The Great Depression (63 page)

Aberhart was in trouble with the voters and with members of his own party because he hadn’t been able to keep his election promise to pay everybody twenty-five dollars a month. In fact, he hadn’t the remotest idea of where the money would come from. His own Social Credit philosophy didn’t include a blueprint for the future. Instead, he had always expected to hire “experts” to tell him what to do. To search out these experts and to appease the insurgents in the party, he created the Social Credit Board and appointed to it five MLAs – all back-benchers. This was an extraordinary delegation of authority and a slap in the face to responsible government, for it bypassed the Cabinet. But Aberhart’s ministers went along with it because they didn’t want to be blamed if the scheme flopped. Here was another example of provincial efforts to subvert the democratic process during the
Depression – as outrageous, in its own way, as Hepburn’s attempts to install one-party government in Ontario. In effect, a group of experts, not elected but appointed by a small, unrepresentative committee, was to end up running the province.

The acknowledged expert, of course, was Major Douglas, whose curious notions had launched Aberhart’s political career. The dissident members of the caucus, who wanted Douglas’s theories put into practice in Alberta, had been in touch with him for some months. Now the first task of the all-powerful Social Credit Board was to invite him back.

In spite of his break with the Premier, Douglas wasn’t averse to returning. His position as moral leader of the movement was shaky. Douglas’s supporters could not long have clung to a leader who continued to shun the only Social Credit government in the world. Douglas was not prepared to come immediately but he did agree to send two of his followers to Alberta. If their report was favourable, then he would take on the job of directing the Social Credit Board.

Aberhart’s troubles were not over, however; the dissidents in the party still wanted him out. And he was under attack not only from the conventional newspapers but also from a new and more virulent weekly, the
Rebel
, whose editor was a Russian-born journalist and Calgary school teacher named J.J. Zubick. Zubick was not one to shilly-shally. In his first issue he called Aberhart a “dishonest, dishonourable, lying blaspheming charlatan, who insinuated himself to power by deception and misrepresentation, and is morally unfit to hold the office of premier.…” There was much more to come.

Douglas’s two emissaries from Britain arrived that summer and went to work. One was a tire salesman named George Frederick Powell. The other was a Southampton insurance man, L.D. Byrne. On August 3, a special three-day session of the legislature accepted their recommendations and made them into law, which the Opposition, with some truth, called “Hitler legislation.”

The purpose of the Credit of Alberta Regulation Bill was to give the province dictatorial powers over the banks. Every bank and all bank employees were to be licensed and all their activities put under the control of the Social Credit Board. A companion bill made it impossible for any bank or employee who was refused a licence to seek redress in the courts. And under the
Judicature Act Amendment Bill, the courts could not take action regarding the constitutionality of these or any other pieces of government legislation.

The federal Minister of Justice wasted no time in disallowing this astonishing legislation. He threw it out in just eleven days. That, apparently, was what the Douglasites wanted – a chance to paint Ottawa as the villain on the side of the hated Eastern banks. As Powell later admitted, “The disallowed Acts had been drawn up mainly to show the people of Alberta who were their
real
enemies, and in that respect they succeeded admirably.” Douglas himself was jubilant. He instructed his visiting experts to get rid of the RCMP and form a provincial police force in its place. That move had already been initiated. Every member of the new force was required to be an enthusiastic Social Credit supporter.

All of this was more than the Alberta attorney general, John Hugill, could take. Hugill was a Calgary lawyer, a one-time partner of R.B. Bennett, and one of the few Social Creditors who was a member of the province’s business and social elite. He quit, calling his former chief a “Teutonic dictator,” and began work immediately on an exposé of the government. When Aberhart heard about that, he threatened Hugill’s publisher, the Ryerson Press, with cancellation of all its textbook projects in the Alberta schools. The book was never published. Aberhart himself became attorney general, his only qualification being a correspondence course in law he’d taken ten years before.

The continued opposition in the press, especially Stewart Cameron’s wicked cartoons in the
Herald
and Zubick’s unrelenting vilification in the
Rebel
, was driving the Premier toward the most intemperate legislation of all – a ham-handed attempt to stifle the press.

The move was popular with the party. Aberhart’s biographers quote from one of the Premier’s September broadcasts in which he excited wild applause when he attacked the press as a “mouthpiece of the financiers [who] persist in publishing fantasies.… I feel certain,” he cried, “that the citizens of Alberta will soon come to judgment that something should be done to curb the mad-dog operations of certain of the financial newspapers.… We license doctors, we license lawyers, and school-teachers and businessmen and auto drivers and hotel keepers for the protection of the public. Why shouldn’t the newspapers be licensed also?”

There’s no doubt that Aberhart’s muddled logic made sense to his audience – and, indeed, to all of his supporters. Yet the implications were horrifying; and that became clear in the fall session when he carried out his implied threat and introduced the euphemistically titled Accurate News and Information Act. Simply put, he intended to muzzle the newspapers as surely as any European dictator. The new act would require newspapers to publish
any
statement made by the chairman of the all-powerful Social Credit Board to correct or amplify a news report on a government activity or policy. The newspapers could also be forced to reveal their sources of information as well as the name and address of anyone who wrote an editorial or news story. If a newspaper refused to comply with this law, it would be prohibited from publishing! Writers who resisted would be banned from any further publication. In addition, fines of up to a thousand dollars a day could be imposed on those who failed to comply. The press, understandably, mounted a massive campaign against the legislation.

Other bills introduced in this spate of legislation included one to tax the paid-up capital of the banks and another to put all “credit institutions” under the direction of the Social Credit Board. Aberhart refused to have these bills tested by the Supreme Court of Canada, whereupon the lieutenant-governor, John Campbell Bowen, refused to sign them, an unprecedented act that forced a test. The court eventually ruled all three bills unconstitutional. For their spirited fight against the Alberta government, the province’s five daily and ninety weekly newspapers would be awarded the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for upholding the freedom of the press, the only instance in which the Pulitzer board of judges went outside the borders of the United States to honour enterprise in journalism.

In Quebec, Maurice Duplessis did not need to make laws to muzzle the press. In his extra-legal war on communism, he had the newspapers, both French and English, on his side. They didn’t utter a peep of protest when, following the scrapping of the infamous Section 98 in 1936, Duplessis introduced, in 1937, the even more infamous Padlock Law.

The catalyst was the Spanish Civil War. With the exception of a few urban intellectuals and a handful of radicals, the Quebec populace was wholeheartedly and enthusiastically on the side of
the insurgent general, Francisco Franco. That was, after all, the Roman Catholic side, a side that accepted uncritically the Franco propaganda that the Loyalists were murdering priests and nuns and were intent on destroying the church in Spain in the name of “Godless Communism.” In the Quebec press, the Loyalists were almost invariably referred to as
les rouges
and Loyalist military victories were often described as massacres. As one American observer reported, “Any active advocate of the Loyalist cause or of any social or intellectual or labor union activity which, by any stretch of the imagination can be linked with Russia, is, in short, in the habitant’s mind, not far from being a potential priest-murderer, nun-ravisher and sacrament-defiler himself.” It was not the Left that threatened violence in Quebec. The powerful Catholic lay organization the Knights of Columbus in Quebec City forewarned that if they could not prevent communist activities peacefully, they would resort to force.

It was in this atmosphere that Duplessis on March 16, at the suggestion of Cardinal Villeneuve, the Archbishop of Quebec, introduced an Act to Protect the Province against Communist Propaganda. This was the notorious Padlock Law. In introducing the bill in the lower house, the Quebec premier used the familiar word that Canadian politicians have so often employed when facing a supposed crisis: “We are trying to establish order in the province.” Leon Casgrain, a Liberal from Rivière-du-Loup, provided an echo from the opposite side of the floor. “It is about time we re-established order,” he said.

There was no doubt about the kind of disorder the Premier was trying to stifle. He was after Communist party members, who numbered fewer than one thousand in the province, and also the unwitting communists who, in his mind, were legion. To Duplessis, their very presence constituted “disorder.”

It was an incredible piece of legislation. Under the new law anyone who allowed his domicile to be used to propagate communism or Bolshevism “by any means whatsoever” could have it padlocked for up to a year. This could be done at the whim of the attorney general, a Cabinet post Duplessis had reserved for himself. As attorney general he could not only padlock a building at his own sweet will, but he could also authorize the destruction of any literature – newspaper, pamphlet, magazine, circular –
anything
he thought carried communist or Bolshevik propaganda.
Those whose homes were padlocked under the act were considered guilty until they could prove their innocence.

The most sinister aspect of the new law was that it nowhere defined “Communism” or “Bolshevism.” Duplessis insisted that wasn’t necessary. “Communism can be felt,” he said. “We shall understand by Communism what everybody understands by Communism.…
Any definition would prevent application of the law
” (emphasis added).

In introducing the Padlock Law, the Premier had taken a long stride toward fascism in Quebec, but few members seemed alarmed by its implications. There were no Patrick Henrys in the Legislative Assembly that day, no Voltaires. Anglophones as well as Francophones accepted this monstrous attack on civil rights without a murmur. The second and third readings of the bill passed without dissent in the space of half an hour. No one, it seemed, was troubled by the omission of a definition of communism. Quite the contrary; that was seen as an asset. The province’s most distinguished historian, Sir Thomas Chapais, declared that he “didn’t believe in restricting such an evil within a narrow compass.” His colleagues in the Legislative Council, the upper house, agreed. What they were attacking wasn’t really communism; it was the whole idea of allowing the airing of opinions in their province that ran counter to the accepted view of the religious and nationalist establishment. The Hon. Jacob Nicol put it bluntly when he said that if communism
was
to be defined, it should include all those “who daily vilify public men.” The Hon. John Hall Kelly said he was happy to pass the bill without a definition of communism but saw no problem in finding one. Kelly’s definition of communism was equally broad. It meant “those actions which sap the foundations of things dear to the province.”

Communism never was defined in Quebec because the government didn’t want to define it. In a revealing, indeed appalling, statement one Cabinet minister, T.J. Coonan, explained that the act had to be broad enough to cover “the many who are Communists without knowing it.”

One might have expected the press, or at the very least the Anglophone press, to take up the cudgels against this unprecedented invasion of traditional legal safeguards. But the press was either silent or, as in the case of the Montreal
Gazette
, in favour of
the new legislation. The
Gazette
insisted that communism was rampant in the province and was also spreading alarmingly. Those who criticized the Padlock Law on the grounds that it conspired against free speech, the paper declared, “cannot discriminate between the legitimate exercise of that right and its flagrant abuse.” Or as Cardinal Villeneuve put it in August, freedom of speech was “not freedom to outrage our social conceptions, to insult our traditions, our principles and our religion.”

The implications might have been seen as ludicrous had Duplessis not been so deadly serious. The
Canadian Forum
pointed out that if the section dealing with papers and pamphlets were strictly enforced, it would prevent circulation of the Bible (“And all that believed were together, and had all things common”) or the works of the early Christian Fathers, not to mention those of Sir Thomas More and Charles Kingsley. Frank Scott, perhaps facetiously, told Dr. Cyril James, the principal of McGill, “… you have in your library works of Lenin and Stalin and Marx.… If they’re going to be allowed to circulate … you’re distributing works of Communism and Bolshevism. You’re breaking the Padlock Act.” A worried James phoned the Montreal chief of police, who told him, “We’re not going to apply the law against McGill.” That, as Scott said later, underlined the unfairness of a law that could be applied unevenly. It made clear the government’s intention to decide whom to punish and whom to absolve.

The Act was not immediately enforced. All that summer and fall communist meetings were banned as the police took arbitrary action against anybody they considered subversive. But it was not until November 9 that Duplessis actually invoked the new law. At 8:30 that morning, one of the employees of
La Clarté
, a communist newspaper published in Montreal, arrived at the office to find the door smashed with an axe. Twenty-five provincial policemen were on the premises confiscating everything from pens and inkwells to cash and postage stamps.