CANADA: Mixed Reception

Russia’s touring farm experts, a surprise hit in the U.S.. got a decidedly mixed reception when their road show moved into Canada. Canadian government officials and farmers treated them courteously enough. But at airports and at hotel entrances, noisy groups of placard-carrying demonstrators, many of them immigrants who came to Canada as anti-Communist refugees after World War II, turned out to jeer and denounce the visitors.

Last week’s angriest demonstration occurred in Winnipeg, where a group of Ukrainian-Canadians gathered at the gates of the airport when the Russians landed. When a car with four husky passengers drove out, the crowd surged around it. Men and women screamed epithets in Russian, someone flung a black mourning wreath (“For Brothers Murdered By Bolsheviks”), and a husky demonstrator poked his fist through one of the car windows before word got around that the passengers were not Russians at all, but Mounties in civilian clothes. After that, the forewarned welcoming committee whisked the Russians through a side exit to well-guarded hotel rooms.

The Russians protested mildly about the press coverage of their tour when a Montreal newspaper headline quoted a demonstrator’s placard (“Bandits Go Home”). “Hooligans,” sniffed the leader of the party. They continued to plod around to farms, ask endless questions and take volumes of notes. But Canadian government officials, many of whom have been openly critical of “cold war hysteria” in the U.S., were plainly rattled. Assistant Deputy Minister of Agriculture Stanislas Joseph Chagnon publicly apologized for the demonstrators’ behavior. “I told the delegates I am sorry,” he said. “I am embarrassed.” To avoid any further embarrassment, it was announced that plans to visit Toronto and Windsor, Ont., where there are large immigrant populations, had been canceled, and that the Russians’ revised itinerary would be kept secret from day to day.

The irony of the situation somehow escaped the British press, which would almost certainly have let go a volley of criticism if the same incidents had occurred in the U.S. The Russians’ reception in Canada went without comment in London last week, reported only by the Daily Express in a six-line item.