The Murray-Hill riot, also known as Montreal's night of terror, occurred during 16 hours of unrest in Montreal, Quebec when the city's police went on strike on 7 October 1969. Many stores were damaged and looted; 100 arrested. Sûreté Corporal Robert Dumas was killed during a violent confrontation between the Murray-Hill taxi company and angry Francophone taxi drivers and their supporters. The arrival of the Van-doos, a unit of the Canadian army, suppressed the rioting and re-established law and order after 16 hours without firm policing.

Montreal's police officers 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, a monopoly held by the Murray-Hill taxi company was symptomatic of Drapeau's rule, in which those with power and influence, but not others, such as working-class taxi drivers, obtained favours from the city. The Murray-Hill company's owners were English-Canadians, but most taxi drivers were French-Canadians. This added to the tension. Taxi drivers formed the Mouvement de Libération du Taxi (MLT) in September 1968 to show their rage at the lucrative airport taxi route being monopolised by the Murray-Hill company 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, and that this justified a violent revolution to make Quebec into an independent socialist nation.

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.

Taxi drivers protested 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.