But as Hitler’s star rose in Europe, Arcand’s began to fall in English-speaking Canada. The invasion of Austria in the spring and the Munich crisis in the fall made Nazism repugnant to most Canadians.
Arcand’s tactics in Ontario differed from those he used in Quebec. Among anglophones he portrayed himself as a British loyalist whose party would fight for “our King, our God and our Country.” His Toronto meetings were marked by the singing of the National Anthem and cries of Long Live the King! In Quebec, however, Arcand’s rhetoric was that of an extreme French-Canadian nationalist. Here he was able to appeal to the anti-war sentiment of French Canadians, who had a horror of becoming involved in another European conflict. Why should they go to war “for rotten democracy,” Arcand asked in fiery speeches that received hearty ovations across the province.
His was only one of several voices encouraging the sickly weed of independence and finding a sympathetic hearing among those Quebeckers who blamed their Depression ills on the economic dominance of a “foreign” minority. Even though he would be interned and discredited during the war that followed, the fascist leader’s shrill tones would echo down the corridors of future decades to mingle with those of others calling for a new and distinct Quebec.
5
Keeping out the Jews
In 1938, John Murray Gibbon, a prominent Canadian literary figure, popularized the phrase “Canadian mosaic” in a book with that title. The implication was that Canada had developed along lines different from those of the American melting-pot. Yet at the time, the concept of a series of closely knit ethnic communities fostered by the Canadian experience was largely a myth. It is true that government policy had brought tens of thousands of Slavic peasants to the Canadian West, but these people had little power. The real power lay with the WASPS of Central Canada and the Catholic hierarchy of Quebec, neither of which wanted any diluting of the traditional racial mix.
Canada was very much a British nation, pledged to maintain “British justice” and “British ideals.” The Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Celts of Ontario didn’t want an alien strain polluting the purity of the line any more than the Quebec nationalists did. Although there were no pogroms in Canada, Jews were beyond the pale, as they had been in much of Europe. Now, facing the greatest pogrom of all, Jews from Central Europe were hammering at Ottawa’s doors. But nobody in the government wanted to let them in.
It is a profound understatement to say that the Canadian government was lukewarm to the idea of Jewish refugees entering the country. As Irving Abella and Harold Troper have made clear in their remarkable book, None Is Too Many, the government didn’t want any Jews to enter Canada.
The villain of the piece is Frederick Charles Blair, director of the Immigration Branch. Blair was the same man who, earlier in the decade, had engineered the deportation of twenty-five thousand people for economic and political reasons. A narrow-minded bureaucrat who ran the department with little interference from Thomas Crerar, his minister, Blair was a man of strong religious views and a violent anti-Semite who despised all Jews. But it must be said that Blair worked in an atmosphere of anti-Semitism, which included the views of the Prime Minister himself. He had little trouble in convincing King and his Cabinet that Jewish refugees from Hitler should be kept out of the country.
All that year King kept telling his diary what a wonderful man Hitler was. “His desire for peace seemed to me to be important and significant and, I believe, true,” he wrote on January 12. Similar sentiments followed: “I am quite sure he does not want to face war …” (February 4). “As I listened to the translation of his speech [he] stood out as the leader in Europe – a voice stronger than any other for order …” (February 20). “I believe the world will yet come to see a very great man – mystic in Hitler [who] will rank some day with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people …” (March 27).
He preferred Hitler to Tweedsmuir – the dictator “in his grey shirt, the absence of feathers, sword, etc.,” the Governor General all “buttons and gold braid.” On April 11, after the Austrian people voted to join the Reich, King wrote approvingly that “Hitler may well be a very proud man as he said he is today in relation to what he has done for his own class.… He has reason to feel that his achievements have been great indeed.”
Like the vast majority of his countrymen, King viewed Chamberlain’s backing down before Hitler at Munich with great relief. “Hitler,” he wrote on September 14, following a particularly explosive speech by the German dictator, “has spoken out like a man. Exposed fearlessly some of the current hypocrisies.” The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia he saw as a necessary manifestation of realpolitik. The Munich meeting, he believed, “is the most momentous meeting between two men that has ever been held in the history of the world.” Chamberlain would “go down in history as one of the greatest men who ever lived.”
King applauded the British prime minister’s plan to separate Russia from its relationship with Britain and France – an act that led to Stalin’s pact with Hitler. “I cannot but believe,” he wrote on September 20, “that Hitler has enough chivalry and sincerity of purpose to join with Chamberlain in seeking wholeheartedly to work out a plan for Europe as a whole which will begin to relieve all its nations of their armament burdens.” King’s perception was as clouded as it had been in February, when one of his visions had convinced him that his party would win a by-election in Argenteuil. The Liberal candidate lost badly and King was shaken. “I have never been deceived in a vision,” he wrote, and mused that he should perhaps place less reliance on “visions, dreams and impressions.” (He failed to take his own advice.)
But then, following the Munich crisis, the whole country was caught up in a dream of peace, a vision of a secure Europe – the wistful belief that Hitler, having got what he wanted at the expense of the Czechs, would have no further designs on other countries. Thus it would be unfair to single out the Prime Minister for his lack of insight.
King, however, appeared to believe that he, the Prime Minister of Canada and the grandson of a despised rebel, had actually been the catalyst that brought Chamberlain and Hitler together. He recalled that he had first introduced the British prime minister to the new German ambassador, Ribbentrop, during a reception at the House of Lords during the Coronation. The other guests stood back, “looking in a rather surprised way at the cordiality of the conversation the three of us were having.” As a result, Ribbentrop had invited King to lunch and urged him to visit Hitler.
This placed King, in his own overblown view, at the very centre of the international stage, arm in arm with the British prime minister and the German dictator. “It is a remarkable fact,” King wrote, “that beginning with a determination to see Von Ribbentrop the day of his arrival in London as Ambassador, from then on there have been links which have brought a closer relationship between the British and the German governments in which Chamberlain and I and Hitler have figured in a relationship that has been exceedingly significant.”
On November 9 the dark and dreadful Kristallnacht, when the streets of every community in Germany and Austria were littered with broken glass from Jewish homes, shops, and factories, brought from King nothing more than a low moan. He did not mention Hitler in his diary, blaming German youth for the destruction, but he did admit that “the sorrows which the Jews have to bear … are almost beyond comprehension.”
Abraham Heaps, the CCF member for Winnipeg North, who was Jewish, had just lost his wife, and this contributed to the Prime Minister’s distress. He sat down with Heaps and the conversation turned to the subject of admitting Jewish refugees into Canada. “Something will have to be done,” King told his diary that night. He repeated it the following day when he attended Mrs. Heaps’s funeral in an Ottawa synagogue. But the emotion of the moment quickly passed, and nothing was ever done.
To the Prime Minister, national and party unity were far more important than the fate of thousands of European Jews. French Canada was solidly opposed to admission of any more Jew
s. The St. Jean Baptiste Society gathered 128,000 names on a petition opposing “all immigration and especially Jewish immigration.” The Knights of Columbus, the Quebec press, and several of the caisses populaires were just as adamant. “Why allow in Jewish refugees?” Le Devoir asked. “The Jewish shopkeeper on St. Lawrence Boulevard does nothing to increase our natural resources.” Quebec’s Liberal M.P.s were unanimously opposed to Jewish immigration. One, H.E. Brunelle, told the House that the Jews caused “great difficulties” wherever they lived. More significant was the unyielding attitude of Ernest Lapointe, who led the opposition in Cabinet.
In English-speaking Canada, the most formidable public opposition to Jewish immigration came from the Canadian Corps Association, the powerful veterans’ group, which sent a resolution to the Prime Minister opposing any weakening of immigration regulations that might “tend to make Canada a dumping ground for Europe.” The CCA wanted all new Canadians to be predominantly British or at least capable of rapid assimilation. “Now is no time to bring in people who have nothing in common with us, who do not want to work in the open and who have no desire to come here other than to find a new home.” This was a not-too-veiled attack on the Jews, who were stereotyped as people who didn’t want to “work in the open,” i.e., on the farms or in the forests and mines.
On the other hand, when the Canadian Jewish Congress held a national day of mourning on November 20, it attracted a broad spectrum of Gentile sympathizers in an attempt to convince the government to allow Jewish refugees to immigrate. Meetings were held from Glace Bay to Victoria, with prominent speakers representing labour, the United Church, and local civic councils. Letters, telegrams, and petitions flooded the Prime Minister’s office in what the Globe and Mail called an example of “the brotherhood of man asserting itself.”
It did no good. Three days after the day of mourning, a powerful Jewish delegation from Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, led by Heaps and Sam Factor, the Liberal member for Spadina, met with King and Crerar. They announced that the Jewish community was prepared to care for any Jews admitted to Canada and asked that at least ten thousand be admitted. King shilly-shallied. He pointed out that unemployment was still high and that Canada must first take care of its own. He also had to consider “the avoidance of strife within our own country,” not to mention the constituencies (meaning Quebec) “and the views of those who are supporting the government.” Votes, in short, were more important than human lives.
King then shocked the delegation with the suggestion that Kristallnacht might be a blessing in disguise; international opinion, he said, was so outraged the Nazis would be afraid to molest the Jews further.
International opinion did not sway the Cabinet, though King, whose conscience was clearly bothered by his colleagues’ intransigence, tried to bring the members around. On November 24 he asked his ministers “to try and view the refugee problem from the way in which this nation will be judged in years to come, if we do not play our part along with other democracies, in helping to meet one of humanity’s direct needs.” He pointed out that “we could not afford to lose the Liberal attitude … and that the time had come when, as a Government, we would have to perform acts that were expressive of what we believed to be the conscience of the nation, and not what might be, at the moment, politically most expedient.” He got little response, “most of those present fearing the political consequences of any help to the Jews.” Cabinet was prepared to find a home for the Jews somewhere else – in Africa, perhaps – but not in Canada.
By this time it was almost impossible for any Jewish refugee to leap the barrier that the Immigration Branch had erected against the Jews. At the beginning of the year, Jewish refugees were required to have capital of at least five thousand dollars on entering the country. By December the department was rejecting those who had twenty thousand or more. Just before Hitler seized Czechoslovakia, a group of Jewish farm families with a total capital of one million dollars begged for entry visas. They were bluntly denied entry. Blair and other officials of the department were convinced, without any evidence, that many refugees were faking their assets in order to gain admission.
In Europe, where time was of the essence for anybody fleeing the Nazis, the very word “Jew” on an application form was enough to cause immediate rejection by Canadian officials. Abella and Troper quote the case of Zita Plaut, who had managed to escape from Vienna to the Netherlands with her husband. In 1938 she applied for a visa to bring the couple and the rest of her family still in Germany to Canada. She told the Canadian official that the family had fifty thousand dollars in foreign currency. “Wonderful,” he said, and handed her a form. She filled it out and signed it. “Oh,” he said, “their name is Rappaport? They are Jewish? I’m sorry, we have no visas.” And he tore up the document as she watched.
King had not since November pressed the matter of Jewish immigration on his colleagues, but Crerar did. On December 1, he told the Cabinet that he was prepared to admit ten thousand Jewish refugees. King was nettled. Crerar had made the recommendation, he felt, “really without consideration of the matter.” With the rest of the Cabinet totally opposed, the Prime Minister fell back on that old bulwark, the BNA Act. He would announce publicly that the matter couldn’t be dealt with until the provinces were consulted. “As legislation respecting immigration is concurrent,” the government would leave it up to each province as to whether they would accept Jewish immigrants. The general feeling in Cabinet was that they would all be unwilling.
To further appease Crerar, King suggested tossing a small bone to Canadian Jews who were still pressuring the government for bolder action, especially in the light of Australia’s commitment to admit fifteen thousand Jewish refugees. Jews who had come to Canada as tourists, it was announced, would be allowed to stay, but no more would be admitted “lest it might foment anti-Semitic problems.”
That was the bizarre argument used by Canada’s High Commissioner to Britain, the patrician Vincent Massey, who danced on the periphery of Lord and Lady Astor’s anti-Semitic, pro-German Cliveden set. Massey told King privately that a further influx of Jewish refugees would “naturally swell the already substantial Jewish population of larger cities” and help create “anti-Semitic feeling.”
The High Commissioner had another, more devious solution. Why not appease those Canadians who wanted to help alleviate the refugee problem by taking in another type of refugee – Germans from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia who had incurred Hitler’s wrath by not supporting him at the time of the Munich crisis? Massey made his prejudices clear when he told King that “these refugees are of a superior type to certain other categories of refugees who are engaging our attention.” For one thing, they were Aryans.
And that is exactly what happened. A few days before Christmas the Cabinet agreed that more than three thousand Sudeten Germans could emigrate to western Canada “provided they came with the amount of capital now required for settlement purposes.”
King’s conscience was salved. Canada would humanely admit these Germans, who “had been sacrificed for the benefit of the world’s peace of which we were the beneficiaries.” As Massey explained, they were among “the numerous non-Jewish people who [found] life quite intolerable under the Nazi regime,” while Norman Robertson, of External Affairs, stated that “men of their type and history should be a really valuable asset and acquisition to this country.”
Of all the disparate groups of refugees in Europe, the victims from Sudetenland were the newest. The Jews, of course, were the oldest. But Canada had made it clear that, as a Canadian official would later say of Jewish immigrants, none was too many. With a scratch of the pen, Canada’s most distinguished and powerful mandarins and statesmen pushed the Jews aside and put the Germans at the head of the queue.
1939
1
A yearning for leadership
2
Back from the dead
3
The royal tonic
4
War<
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1
A yearning for leadership
The country was tired.
In this, the last year of the Great Depression – but who could know that? – the people were weary and dispirited and their leaders worn out in mind and sometimes in body. (Mackenzie King, on New Year’s afternoon, took to his bed for two and a half hours.)
One million Canadians were still on relief. Jobs remained hard to get, even though many who had them were overworked. Social workers had too many desperate cases, doctors too many indigent patients, teachers too many ragged students crammed into rundown classrooms.
Since 1930, the country had been living from hand to mouth. The government had shovelled nine hundred million dollars into direct-aid works and projects for unemployment relief and agricultural distress and had precious little to show for it. The number of people dependent on public funds was still rising, yet the nation’s leaders seemed incapable of effective planning.
The Canadian Welfare Council described the prevailing mood in its annual report that January: “A weary country and a disillusioned people have been in a mood of drift.” Under such conditions, charismatic leaders often emerge to short-cut democracy. It had happened elsewhere. Could it happen in Canada?
There were hints that it could, especially in the three provinces whose leaders had, with the enthusiastic approval of the voters, tried to subvert the democratic process.
The Great Depression Page 54
