Duplessis Out

In 1651, Governor Duplessis-Bochard of Trois Rivieres, Canada, sortied too far from his stockade and lost his scalp to Iroquois. Last week one of the indiscreet Governor's most indiscreet descendants, another restless inhabitant of Trois Rivieres, Quebec's Conservative Premier Maurice Duplessis, lost his political scalp in an overwhelming rout.

Maurice Duplessis' Union Nationals swept to power in 1936, after 39 years of Liberal rule in Quebec, on the strength of some high-sounding oratory against trusts and political graft. But he found promises when out of office easier to make than laws when in. He dropped trust-busting for labor-baiting, and the law for which he is best known is his Padlock Law, allowing him to shut any building merely suspected of harboring "Communists," which term he defined broadly. He made himself ridiculous by cutting his own salary, then restoring the cut; by decreeing French to be Quebec's official language, then rescinding the decree. Because he used Hitler's theories of racism, Mussolini's system of corporatist trade-union laws, and Huey Long's finger-wagging, roughshod political tactics, he was called a Fascist.

Premier Duplessis' mandate ran for five years from 1936, but so lame was his position by this autumn, that he eagerly seized on the war as an issue whereby he might recoup lost prestige. He raised the eternal French-Canadian bugaboo of conscription for a British-Canadian war, and decreed an election. It was an important contest, for if Maurice Duplessis won, it would mean that a huge French island in Canada was in open opposition to the Federal policy, and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's Government might fall. But things went badly for pink-cheeked, Hitler-mustached, Bon Vivant M. Duplessis.

In the first place, the conscription firecracker did not go off. Maurice Duplessis seemed to forget that France was at war as well as Britain. His constituency did not forget that Ottawa, not Quebec, has the final say on conscription, and so the voting would be mere polling of opinion. His Liberal opponents opposed conscription as violently as he did, anyhow. And conscription did not have a strong enough stink to kill the odor of red herring.

The Liberals had no trouble making the point that Premier Duplessis had raised the conscription issue to cover the appalling state of Quebec's finances. Showing that the provincial public debt, having been $150,000,000 when the Union Nationale took over, was now at least $286,000,000, they made no specific charges but cleverly asked: "Where has it gone?" The Duplessis campaign promises began to get vague. Then the Federal Government came out against him: the three Quebec Liberals in the King Cabinet threatened to resign if he won, and spectacular Minister of Justice Ernest Lapointe, who might be Canada's Prime Minister if he were British, campaigned against him with epigrams: "It is the Union Nazionale, not the Union Nationale I" Finally the powerful Church failed to support him. The Premier began to mumble about good roads, public works, farm credits.

Maurice Duplessis' patron saint is St. Joseph. Every Wednesday is St. Joseph's day in French Canada. And so Maurice Duplessis has always chosen Wednesdays for his most important speeches, biggest deals, happiest parties. He chose last Wednesday for the election. But the good saint was looking the other way that day. Before the polling, which ran off without incident, Maurice Duplessis had the Premiership, 76 of 86 seats in the provincial legislature, and a future. After it, he had his own seat in the legislature, 72 Liberal colleagues and Montreal's vitriolic Mayor Camillien Houde to bait him, and nothing much politically but a past. As Maurice Duplessis' successor, Quebecquois chose staid, clean, able, colorless, short Adelard Godbout, a scientific farmer who was Premier in 1936.

As for Canada, she had a thrilling prickly feeling in her spine that came from good health in all her parts; the slight attack of French gout was over.

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