03pilot. He was in serious condition, not critical,
00:19:06perhaps, but serious due to the massive
00:19:09blood loss. And that would have looked like
00:19:13and a warn you this is the most graphic part of the story
00:19:16because it's at this point we have video of the state of the
00:19:20lanes captain as he's lying injured on the floor.
00:19:24But this was the scene you're looking at. 2 bloodied pilots
00:19:28on the floor on this passenger jet in mid air,
00:19:31passengers holding one of them down,
00:19:34treating the other. The reason I show that to you is because I
00:19:38want you to understand how unreal this all would have felt
00:19:42to everybody on board. And yet we have yet another improbable
00:19:46act from the very same passenger who claims to have
00:19:50subdued the attacker in the 1st place. He single handedly pulls
00:19:54the plane out of its nose dive.
00:19:57Uh,
00:20:00yeah.
00:20:02He would later reveal he learned that move from TV shows
00:20:06pulling on the pilot steering column,
00:20:08the yoke to pitch the planes nose up. They actually pull up
00:20:12the stick the the airplane stick. The plane was decreasing
00:20:16in very, very sharp angle. It is a
00:20:18tricky maneuver, you know, not normal or a commercial
00:20:21airliner to be in that flight position to be nose down at 600
00:20:25miles an hour. But even all this,
00:20:28as improbable as it all is put together,
00:20:30only leads to yet another impossible question.
00:20:34How do you land a plane when you have no pilot?
00:20:42In a normal emergency, if such a thing even exists,
00:20:46the pilot is doing more than just flying the plane and
00:20:50landing it. They are the planes eyes and ears,
00:20:53navigating weather patterns, how much fuel they've got left,
00:20:57and which runways are even available and safe. There was
00:21:01nothing but desert beneath US1 passenger told CNN. We feared
00:21:05being taken to an enemy country or landing in the middle of the
00:21:09desert. We didn't know who to trust. Now,
00:21:12if this were a Hollywood movie, the scripted stroke of luck
00:21:16here would be that someone on board is simply bold enough to
00:21:20do something like land a plane that they've never done before
00:21:24and it just happens to work out. But in real life,
00:21:28there just happened to be another set of pilots on board,
00:21:32an off duty British pilot along with another, together,
00:21:35a pair of relief pilots who were meant to fly the next
00:21:39flight
00:21:41was fortunate that they were on an airplane that had this extra
00:21:45deadheading crew, as we call it. You know,
00:21:47but to actually jump into a pilot seat when you've got
00:21:51another pilot next to you that potentially was suicidal and
00:21:55the captain of the aircraft neutralized as well was
00:21:59absolutely heroic action. Those 2 pilots took control of the
00:22:03plane, diverted to an airport not in
00:22:06Israel where they were originally going,
00:22:08but in nearby Saudi Arabia instead.
00:22:11Which interestingly is a country Israel has no formal
00:22:15diplomatic relations with, but that years ago did open its
00:22:19airspace. 2 passenger planes flying to and from Israel. So
00:22:23they had control of the plane and a safe runway to land on.
00:22:27But there was still one more problem. The plane was badly
00:22:31damaged. When I saw the images of the aircraft on the ground
00:22:35with the rudder section torn out,
00:22:37I immediately had a cold chill. If you've ever looked at the
00:22:41back of a plane,
00:22:43you know what that vertical tail looks like. But what's a
00:22:46little more subtle than that is the rudder,
00:22:49which is this movable flap that controls the side to side
00:22:52swinging of the lanes nose. It's basically stabilizing the
00:22:56plane. If you RIP that out, as you can see in these photos
00:22:59here of this fly Dubai flight shortly after emergency landing,
00:23:03you have two problems. 1 is that you're possibly bleeding
00:23:07hydraulic fluid out all over the place,
00:23:09which affects a whole bunch of other systems on the plane. But
00:23:13two,
00:23:14landing becomes more dangerous. Letters are the key element of
00:23:17aircraft stability, particularly at landing. And in
00:23:21this case the runner was not there. The airplane went
00:23:24through extensive aerodynamic shot. All of the experts I've
00:23:28heard on this believe it was the planes nosedive. We
00:23:31mentioned at the start that sudden steep descent that
00:23:35likely applied enormous aerodynamic forces to the tail,
00:23:38enough to RIP that part of the rudder right off. But somehow
00:23:42those two relief pilots
00:23:44managed to land the plane regardless,
00:23:50so now investigators have their work cut out for them. Why did
00:23:54this copilot hijack the plane, and what was he trying to do?
00:23:58Did he improvise the weapon he used,
00:24:01or did he smuggle it on board? And Speaking of getting on
00:24:05board, should intelligence or law
00:24:07enforcement officers have known to apprehend him before he got
00:24:11on that plane? Those answers will hopefully
00:24:14come with time, but all we know now is that
00:24:17this plane load of passengers somehow pulled off the
00:24:20impossible. The captain surviving A devastating attack,
00:24:24managing with his last sliver of consciousness to open the
00:24:27cockpit door, allowing passengers undergoing
00:24:30extreme G forces to storm that cockpit, subdue the attacker,
00:24:34pull the plane out of the nosedive just in time. And then
00:24:38they just happened to have a pair of pilots on hand who
00:24:41grabbed the controls, find a safe runway to land on,
00:24:44and manage to do so with a severely damaged rudder in a
00:24:48plane that no inspector would ever consider airworthy.
00:24:51I don't know what you call that, but as terrible and traumatic
00:24:56as it was for everyone involved, those folks undeniably got very,
00:25:01very lucky.
00:30:22On this edition of the Fifth Estate...
00:30:24...we're in Edmonton, just days ahead of a crucial
00:30:28provincial referendum that risks reshaping the country;
00:30:31asking Albertans whether they want to remain
00:30:34a province of Canada.
00:30:37The only way to amend the Canadian Constitution
00:30:41is for a Canadian province
00:30:44to vote itself the hell out of Canada.
00:30:48[audience cheers]
00:30:49Let's not throw in the towel and give up on our country
00:30:53just as the battle has turned in our favour
00:30:55and victory is in sight.
00:30:58And while Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she'll vote to remain in Canada,