The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  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.

  In several cases the police enforced a deadline. On December 20, for example, a Provincial Police inspector named Beauregard visited Nathan Dubrinksky, a tailor, at his home on Laval Avenue and told him that he must evict his tenant, one D. Ship, by January 4, 1939, or have his premises padlocked. Three days later, the same inspector and another officer visited an unemployed tailor named Louis Fineberg, also on Laval Avenue, and ordered him to turn his son-in-law, Muni Taub, into the street. The eviction must be carried out by January 8, Fineberg was warned,
or the premises would be padlocked.

  The Canadian Civil Liberties Union persuaded Taub and his father-in-law to test the validity of the Padlock Law in civil court. Fineberg would ask Taub to leave; Taub would refuse. Fineberg would then sue Taub for cancellation of the lease and for $285 in damages on the ground that Taub was using the premises for the propagation of communism. Taub’s defence, conducted by Calder of the CCLU, would be that the Padlock Law was unconstitutional and therefore Fineberg’s action was unfounded. The Quebec Superior Court, however, upheld the law, and Taub lost his case.

  The Taubs, however, did not move out. The police threats were just that – attempts to scare people into taking action that the authorities themselves were reluctant to take. The Duplessis government was wary of test cases. None of the threatened premises was ever padlocked.

  Although the police seized close to 140,000 papers, reviews, books, pamphlets, circulars, buttons, and badges (and once a child’s doll and a pair of trousers), the total number of buildings padlocked in 1938 amounted to no more than ten. No one was charged or arrested under the Act so that none of the victims had the opportunity to defend themselves in open court – a fact that Duplessis and his police used to boast of brazenly as proof of their clemency.

  The year was scarcely over before the Premier, in an address to the Montreal Canadian Club, openly challenged anyone to point to one abuse committed under the Act. The CCLU had for more than twelve months been pointing to dozens of abuses, but that was lost on both the Premier and the press. “What do we do when there is smallpox?” Duplessis asked his listeners. “We quarantine a person or a house where there is an epidemic and nobody kicks.… Communism is something affecting the heart and the brain. Don’t you think that house should be quarantined too? … We don’t arrest the man; we padlock the house; we keep the liberty of the man.…”

  Duplessis claimed that the government had had “positive proof that the danger was real and imminent.” Now, he said, the danger was over. Quebec had been the one province to “show the light and be the bulwark of law and order and common sense.”

  For those words he earned the plaudits of the English-language press. The Montreal Gazette rushed to congratulate the Premier on the success of his padlock campaign. “Quebec does not want Communism,” it declared. “The Quebec government will not tolerate it.” The Montreal Star described Duplessis’s defence of the act as “a logical, forceful, and in more ways than one, an unanswerable argument.… We … accept – and the public of Quebec will do so with genuine relief and satisfaction – the Premier’s declaration that the danger is now over. He attributes this to the application of the Padlock Law, and he is in the best position … to know the actual facts.… The citizens of Quebec will feel the safer in the knowledge that the Premier is as resolute as ever to fight against such a danger with all the energy and vigilance at his command.”

  Duplessis’s war on the bogey of communism had its parallel in Hepburn’s war on the bogey of the CIO. The two powerful premiers had a good deal in common and had, indeed, formed a loose alliance against the federal Liberal government in general and Mackenzie King in particular. Both were bon vivants who enjoyed hard drink, loose women, and lively parties. Both knew how to invent a scapegoat (godless radical; outside agitator) whom they could set up as a dangerous threat to society. Both had presented themselves as reformers; each had ended up in the pocket of the business establishment.

  Hepburn’s highly publicized war against the CIO had not squelched the American union group any more than Duplessis’s trumpeted victory over the forces of evil in Quebec had wiped out communism. At the time of the passage of the Padlock Law, one of the leading red-baiters in the province, Father Bryan, had estimated there were nine hundred Communists in the city of Montreal. More than a year later, Eugene Forsey wrote in the Canadian Forum that “reliable information now indicates … there are several hundred more Communists in Montreal than there were in 1937.”

  But whether Duplessis’s campaign was successful or not, the Act remained on the books. Nor did the threats and seizures cease just because the Premier had proclaimed victory.

  3

  Bloody Sunday

  By May, British Columbia was ripe for another explosion. Mackenzie King had lit the fuse when he reduced grants-in-aid to the provinces by a third and then stubbornly refused to restore the cuts after the recession hit. It was this parsimony that led to the famous post office sit-down in late May and the events of Bloody Sunday in Vancouver on June 19.

  When the federal government closed the relief camps in 1936, it had instituted a program of farm placement in which single men were to be paid five dollars a month for agricultural labour. That was no more than the so-called “slave camps” paid, but for the government – if not for the men – there was an advantage. The transients were not only out of the cities, they were also isolated from one another. It would be almost impossible to organize them as Slim Evans had done in 1935.

  The farm employment scheme ended with each harvest, after which the men were left to fend for themselves. The government justified this callous policy by pretending that they could exist all winter on their summer savings. That was patently absurd. Thousands began to move west – to Alberta, in the vain hope of getting Aberhart’s promised dividend, and to British Columbia, where the provincial forestry camps were paying more than three times as much as the farm placement scheme. Ottawa paid half the cost of these camps (also set up in the fall of 1936 to replace the maligned relief camps). British Columbia had to shoulder the rest. With more and more transients reaching the coast, the cost soared. In 1938, the number of non-residents in the B.C. camps had increased by 50 per cent over 1937.

  The province couldn’t afford to keep them open alone. Faced with the federal cuts, the B.C. government closed them six weeks early, in April. Premier Pattullo cut all single men off relief and, as a result, hundreds of destitute men gravitated to the city of Vancouver. There they were organized by the Communist-led Single Unemployed Protective Association and its ally, the Relief Project Workers’ Union, with headquarters on Cordova Street near Vancouver’s skid row. Once again the city was faced with the spectacle of ragged men with tin cans begging for money on the street corners.

  As before, the single unemployed were organized into four divisions, each division further divided into bunkhouse units of ten with the usual subcommittees. The leader of No. 1 Division, the so-called “youth division,” was Steve Brodie, a veteran of both the On-to-Ottawa trek and the Regina Riot. He was now twenty-six, a medium-sized man with aquiline features, still very much a maverick. His father had been a blacksmith and lay preacher in Scotland; both his parents had died in 1919 of influenza. Brodie had come to Canada in 1925, one of a shipload of orphans sponsored by the Salvation Army. He worked on prairie farms until the Depression and then joined the army of boxcar cowboys until he was shunted into the relief camps. The Regina Riot turned him into a Communist.

  Brodie had lost a job at Bridge River that spring for union activity. Now in Vancouver with his division, begging on the streets, he felt a sense of frustration. He was too independent to be a good Communist. He didn’t agree with his party’s policy of continuing the tin-canning, which he found demeaning. And he didn’t have much sympathy with those hidebound members of the party who sat around mouthing Marxist jargon – all talk and no action. It was ironic. The so-called wild-eyed radicals who led the party were, in their own way, as cautious as the politicians. As Brodie put it, “the image of Communist plots and rioting were [sic] only the product of wishful thinking on the part of the federal and provincial governments. That would have been the excuse for iron heel tactics which they were only too willing to invoke. And far from inciting the men, Communist Party organizers warned against provoking confrontation.”

  What Brodie wanted was confrontation – the kind his hero, Arthur Evans, had provoked three years before, to the dismay of Tim Buck and Joseph Salsberg. Brodie wanted to shake up the Vancouver
business community to the point where it would pressure Ottawa to do something for the single unemployed. Some new strategy was required, and Brodie soon hit on one.

  Long before the sit-in became the recognized weapon of American civil rights movements it had been used by the Relief Camp Workers when they occupied the Vancouver Public Library and Museum in 1935. Brodie had been chairman of a division during that brief but effective tactic. Now he realized that this was the way to strike at all three levels of government as well as the private sector. In one sudden move, he and his followers would occupy the federal post office, the city-owned art gallery, and one of the hotels. Then they would demand that the police arrest them for trespassing.

  Brodie first paced off the distance to all three buildings, timing the length of each walk so that they could be invaded simultaneously. He chose the Hotel Georgia rather than the larger Hotel Vancouver because it was easier to enter. On May 19, he called a meeting of his division and told the men: “You’ve been howling for action and I think I have got something now.” But first, he needed their support. Brodie always made sure that these meetings were scrupulously democratic, with parliamentary procedure followed to the letter. He asked for a vote of confidence and got one. “Go get ’em, Steve!” the men shouted, cheering and stamping.

  Brodie, with the agreement of his division, wanted to create a four-man action committee composed of himself and the three other divisional leaders. Only in that way could he ensure tight security. But he had to argue with the other three until four in the morning before they agreed to his plan. After he brought them round, he wasted no time. Zero hour would be at two that afternoon.