CANADA: Le Chef Is Dead

Maurice LeNoblet Duplessis, the Premier of Quebec, scorned the taking of bids on public works as “disguised hypocrisy,” and bestowed stretches of highway to qualified areas (i.e., they voted right) in the fashion of a feudal lord. He set elections for Wednesdays, day of devotion to St. Joseph, his patron saint, and went faithfully to 6 a.m. Mass at the Quebec City Roman Catholic basilica, while his bodyguard, a Protestant, waited impassively in the rear of the church. Neither the man nor his government could have happened anywhere but in Quebec.

Well born and well educated, he waited until he was 33 to take his first fling at running for the legislative assembly, then lost. There was little losing after that. Duplessis represented Trois Rivieres in the assembly from 1927 until his death last week. He was Quebec’s premier for five terms, longer than any other man.

Many of Duplessis’ civil-rights policies would have been incredible anywhere else in North America: the notorious Padlock Law for political groups he deemed “Communist,” his harassment of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the brutal record of his tough provincial cops in labor disputes. Duplessis was sometimes at odds with high Catholic churchmen, but in rural areas, Le Chef, le pere, and the preservation of the faith were indivisible.

Endlessly he defended “provincial autonomy.” But Duplessis’ continuing squabble with Canada’s federal government over tax apportionment, his refusal to let the Trans-Canada Highway go through Quebec, his refusal to allow Quebec universities to accept sorely needed federal grants, made much sense in French Canada. Quebec, over the eventful 200 years since England’s Wolfe beat France’s Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, has kept its identity, even prospered as a French enclave in the continent of les Anglais and the Yankees. A major reason was just this sort of cohesive orneriness.

The trip he made last week was the kind Duplessis took often, and carried off well, at once political fence mending and approving official inspection of Quebec’s industrial progress, which he had earnestly nourished. Boarding a Dakota, he flew north over the bleak vastness of the northern Ungava district to Schefferville (pop. 1,630, an iron-mine company town). Relaxed and joking, the premier and friends toured the great, red-dust-laden, open-pit ore mine. During a break. Duplessis and a companion chatted in an office building. The premier was idly looking out a window when he wheeled unsteadily toward his companion with a wordless appeal in his eyes, obviously ill. Plagued for years with diabetes, he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, the first of four that were to strike him in 24 hours. This week Premier Duplessis was dead, at 69.