Canada: QUEBEC: The Witnesses

Quebec was placed on trial for its devotion to civil liberties, and Quebec failed. Three times, members of the cantankerous Jehovah’s Witnesses sect tried to hold public meetings, and three times angry mobs scattered them.

At Chateauguay, about 90 Witnesses spread out on a door-to-door tour, handed out their literature, delivered their standard anti-Catholic sermons. By the time they gathered for a meeting in Witness R. W. Weaner’s yard, a mob of 1,000 men, women & children had a truck filled with rotten vegetables ready. The Witnesses were pelted. Those who resisted were beaten. Finally the crowd set up two fire sirens 25 feet from where Witness J. R. Dufour was lecturing, turned them on full blast and drowned him out. Fifteen Witnesses were arrested (for distributing circulars without a license).

A few days later, at Lachine, a crowd of 2,000 broke up house-to-house distribution of Witness sermons, then besieged Joseph Letellier and three other Witnesses of the sect in Letellier’s watch-repair shop. They smashed windows, messed up the shop’s front. Three youths were arrested—for throwing stones.

Then, at Chateauguay again, the Witnesses tried to hold another meeting. Again a mob (about 1,500) threw eggs, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, stones. Witnesses who tried to get away were chased and pummeled. Seventeen Witnesses were arrested.

To many Quebeckers, the disorders seemed justified. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are virulent in their attacks on organized religion, are particularly offensive against Roman Catholicism. But more thoughtful Quebeckers well knew that the Witnesses, who thrive on persecution, had made a case for themselves in Canada’s Catholic province, had showed the rest of the Dominion that many of Quebec’s people subscribe to free speech only up to a point. Said the Toronto Star: “The offensiveness of the Witnesses’ methods does not justify people … in taking the law into their own hands.”