Handy Padlock

Pierre Gelinas, editor of Montreal's pro-Communist weekly Combat (circ. 2,500), had barely settled down to work one day last week when a squad of policemen clumped into his office. Cried 23-year-old Editor Pierre Gelinas: "What the hell have you come here for?" The cops told him to stand up. They searched him, took away his Labor Progressive (Communist) Party card, and hustled him out of the building. They seized 1,000 copies of Combat, and gathered up office files, pamphlets and pictures of Stalin, Molotov and Canadian Communist Leader Tim Buck. Then they sealed the door of the Combat office.

That afternoon, many a Montrealer heard the news of the raid and padlocking with shocked alarm. Sputtered Editor Gelinas, at a meeting of Communist students at McGill Union building: "This is just the beginning of Fascism in Quebec. . . . The issue is freedom of the press and freedom of thought."

Montreal's press kept editorially mum, but Ontario's staunchly conservative Toronto Globe & Mail thundered: "Today the padlock law is used against a paper which is unpopular and weak. Tomorrow it can be used against any political foe which the Union Nationale Government chooses to regard as offensive."

Orders for the raid had come directly from Premier Maurice Duplessis, who (as Attorney General) is both executor and sponsor of the 1937 padlock law banning the use of premises for disseminating Communist propaganda "by any means whatsoever." In the 32 months before he went out of office in November 1939, Duplessis used the law eleven times. Until last week, he had not used it once since his return to power in August 1944. Now, with provincial elections just around the corner, the law seemed just the ticket for the anti-Red campaign which is supposed to bring in many Duplessis votes.

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