Did you know that in 1995 the largely french-speaking Quebec held a referendum on whether it should become an independent sovereign nation? The margin between the yes’s and no’s was even thinner than the Brexit Referendum. 49.42% voted for independence, 50.58% voted to remain as part of Canada. The movement to hold a referendum was lead by the Centre-Left local Parti Quebecois, which had ties to the Federal Bloc Quebecois. This movement was years in the making. It grew from Quebec’s ‘Quiet Revolution’ of the 1960’s moving against the traditionalist, conservative Union Nationale party. The Quebec Liberal party took the larger proportion of seats in the 1960 election. Quebec, similarly to Manchester, was highly industrial, progressive and was living up to its slogan ‘It’s time for a change.’
Montreal was home to a number of leaders of the Communist Party of Canada, since its inception in 1921. Maurice Duplessis, then Premier of Quebec, introduced legislation in 1937 which was designed to protect Quebec and its citizens from communist Propaganda. This was called the ‘Padlock Act’. Properties where Bolshevist/Communist meetings were held were physically padlocked to prevent their use. The padlock would only be removed on order of a judge, if the owner could prove the building had not been used to promote communism in the preceding year. Distribution of printed material was also outlawed with a jail sentence of up to a year for those caught. The law was still being upheld with the very public padlocking of the ‘United Jewish Peoples Order on Esplanade Ave. in Montreal on Jan. 27, 1950’. The law was revoked in 1957 on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
This paper denouncing the Padlock Act as misguided state control, details the alliance Canada made with the Soviet Union during the second World War. The author of the dissertation, Zoe Allen-Mercier (2016), highlights the obsession the Canadian authorities had with preventing infiltration of communists and communist ideology. She states rather simplistically that, as Quebec was located geographically far from the real threat, there was little reason to enter in to such a state of ‘National Insecurity’ as presented by laws like the Padlock Act. It seems ‘infiltration’ is not a term she is familiar with. It is not the first time we have read articles claiming that the west were ‘paranoid’ about communism. Perhaps on reading the previous and following articles it will become clear, certainly among the general public, that it has certainly not been the case.
This is not a political story, however, but a look at the strange relationship between clusters of fires and heatspots that appeared in Quebec this June 2023, and the state’s formidable mining industry.