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Quebec’s dirty secrets unveiled
January 29, 2012 - 4:35am By PAUL W. BENNETT


Confronting the darker side of Quebec’s history has not been easy, particularly for that province’s small but influential elite, dominated by nationalistes. Every society has produced popular historical myths that leave some dirty laundry buried in the past. What is unique about Quebec is a certain ingrained and overly defensive siege mentality when it comes to facing up to the odd soiled linen in the closet of modern Quebec nationalism.

That Quebec reflex reaction must be fading because Jean-Francois Nadeau, arts editor of Montreal’s Le Devoir, has now produced a full-scale biography of Quebec’s infamous Fascist party leader Adrien Arcand with an alluring title, The Canadian Fuhrer (James Lorimer and Company, 360 pages, $35). Publication of the book in French in 2010 marked a watershed in Quebec nationalist thinking, speaking to the previous silences in Quebec history.

Two decades ago, a feisty Quebec scholar, Esther Delisle, had paid a heavy price for exposing the first cracks in the nationalist armour. In her PhD thesis she offended many by identifying Lionel Groulx, Quebec’s modern patron saint, as a purveyor of anti-Semitism and a nationalist who was remarkably tolerant of right-wing extremism. Her 1998 book Myths, Memories and Lies went public with a shocking account of how some members of Quebec’s elite, nationalist and federalist, supported Nazi collaborator Marshall Philippe Petain and his Vichy government in France during the Second World War and then helped bring war criminals to safety in Quebec after the war ended.

Delisle was strongly chastised for speaking out and when Montreal writer Mordecai Richler took her side, she became a bête noir. After the Quebec premier’s brother Gerard Bouchard attacked her research and rose to defend Groulx against the charges of anti-Semitism, she was essentially blacklisted in French Quebec.

Nadeau’s The Canadian Fuhrer returns to the touchy subject of the emergence and persistence of Adrien Arcand and his Quebec fascist party from August 1939 until the 1960s. It’s a very thorough, authoritative biography with a title that not only projects a strong, powerful image, but conveys the author’s willingness to call a spade a spade.

As a former academic historian, Nadeau brings an impressive array of insight and talent to the task of unravelling the life of Canada’s best known fascist leader. It shows the vital importance to Arcand’s political life of being fired from La Presse for union activities and the founding of his wickedly satirical newspaper Le Goglu in Montreal’s working-class east end. After flirting with Italian-brand fascism, Arcand and his close associate Ajutor Menard chose a different path "paved with Hitler-style swastikas instead of Roman symbols of fascism."

The rise of Arcand’s movement is explained as a radical political response to the hunger, unemployment and war anxieties of the 1930s. Radical ideas gained currency among Canadians along the whole range of extremes from Communism and socialism to the right-wing variants, the Social Credit movement on the Prairies and Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale in Quebec. Amid such turmoil, Adolf Hitler cast a spell and one that even fooled Canada’s wily prime minister Mackenzie King.

The most alarming part of Arcand’s story is how he managed, while spouting Nazism and anti-Semitism and operating on a shoestring, to become a significant political force in Quebec throughout the 1930s. His role on the fringes of the Jeune-Canada movement founded by Andre Laurendeau and Lionel Groulx makes for fascinating reading. All of the Jeune-Canada partisans are shown to have shared anti-Semitic attitudes, but Groulx, the rather effete young nationalist, remained uncomfortable with Arcand’s distinctly working-class brand of fascism.

As a Le Devoir journalist, Nadeau is at pains to show how leading Quebec nationalists like Groulx and Jeune-Canada sought to keep a safe distance from Arcand. "Anti-Semitism and xenophobia," he writes, were integral to their thought and program but, unlike Arcand, "blood and race" was not "the primary standard by which everything was judged."

Arcand and his far-right National Unity Party did draw their strength from what is described as "the spirit of the 1930s." Once Canada declared war on Germany and Italy in 1939, Arcand was interned for his political views. After the war, he remained a committed fascist and resumed his political activities, forging alliances with Duplessis and the UN in a futile attempt to stave off so-called "Reds" like Jean Lesage and the Liberals, promoting the Quiet Revolution.

Adrien Arcand, as Nadeau points out, remained a committed fascist. He not only continued to espouse anti-Semitism but denied the existence of the Holocaust. After flailing away for four decades in the world of radical politics, Arcand was left destitute and beset by poor heath before he passed away quietly on Aug. 1, 1967.

Nadeau’s The Canadian Fuhrer will go a long way toward extinguishing the trace of stench associated with the heirs of Lionel Groulx, Quebec’s modern-day nationalists. It will quickly be recognized as the standard work on a sordid aspect of Quebec’s 20th-century history. In one particular, perhaps picayune aspect, the book falls short. It’s curious to me why this otherwise fine book contains no direct reference whatsoever to Esther Delisle, the intrepid scholar who first blasted open the larger story. When that happens, all will be well with the world.

About the Author
Paul W. Bennett is founding director, Schoolhouse Consulting in Halifax, and lived in Montreal from 1997 until 2005.

First Acadian G-G was a dominant force in Canadian politics: scholar

By James Foster
Times & Transcript Staff




In her new book The Golden Age of Liberalism: A Portrait of Roméo Leblanc, scholar and author Dr. Naomi Griffiths paints the Memramcook-born first Acadian governor general as a selfless civil servant and one of the great governor generals in Canadian history. Some might accuse the renown Acadian scholar and historian as being biased towards LeBlanc - they were friends since they first met in London in the 1950s, but Griffiths insisted that this book should have the word "portrait" in its title for a reason.


"I wanted to give an idea of what he was like as a human being, and to tell his story against the backdrop of his experiences," Griffiths says while in Moncton on a book tour. She describes the book as somewhat of a painting; its author, the artist.

"Every artist has his biases. We all have our biases. It's what we do with those biases."

After careers as a teacher and foreign news correspondent, LeBlanc became a key player in the federal Liberal party, serving as press secretary to prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau in what Griffiths refers to as The Golden Age of Liberalism, when the party dominated the federal political scene. LeBlanc himself was federally elected in 1972.

As fisheries minister, he was called the fishermen's minister for his ardour at fighting for the average fisherman's plight in LeBlanc's home province and well beyond. He won unlikely battles, like Canada's declaration of the 200-mile limit and the decentralization of some federal departments and offices out of Ottawa to small communities, as seen in the federal superannuation office that dominates downtown Shediac to this day, in a mid-1970s era when the plights of small-town New Brunswick or near-shore fishermen in Prince Edward Island might not have figured prominently on the federal scene without LeBlanc to do battle on their behalf behind cabinet doors.

"He won battles he shouldn't have won," Griffiths concedes.

But that wasn't LeBlanc's greatest impact on Canada, Griffiths believes, nor was his tenure as senator which began in 1984, nor being appointed governor general in 1995, a role cut short in 1999 by illness.

Rather, it was his participation in the federal election of 1993, a vote that changed the course of Canadian history, in which her friend played a pivotal role both behind the scenes and in the forefront, she says.

In that election with LeBlanc's good friend Jean Chrétien at the helm of the Liberals, the party seemed poised for at least a minority win and perhaps a majority government, when a fatal gaff doomed the Progressive Conservative Party, when it fumbled an ad campaign that tried to shame voters into not voting for the Liberals based on the Chrétien's record, while the photo they used to illustrate the eventual winner seemed to unduly focus on his facial deformities. The attack ad was widely seen as mocking Chrétien for his medical condition that caused one side of his face to droop. LeBlanc, as the five-star general of the Liberal war room, sent out the troops to whip up outrage at what was widely seen as a personal attack, and Chrétien himself talked about how he was bullied and teased as a boy about his appearance.

While there were tons of political baggage dragging down the Kim Campbell-led Tories, Griffiths isn't alone in believing the Liberals' cunning handling of those ads brought voters on side and played a large role in the most devastating defeat of a governing party in Canadian federal political history, the Tories losing all but two seats, one of the greatest defeats of a governing power in the western world, ever.

Griffiths remembers being in a room full of mostly Conservative women when the ads appeared on TV screens.

"Those women were mortified. It hit them in a way that they were truly affronted," she says.

She has no doubt that none of those women voted Conservative in 1993, and that millions of other voters were equally appalled, and that it might not have played out the way it did without LeBlanc directing the Liberals' campaign. Within a decade, the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada had disappeared completely, merged with the Reform Party.

That's not to downplay his other accomplishments, Griffiths stresses.

He excelled as governor general, easily assuming the role of the people's GG, just as he was the people's fisheries minister. He was the first to travel extensively in the role including abroad and to tiny Canadian settlements in the far north and far west, the first to adorn Rideau Hall with first nations art, a passionate believer in small towns and those Canadians who lived in them, of recognizing little people who did great things as with his Canadian Caring Awards and so much more, Griffiths says.

"With that, he was saying, 'This is how I see Canada,'" Griffiths says.

"For me, if someone asked me to tell them something about the country of Canada, I would just say, 'Roméo LeBlanc.'"

LeBlanc died June 24, 2009 after a lengthy illness. He was 81 years old.

The book is now on sale for $35 at book stores everywhere.