It is 50 years this week that a group of junior level recruits of the Committee to Re-elect the President (Richard Nixon), made a forced entry into the office of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington. They were apprehended without resistance; nothing was stolen, nothing was damaged, no one was hurt.

It was not even the “third-rate burglary” of White House press secretary Ron Ziegler’s description. The intention was to attach wiretaps on the Democrats’ telephones, and President Nixon knew nothing about it. As the ensuing saga unfolded, in my capacity as the publisher of a small semi-urban daily newspaper in Québec with some readers in Vermont, I warned of the dangers of criminalizing policy differences.