The Senator Speaks Up

A French Canadian last week said some things that French Canadians seldom hear and never like to hear. He soon had all French Canada about his ears.

In Ottawa's plush red Senate chamber. Telesphore Damien Bouchard rose to make his maiden speech as a Senator from Quebec Province. His explosive subject: the not-so-latent hostility between French Quebec and the rest of Canada. Said he: "I still believe that a large majority of my compatriots love Canada as it is, constitutionally and otherwise, and do not want any change in their allegiance. . . . Their only wrongdoing is that they care too little about those who . . . are sabotaging our free institutions. The worms are gnawing at the tree of liberty. . . ."

Biased History? What immediately concerned the Senator was: 1) the "racial hatred insidiously instilled into the minds of French Canadians" by a biased teaching of Canadian history; 2) the secret French Canadian "Order of Jacques Cartier," whose leaders he accused of plotting to erect a French, Catholic and corporative state in Canada.

Senator Bouchard said that this Order had been founded with the blessing of the French Canadian Catholic clergy. He said that the Order's leaders had infiltrated into patriotic societies, boards of trade and municipal councils. He said that Quebec's potent, ultraisolationist party, the Bloc Populaire, was the Order's political tool. He said that the Order's ultimate aim "is not only to disunite the people on lingual and religious matters, but also to disrupt confederation, to abandon the more humane North American concept of a large nation composed of different religious beliefs and racial origins and to revert to the old European concept of smaller nations of the same religious and racial descent."

Biased Words? These were extreme words, but there was enough truth in them to hurt. Quebec City's L'Action Catholique, the organ of powerful Cardinal J. M. Rodrigue Villeneuve, called Bouchard a "vile man" and a traitor to his people. The Cardinal himself said: "I must publicly disapprove. . . ." The Liberal Party's Premier Adelard Godbout, from whose Cabinet Bouchard had gone to the Senate, was sorely embarrassed. In Ottawa, a French Canadian member of Mackenzie King's Liberal Government tried to minimize the whole affair. Said able, cool Louis Stephen St. Laurent, Minister of Justice: ". . . a group of from one-tenth to one-half of one percent of the population [of Quebec] should not be taken too seriously. . . . Senator Bouchard is one of those who assert that a spade should be called a spade but sometimes . . . he is apt to refer to such an implement as a steam shovel."

Premier Godbout flew to Ottawa, talked to Liberal chieftains, as quickly flew back to Quebec City. He summoned his Cabinet, then announced that Bouchard had been fired from a lush job to which Godbout had appointed him only two months ago. The job: the $18,000-a-year chairmanship of Quebec's Hydro Commission, which recently took over one of the biggest private power companies in Canada.

Said undaunted Senator Bouchard: "I am still asking my critics to prove that what I said . . . is contrary to the truth."

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