CHAPTER 20

1939

ON THE FIRST DAY OF SEPTEMBER IN 1939, THE PREMIER of the province of Quebec lay sequestered in mid-debauch. He declined to be distracted by the news that Hitler had invaded Poland. Over the next few days, he maintained his public silence on world events. Not an uncommon tactic. Let others surrender their positions, then see what voids remained for him to wisely inhabit. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had backtracked on his longstanding rhetoric and declared that Canada would fight on the side of Great Britain, and the House of Commons was called to address the issue on the fourth.

Duplessis, nonplussed, drank on.

He had retreated to a room in the Château Frontenac, high above the St. Lawrence River. To ease a vexatious spirit, he had invited a series of consorts to pass through his suite. Business and news were periodically brought to him, which he perused while the damsel of the day bathed or took a nap.

Then King invoked the War Measures Act.

Officially, King’s premise was the defence of the nation in the aid of France and Great Britain against Germany’s aggression, yet the first casualties of his legislation were the premier of Quebec and, by extension, the bombastic mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde. These were his true political foes. He needed them out of the way to properly conduct a military campaign. He could not rally the nation if two adversaries, each of whom enjoyed strong populist sentiment, were strategically aligned against him. So he went after their Achilles’ heel: both men were running their governments into bankruptcy. Houde had the city forty million in debt, and a trio of banks had cut the city off from further advances. Houde had already stated that Quebec should fight on the side of Mussolini, which had helped the banks reach a determination regarding his civic management. Now he was assailing them. “I won’t allow the people to die of starvation to please a pack of bankers.” The pack hardened their hearts and sealed their vaults against him.

Duplessis felt King’s squeeze. He had the option of raising government money in the United States, for Americans were accustomed to many of their own states being in worse fiscal straits than Quebec. The banks had bailed him out in the past, but now the War Measures Act forbade any borrowing by cities or provinces unless approved by the federal government.

All vaults were closed to him. He sent a man to Ottawa to beg funds from the federal government itself, only to be stiffly refused.

The Opposition took heart. Godbout, the Liberal gnat, declared, “With each beat of your heart, Duplessis extends your debt by two bucks!” In the past, the premier could have countered the accusations with wild spending sprees calculated to buy votes. He could have ordered the building of roads or bridges or wharves, but with empty coffers he was stymied, and from his room in his drunken spree he sent notice that he was calling an election for October. When he awoke to sobriety, he discovered that, compounding his dilemma, King had also instituted censorship. Duplessis could not campaign over the radio without first submitting his speech to federal censors, whose red pencils and snipping shears were kept especially sharp for him. His first reaction was to refuse to speak on radio altogether, and to disallow anyone in his party to speak, effectively surrendering the airwaves to the glory of his silent sulk. And to his enemies.

The fresh campaign, which he called to rally support against the federal government, began as a disaster, quickly worsening. For his inaugural speech, his diction was precise, as usual, his oratory robust, as usual, but he was uncommonly drunk. By the night’s end, the people were uncertain whether he meant to lead them towards independence or war, or against war, or into the arms of Hitler, or was inviting insurrection. His coalition of forces fell away quickly. The English business community was appalled. Cardinal Villeneuve had recently travelled through France, treated with the élan reserved for a head of state while being educated on the impending peril posed by Germany. He could no longer support Duplessis, and so the crutch of the Church was also withdrawn.

The Liberals fought hard, taking up several positions the premier might have considered his natural ground. They dismissed conscription, declared it would never happen, and effectively vilified Duplessis. A vote for the premier was a vote for Hitler and Stalin, a vote against him a vote for civilization. Intoxicated and feeling absurdly assured of his own power, le Chef was losing control over his confederates, who now believed he was marching them towards disaster.

Disaster ensued. He was scorched in the election. His regime of artificial dictatorship, scandals, martinis and attendant ladies buckled.

In his home in Trois-Rivières, his sister, unaccustomed to defeat, quietly wept. He stepped up beside her and sat down. “Why cry? Do not cry,” he said. “I will be back. Next time, I will remain in power for fifteen years, or until God takes me. I promise you, never again shall we know defeat. They are saying that my government has been an aberration, but we will rise up again to show them that this night is the aberration.” He kissed her temple, and her weeping ceased. “I will be back.”

In the days ahead, Duplessis stayed home, not drinking so much, remaining contemplative, rearming his energy. On his desk he kept a clipping, in English, culled from Time magazine. He read it aloud each morning, and before lunch, and at the end of each business day, permitting the rancour of the separate readings to settle deeply inside him. He returned to his office before retiring for the night and read the clipping to himself once more, to embed the nettlesome comment into his marrow. Centred in the journalist’s assessment was an insult he could not abide—one he would correct, but, more important, one he would use to motivate his comeback. He read, “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 … But things went badly for pink-cheeked, Hitler-moustached, Bon Vivant M. Duplessis.”

Never again, Duplessis vowed, would anyone think to call him “pink-cheeked.” Of that, he was profoundly certain.

To the clipping, he’d say each day, “I’ll be back.”

In Ottawa, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was ecstatic with le Chef’s demise. “One down,” he confided to a senior advisor.

“We’ll get the other one, soon enough,” the confidant replied.

“I want Houde’s head on a platter.”

Carole and Roger Clément were awakened from their beds.

The cops went straight to the small, hand-cranked printing apparatus in the otherwise empty back bedroom, where a crumpled copy of a pamphlet was mysteriously discovered in the waste bin. They never left copies lying around.

“Get dressed, please, ma’am. You’re coming with us.”

Under the War Measures Act, some criminal trials had been disbanded.

Roger declared, “I did it. Not her.”

An officer held up the offending leaflet. “Says here a woman was raped. In a munitions plant. That’s sedition. You printed this?”

Roger said he had. To prove it, he said, the crank had been malfunctioning, stubborn and strenuous to turn.

“Go ahead. Turn the handle yourself.”

The officer tested it out, realized that a small woman could not possibly have turned the crank, and ordered that Roger be arrested in Carole’s place.

She watched him go.

The man who loved her sacrificed himself. Somehow she knew that was right. What would she do in a prison camp except die? Roger would survive, and he’d return to her. She would help by making airplane wings and trust that her labours shortened the war. Each night she returned alone to her little house, as she had done for so long before she’d been married. Each night, she gazed at a picture of herself and her husband on their wedding day, whispering to him, “Be so very brave. Come back to me, Roger.” Each day, she’d check the mail, hoping the censors had let something through from the camp.

Always, before he finished a letter by saying again that he loved her, he would write, “I’ll be back.”

The justice minister had news. The last time he was this excited, he was reporting Duplessis’s defeat. Since then, Paris had fallen. Few around Parliament Hill were feeling chipper.

“What is it?” the prime minister asked.

“Houde!” he exclaimed. “He’s come out in public against conscription. He urged the people of Quebec to defy the law.”

“Sedition?”

“Sedition,” the man proclaimed.

“Off with his head.”

“Sir, I don’t know—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s a metaphor. Arrest him. I want him interned.”

“The mayor of Montreal?”

“The mayor,” King confirmed, “of Montreal.”

“Just like that?” the man asked.

King paused. “No,” he decided, his political brain at work. “Do we know that he said these things for a certainty? Or will he claim that he was misquoted?”

The minister told him that the journalist who overheard the remark had phoned the news to his editor, a man by the name of Ludington, whom King had once met. Ludington advised the reporter to write out the remarks as he had heard them, then take them to Houde to see if he would sign them.

“He signed?”

“With some élan, apparently. You know Houde.”

“Call Ludington,” King advised. “Tell him we’re using the censors to scuttle the story.”

“It’s already been printed.”

“Doesn’t matter. He can write no more. When he complains, tell him that if the story had been mentioned in the House of Commons, he’d be free to write about it. As is, we’re free to scuttle it.”

“Then we don’t get Houde,” noted the justice minister.

“Oh but we do,” King told him. “Ludington will call the Opposition. He’ll coax them to air the story in Parliament. Once they do, I’m obliged to discharge my duty and arrest Houde. It won’t be because I want him gone, but because my arm has been twisted by the Opposition. Make the call.”

Roger Clément watched the big, jovial man arrive at the camp in New Brunswick, along the banks of the Saint John River. He’d heard that he was on his way, and arranged it so that he was among the first to greet him. “Mr. Mayor, remember me? I used to crack heads for you.”

The mayor sized him up. “Yes. Roger, isn’t it? Roger Clément.” True to his reputation, he never forgot a name or a face.

“Do you want to bunk in my cabin? It’s not so bad. We’ve fixed it up.”

“Is it amicable? A good group of guys?”

“We distill our own spirits.”

“Lead the way, young man. Take my bags, will you?”

So Camillien Houde, a poor man’s son who had become a big city’s mayor, became an inmate in a wartime interment camp while enjoying the services of his own valet. Some prisoners passed the time by plotting escape, a favourite plan being a hockey game, prisoners against the guards, on a day when the river froze before it was covered in snow. Some prisoners dreamed of outskating the guards on an endless breakaway to the sea. Houde could skate, but he had no intention of being a runaway in the wilderness, or living life on the lam. A man of his bulk and fame, where could he hide? Instead, he plotted his triumphant return. “You watch,” he told Roger, and shook a thick finger. “I’ll be back. Hell, son. We’ll both be back.”