The Great Depression (65 page)

A month later, in a proposal that shocked the Prime Minister, Rogers declared no attempt should be made to balance the budget and tabled the subcommittee’s recommendation that an additional seventy-five million dollars be spent at once on relief works.

A nasty struggle followed in the Cabinet, with the conservative Dunning and the Keynesian Rogers both threatening to resign. In the end both men were mollified by a compromise that whittled the sum down to forty million. It was to be spent on a national program of conservation and development, much of which had already been recommended in the final report of the NEC.

Like it or not, Ottawa was finally being forced to take on some national responsibilities. Two bills, designed that spring to revive the flagging construction industry, nudged the country forward on its path toward centralization. The Municipal Improvements Assistance Act offered loans for public works directly to the municipalities without going through the provinces, a procedure that both King and Bennett had said was impossible. The National Housing Act made low-interest loans available to the municipalities for low-cost housing, again bypassing the provinces.

Dunning admitted that the federal government was edging into a field it had not previously occupied, while King, in a rueful diary entry, noted that nations everywhere were moving “in the direction of the extension of State authority and enterprise.” He feared that “Canada will not be able to resist the pressure of the tide.… The most we can do,” King wrote, “is to hope to go only sufficiently far with it as to prevent the power of Government passing to those who would go much farther.…”

It was, in fact, happening just across the Ottawa River. In a different context, the Quebec government had already gone a long way towards imposing the authority of the state on those who disagreed with it. But King, for all his concerns about the authority of the state, was not prepared to interfere.

By May 10, 1938, the attorney general’s department in Quebec was able to announce that it had ordered 124 raids under the Padlock Law and seized 521 “Communist” books. Yet no one was arrested or charged with any offence. As the Canadian Civil Liberties Union pointed out, “twice every three days, for six months, the provincial police have carried out execution without judgment, dispossession without due process of law; twenty times a month they have trampled on liberties as old as the Magna Carta.”

Duplessis defended the Act, comparing it to “the British law which enables authorities to put handcuffs on undesirable subjects and dangerous persons.” Under the British law, of course, such people, no matter how undesirable, were given their day in court. But the Premier had his entire Cabinet behind him, including the English-speaking members, one of whom, Gilbert Layton, praised the law as “one of the best pieces of legislation ever passed in the province.”

The Duplessis government operated through fear. In most cases it wasn’t necessary to go through the motions of padlocking a home or a place of business. The
threat
of being padlocked, or even the fear of being padlocked, was enough to cause the owners of public halls to close their doors to progressive or left-wing groups protesting the loss of civil liberties in the province.

Those who publicly opposed the law found themselves in danger of being labelled communists. The CCLU had trouble organizing any kind of protest because the owners of meeting halls refused to rent them out. When the Reverend R.B.Y. Scott of the United Theological College asked permission to hold a members’ meeting of the CCLU at the Montreal High School, the assistant superintendent of the Protestant School Board refused
on the grounds that the school might be padlocked. Scott asked him if that wasn’t tantamount to making any discussion of civil liberties synonymous with communism. The answer was yes.

From time to time in Canada, the advocacy of civil liberties has been equated with communism – generally by cranks and extremists. But in Quebec it was quasi-official government policy, as Frank Beare of the Presbyterian College in Montreal discovered. Shortly after the school board’s turn-down Beare wrote to the attorney general’s office asking for assurance that it was not the province’s intention to apply the Padlock Law against the CCLU. Deputy Attorney General Edouard Asselin replied, “… we are sorry to state that your request cannot be granted.” The union found its efforts frustrated on every hand as the intimidation continued. Frank Leone found that out when he attended a meeting of the CCLU as the delegate from an Italian cultural organization. The very next day his home was raided and his entire library seized.

Where books were concerned, the police cast a wide net. During 1938 they seized works by Spinoza, George Eliot, and Aldous Huxley as well as a Gaelic Bible, the
Canadian Forum
, and a variety of American periodicals, including such mainstream publications as
Coronet, Pic
, and
Look
, not to mention the magazine section of the Vancouver
Daily Province
. All were identified as carrying “communist propaganda.”

One Montrealer, James Gauld, lost his car because of the Padlock Law. He was sitting in the car when he was picked up by the police, taken to headquarters, photographed and fingerprinted, and then told there was no charge against him; he was listed, euphemistically, as a “visitor.” His car was seized because he was using it to transport copies of the Toronto communist paper the
Clarion
. When the automobile was not returned, he tried to sue the chief of the Quebec Provincial Police but was told by the Superior Court that his only recourse was to take action against the provincial government by petition of right. Since the government itself would have had to consent to be sued – as it must under the law – the wretched Gauld found himself at a dead end. And automobiles weren’t even listed under the Act as subject to seizure – only documents.

Any suggestion of a Russian connection was enough to cause a building to be padlocked. Early in February, the Maxim Gorky
Club was locked up. The club, with fifty branches in Canada, was devoted to educational, social, and cultural subjects. In Montreal, it engaged in dramatic performances and the education of children of Russian origin. The police damned it as Bolshevik after finding a picture of Stalin in one of the schoolbooks. The CCLU pointed out that similar pictures appeared in history texts across Canada, including the Grade 10 text of the neighbouring West Hill High School, which showed Lenin addressing the Red Army. The police did not padlock the West Hill building.

At one point the police and their political masters tried to attack communism by expunging the word from the Quebec lexicon. That touched off a day of comic opera at the Montreal High School, where the Montreal Youth Council was about to stage its annual Model Legislature. The provincial police descended on May 7 and told the council that the building would be padlocked unless they were guaranteed that no one would utter the words “communism” or “communist” during the proceedings. The council agreed, and for the rest of the day the delegates from the Young Communist League were solemnly described – and indeed so described themselves – as the representatives of “an unmentionable organization.”

The Padlock Law brought forth a storm of protest from church, educational, and labour organizations across the country, but the federal government still stubbornly refused to take the kind of action it had adopted so swiftly in the case of Alberta. On July 6, Ernest Lapointe publicly announced he was not disposed, as Minister of Justice, to recommend either disallowance of the Act or a reference to the Supreme Court to determine its constitutionality.

The previous day the justice minister had justified his stand to the Cabinet by some devious legalese. Mackenzie King, to whom national unity was more important than civil liberties, went along with his Quebec lieutenant; the last thing he wanted was a split along racial and national lines. He appeared to be as confused as his colleagues over Lapointe’s reasoning. “The recommendation,” he wrote in his diary, “was rather lengthier than was necessary. Part of it seemed to justify the legislation itself rather than the question of whether it was properly disallowed, the line of justification being that Communism did not assert violence, as one of its methods, and, therefore, in making Communism a crime by the Province, it was not invading the Federal Criminal
Law jurisdiction which would permit propagation of communistic doctrines in other Provinces. Lapointe used the Oxford Dictionary definition. I sent for Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy. Found it too held the view that violence was not a necessary feature of communistic theories or teaching.…”

No one, including the Prime Minister, seemed to understand that Lapointe’s hair-splitting amounted to a political about-turn in the common attitude toward the Red Menace. If communism didn’t assert violence, why had eight men been jailed and scores more unmercifully harassed because the government feared violence from them? And why, if violence was not asserted, were buildings being padlocked without due process of law in Quebec? Lapointe, of course, represented the right wing of the Liberal party as well as its powerful Quebec wing. As the
Canadian Forum
shrewdly pointed out, it was not really communism that was disturbing the Quebec establishment. The real danger was anti-clericalism.

King must have been grateful for Lapointe’s casuistry. It allowed him to salve his conscience and neatly dodge a Liberal split. He was convinced that disallowance would bring about a Quebec election that Duplessis would win, and “this would mean another great division in Canada.” Thus he was prepared to accept “what really should not in the name of Liberalism, be tolerated for one moment.” It was, he told himself, “a wise decision … but it is not a decision which does credit to Liberal thought, at a time when Liberalism is being crushed in other parts of the world.”

This foot-dragging over the Padlock Law produced a sharp retort from the Canadian Civil Liberties Union, which found it “utterly disgusting … that the Government of Canada, so eager to respond to the pleas of bankers and mortgage-holders in the case of Alberta, openly and callously disavows responsibility in the case of a Quebec Statute which merely tears Magna Carta to shreds.”

Lapointe had also stated that the constitutionality of the law could be more conveniently tested in a concrete case rather than by the submission of an abstract to the Supreme Court. “This means,” the union pointed out, “that any victim of this legislation who is too poor to pay the costs of an action which might end only in the Privy Council, must suffer in silence until the Attorney
General is foolish enough to proceed against someone of greater wealth.…”

The invasions of private property and the seizure of books continued that summer. The most sinister feature of these seizures was the secrecy in which they were shrouded, apparently to avoid arousing public indignation. The procedure taken against people who had not been accused of any offence, let alone convicted, was, in the CCLU’s words, “that of a military dictatorship, which cannot exist without an efficient and deadly secret police, against which the courts can give no protection.”

The actions went beyond seizure. Some destitute families in Montreal were refused relief for no other reason than that the authorities disliked their political views. One man who had joined a demonstration against the Italian and German intervention in the Spanish Civil War was arrested, fined twenty-five dollars, and cut off relief. Another was told bluntly that his relief would be cancelled “because of [his] non-conformist political views.” A third was told he was an “undesirable individual” who engaged in illegal political activities and so was not eligible for public support.

The most notorious application of the Padlock Law came in July in Quebec City. Police arrived at the home of François-Xavier Lessard, nestled beneath the steep St. Sauveur cliff, and gave his wife and two children twenty-four hours to leave the house. The following day, when Lessard, a forty-year-old carpenter, was at work, they turned up at noon, padlocked the building, and turned Mrs. Lessard, seven-year-old Edouardine, and ten-year-old Cédard out into the street.

Lessard, hewing to the outdated belief that a Quebecker’s home was his castle, decided to fight back. He proposed to break the padlock and re-enter his own domicile, not an easy job with two policemen in a car parked directly outside the house. Two of his friends engaged the officers in conversation while Lessard and Joseph Drouin hacked away at the lock. When the police tried to leave the squad car to stop them, they found that Lessard’s friends had wired the door handles shut.

It was a Pyrrhic victory. Drouin and Lessard were charged with “wilfully violating a Provincial Law” – the Padlock Law – and “conspiring to interfere with a police officer.” They were not, however, tried on the first count, thus denying their defence counsel,
R.K. Calder, K.C., of the CCLU (who took the case without fee), the opportunity to argue the unconstitutionality of the Act.

In spite of that restriction on the defence, the judge not only admitted but also commended to the special attention of the jury some “evidence” from the so-called communist literature seized in Lessard’s home. What that had to do with a case involving conspiracy to obstruct a police officer no one was able to say. But the prosecution did its best to appeal to every form of local prejudice, including the curious as well as irrelevant statement that Lenin’s advocacy of equality between the sexes was “an insult to French-Canadian motherhood.”

Both men were found guilty and subjected to savage sentences. Lessard was given two years in penitentiary, Drouin a year in jail. When the Supreme Court upheld their convictions, the province cut off relief to Lessard’s wife and children because of his “ideology.”

The raids did not let up. Late in the year, the Duplessis attack on civil liberties entered a new phase, apparently designed to make it impossible for persons the police declared to be radicals to find shelter in their native province. In late December, during the Yuletide holidays, Quebec Provincial Police descended in pairs on some dozen Montreal dwellings, threatening to padlock the premises unless the owners evicted certain tenants.