BY BRIGITTE GROUIX AND MICHEL DUGRÉ
MONTREAL - Quebec Lieutenant-Governor Jean-Louis Roux resigned from his position November 5, a few days after admitting he wore a swastika during World War II and participated in a demonstration against the conscription during which windows of Jewish stores were smashed.
The lieutenant-governor is the representative in Quebec for Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. Appointed by Ottawa, he has the power to veto any law adopted by the Quebec government.
Welcoming Roux's resignation, Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard called the position of lieutenant-governor "a colonial relic." The Quebec government strongly opposed Jean-Louis Roux's appointment on September 12. Roux is a staunch federalist. During last year's sovereignty referendum in Quebec, he compared Quebec artists supporting sovereignty to German intellectuals who remained silent during the rise of fascism.
Supporters of the Canadian government are using Roux's past associations to portray Quebecois - the vast majority of whom opposed the two world wars - as anti-Semites.
The Montreal daily La Presse ran an article September 11 headlined, "Down with conscription! Down with the Jews!" describing a March 24, 1942, anti-war rally.
Current articles in the Montreal daily Gazette routinely describe this and other similar rallies as "anti- conscription, anti-Semitic." In its November 7 editorial, The Gazette said that Roux, "like other boys ... in Quebec... was a product of the times." In the same issue, columnist Peggy Curran tried to explain Roux's anti- Semitism by the fact that "1942 was also the height of the conscription crisis in Quebec."
Senator Jacques Hébert said that Roux's generation "had been poisoned by the nationalists of the time." He added that he had been saved "from becoming perhaps a nationalist and a racist" by his father who sent him to a college outside Quebec.
After accepting Roux's apologies, Robert Libman of B'nai Brith said that the positive result of the Roux affair may be "to begin to exorcise some of the demons from a very difficult, dark and silent period in Quebec history."
These attacks against Quebecois opposition to World War II are aimed at preparing coming wars abroad and attacks against working people at home. In resigning, Jean- Louis Roux saluted "those who fought in the ranks of the army of freedom, during the 1914-1918 war, the 1939-1945 war, during all the other wars and, recently, during the peace keeping operations in troubled regions of the world." This conveniently coincides with Ottawa's attempts to set foot again in Africa, after its experience in Somalia where its army proved once again to be racist.
André Laurendeau, a central leader of the anti- conscription mobilizations in 1942, described the March 24, 1942 rally in quite different terms than La Presse. "Applause shook the room," Laurendeau wrote in The Conscription Crisis, when a speaker said, "My opponent is not the Jew or the Christian, but the one... who wants to draft our youth but opposes his own wealth being drafted." After the rally, on their way to attacking the Gazette, a small number of participants attacked Jewish stores. They were very well organized, noted Laurendeau. They could only have come from the "Black Shirts of [fascist leader] Adrien Arcand," he concluded.
While there were fascists in Quebec during World War
II, this reality was not different than the rest of
Canada, and all other imperialist countries.
Inter-imperialist war
The anticonscription movement in Quebec was one of the
most important movements against an imperialist war in a
country at war. Contrary to Ottawa's propaganda both then
and now, World War II was not a war to stop fascism.
Canada entered the war to defend the interests of Canadian
capitalist rulers. The war was against their imperialist
rivals for the partition of the world. It was also a war
against working people in Canada.
While fascism was and remains the most virulent form of capitalist domination, Ottawa and its allies were no defenders of democracy in the Second World War.
On the first day of the war, Sept. 1, 1939, Ottawa imposed the War Measures Act restricting democratic rights and imposing censorship. On the third day of the war it imposed Rules for National Defense, making it a crime to "oppose recruitment and harm the success of Her Majesty's forces."
Later on, the jailing of thousands of Japanese, many of whom were born in Canada, served as a threat to opponents of the war. Leaders of the anti-war movement were jailed, including the mayor of Montreal, Camilien Houde, who spent four years in jail for his opposition to conscription.
The real character of Ottawa's call for the defeat of fascism in the Second World War can be illustrated by its opposition to the entry of Jews in Canada during this period.
In the last year before the war, Ottawa raised the capital required for a Jewish family to enter Canada from $5,000 - an enormous sum at the time - to more than $20,000.
Out of the millions of European Jews looking for a place of refuge between 1933 and 1945, Canada admitted only 5,000. "It is arguably the worst record of all possible refugee-receiving states," said Irving Abella and Harold Troper, authors of a book on this question. "The Jews of Europe were not so much trapped in a whirlwind of systematic mass murder as they were abandoned to it," they said in their preface to the book.
The book is called None Is Too Many. Its title is taken from the answer given by a senior Canadian official in 1945 when asked how many Jews would be allowed into Canada after the war.
In their war drive, however, the Canadian rulers faced the massive opposition of Quebecois. In the very first days of the war, several anti-war rallies took place throughout Quebec. Among the main speakers were leaders of the trade union movement and of the main farmers organization.
"We won't go," was the main slogan. Memories of massive mobilizations against the First World War played a big role in these mobilizations. In April 1918, four workers in Quebec City had been killed and hundreds arrested in an armed confrontation with the Canadian army.
At the end of 1941, Ottawa had 125,000 troops in Europe, all volunteers. To deepen its involvement in the war, it decided to turn to conscription. To legitimize this move despite Quebecois opposition, Ottawa decided to seek a majority vote in a referendum across the country in April 1942.
The purpose of this cross-country referendum was to
deny Quebecois their right to decide. From then on
Quebecois opposition to the war became more and more
intertwined with resistance to this national oppression.
Resistance to war, national oppression
More than 71 per cent of people in Quebec voted
against the conscription, while 80 percent of those living
outside Quebec voted for. It is estimated that well above
80 per cent of Quebecois and other French-speaking people
outside Quebec voted no.
The anti-war mobilization coincided with growing labor resistance in Quebec. Between 1941 and 1944, the annual number of strikes in Quebec was almost four times higher than the average during the 1930s.
Challenging repressive war laws making almost all strikes illegal, workers were fighting for wage parity with workers in Ontario.
While Quebec and Ontario were almost equally industrialized, during the years leading up to the war the unemployment level was at least 30 percent higher in Quebec than Ontario. Employed workers in Quebec worked more hours per week but earned much less annually than workers in Ontario.
The infant mortality rate was 66 per cent higher in Quebec than in Ontario. The death rate from tuberculosis, a disease aggravated by overwork and insufficient diet, was three times higher in Quebec than in Ontario. Illiteracy in Quebec was double that in Ontario, and of the 27 public libraries in the whole province, only 9 were in French. Mobilizations against the war were fueled by resistance to these conditions.
In the summer of 1941, for example, 10,000 aluminum workers in the Saguenay area occupied their plant demanding a wage increase and protesting management's English unilinguism. Ottawa sent the army to end the occupation. The strike ended five days later when hourly wages were increased and changes were made in the management.
Members of the Steelworkers Union at Peck Rolling Mills in Montreal were out for two months in 1941 and forced Ottawa to increase the minimum wage in the war industry. In 1942, strikes took place in the war industries, shipyards, steel mills, tobacco factories, shoe industry, and others.
Some 20,000 workers went on strike against the giant Canadair aircraft plant in 1943. This was the biggest walkout in Canada since the Winnipeg general strike of 1919. It lasted 12 days and workers won union recognition, reduction of the work week, and wage increases.
This strike movement put on the table, as never before, the possibility to overcome the division between workers who speak French and those who speak English in Canada. This division is the main legacy of the defeat of the 1837-1838 bourgeois revolution.
The possibility of a united fight by workers to defend their interests during the war was the real specter that was haunting the Canadian ruling class.
This was a real possibility. While at a lower pace than in Quebec, the number of strikes also increased in Canada during the war, reaching a summit in 1943. Many bitterly fought strikes were for union recognition. The number of union members doubled in Canada between 1940 and 1945.
In 1941, gold miners from Kirkland Lake in Northern Ontario faced most of the province's police force during their strike. In 1943 steel workers in Galt, Ontario, shut down seven plants in the town to negotiate a contract with the steel companies.
Real steps for unifying the working class in Quebec and in the rest of Canada, however, were prevented by the policy of class collaboration of social-democrat and labor officials outside Quebec, who were supporting the war.
From 1941 on, the Stalinist Communist Party of Canada
waged a campaign for "an alliance of all classes... united
by the common goal of defending their national existence."
In the name of defending Canadian unity, Stalinists
supported a "No Strike Pledge," calling on workers to
restrain from strike action. Through their newspaper La
Victoire (The Victory), they denounced as "conscious or
unconscious supporters of a hitlerian fifth column inside
the country" those in Quebec who opposed conscription.
March toward working-class unity
The main lesson from World War II is that the
capitalist government in Ottawa was the main tool through
which Canadian rulers denied Quebecois the right to self-
determination, attacked workers rights across the country,
and waged their war against working people abroad.
The only realistic perspective for working people in Canada and Quebec remains a common fight for a workers and farmers government like the one our brothers and sisters established in Cuba in 1959.
Gains made by Quebecois through massive battles, combined with the weakening of Stalinists and other misleaders who betrayed workers' battles during the war, made the working class in Canada more united and stronger today.
During the same period, however, an important layer of Quebecois capitalists emerged. This helps explain why, over the last few weeks, not one Quebec nationalist leader defended the anti-war movement during World War II. They no longer oppose the Canadian army. The Bloc Quebecois, the official opposition in Ottawa, supported the recent proposal to send the Canadian army in Zaire, as it supported interventions in Somalia and Yugoslavia.
Jacques Parizeau, then leader of the Parti Quebecois, was among the first politicians to call in the Canadian army in 1990 to crush a mobilization by Native people in the Montreal area. As defenders of the interests of a small layer of Quebecois capitalists, the leadership of these parties fear the working class far more than they fear Ottawa.
The fight to put an end to national oppression and win Quebec independence will only move forward as part of the mounting resistance by working people across the country to the deepening attacks on our working and living conditions and to Ottawa's war drive. Working-class unity will make the difference in the toilers' capacity to stay the repressive arm of the Canadian capitalist rulers.
Michel Dugré is a member of the International Association of Machinists.