New Leader in Quebec

When Quebec's Strongman Maurice Duplessis died last September, he left to his lieutenants as a legacy the most powerful political machine Canada has ever known. His Union Nationale passed first to longtime heir apparent, Paul Sauve.

Last week--after Sauve was cut down by a heart attack at 52--the Union Nationale went up for grabs among Duplessis' old lieutenants. By the time cigar smoke cleared, the party had weathered a Tammany brawl for the succession, and the big French Catholic Quebec province (pop. 5,000,000) had a new premier: Joseph Marie Antonio Barrette, 60, a Duplessis colleague for 23 years and Quebec's labor minister since 1944.

The party that Antonio Barrette takes over is not the same one Maurice Duplessis bequeathed. Where Duplessis endlessly battled Canada's federal government with the cry of provincial autonomy, Sauve had already restored reason to Quebec's relations with Ottawa. He had also stolen the Liberal opposition's thunder by launching overdue reforms that would help shore the party for an expected spring election. His unexpected death after just 114 days in office set the Union Nationale adrift with no obvious leader, raised doubts whether the party could survive a struggle for power, and whether Sauve's successors would carry on in the new pattern or revert to Duplessis' mossback ways.

Canadians watched with some foreboding as the Union Nationale ministers, clearly split, closeted themselves in Quebec City's famed Chateau Frontenac hotel. Significantly, Duplessis' closest crony, Attorney General Antoine Rivard. faded fast as a candidate. In a deadlock between Montreal and Quebec City factions, Dark Horse Barrette, a Joliette (pop. 19,000) insurance broker who still carries a union card as a machinist, emerged as the com promise.

As labor minister, Barrette found his labor-baiting, domineering boss so difficult to get along with that for the last 21 months of the Duplessis regime Barrette ran his department from Joliette, virtually boycotted cabinet meetings. In his first words as premier, he identified himself with the Sauve reforms, pledged himself to defend French Canada's historic stance "without rancor or pettifogging." Under no illusion that he cast as large a shadow as Strongman Duplessis or the brilliant Sauve, Barrette at least did not underestimate his office. "Someone once asked me what I thought of a certain Prime Minister of England," he said. "I replied that the Prime Minister of England is always great."

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