Bedroom Farce

The Canadian Parliament's least happy duty is to act as a divorce court for the provinces of Quebec and Newfoundland. It is an arrangement originally made as a concession to populous Roman Catholic Quebec, which frowns on divorce and declines to establish a court of its own. The sole ground for a parliamentary divorce is adultery. Over the years, as the number of petitions grew (to more than 600 this year), Ottawa tacitly winked at its suspicion that Montreal detective agencies were doing a lucrative trade arranging the evidence. But last week an aggrieved husband named William Eccles blew the whistle on the game by describing in full detail in the Toronto Star how his divorce was rigged.

Eccles' story was that he had originally agreed to give his wife Lise an "amicable divorce" in return for withdrawal of her demand for $240 a month for support. But now, he said, his wife was making it difficult for him to see their nine-year-old son, and "I realized that if my fake divorce goes through, I may never see my son again."

He spoke up in the nick of time. The Senate had already favorably concluded its investigation of Lise's "prayer for relief," and passed it on for the Commons' rubber stamp. Her evidence, which varied only in details from the testimony often offered in New York courts: a pair of operatives from the Reliable Detective Bureau had rapped on the door of Room 201 in Montreal's Taft Hotel, surprised Eccles in shorts and one Joanne Laer in a well-mussed bed. Eccles' version was that he and the detectives drove to the hotel together, where he simply registered and then went home. He had met no woman, had not gone upstairs.

The Eccles confession hit Ottawa in the midst of a campaign by a small band of Socialist M.P.s to end parliamentary divorces. They have filibustered on every divorce bill before the House this session, hoping to force a change in the law. A House subcommittee summoned the cast of the Eccles case to Ottawa for a hearing. The verdict: Lise Eccles' divorce was denied, and the case was turned over to Mounties for possible prosecution for collusion and perjury. A cry is now being heard that Parliament should disentangle itself from divorce entirely and turn over its jurisdiction to a responsible court.

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