Canada: Demagogue from Quebec

In the small, grey Quebec villages, political meetings have a clannish, almost family atmosphere. Réal Caouette, 45, strides down the center aisle, chatting, shaking hands. A small, bespectacled man, he speaks rapidly in French Canadian patois, his jokes homey and telling. At meeting’s end, as party workers pass cardboard ice cream containers for campaign contributions, he says to his audience of stubble-chinned farmers and somber-faced workmen: “Give if you can, but don’t be shy if you can’t. And if you really need some money, take it.”

Caouette is the most conspicuous new political phenomenon in Canada, and a man who on April 8 could wind up holding the balance of power in a nation deeply divided between Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives and Lester Pearson’s Liberals. Caouette’s platform is based on the funny-money Social Credit party, which in the Depression promised a printing-press prosperity (each citizen should get a share of the national wealth—in cash).

French v. English. In last year’s elections, Caouette singlehanded built Social Credit strength in Quebec from nothing to 26 of the province’s 75 seats in Parliament, while in the rest of the nation the party won only four seats. “This time,” promises Caouette, “we are going to take 60 seats.” Last week’s Gallup poll gave the Liberals 41% (a drop of 3%), the Conservatives 32%; the only significant shift since the beginning of the campaign was a 5% gain, to 16%, for Social Credit. Pearson needs Quebec to win clear control of Parliament, and it looks as if he won’t get it.

It is not Social Credit’s oddball economics but Caouette’s French Canadianness that is his true strength. He makes skilled demagogic use of Quebec’s nagging dissatisfaction with its role in Canadian life. French Canadians make up nearly 30% of the country’s population, and most of them feel like second-class citizens. They complain that they hold only 10% of the jobs in the federal civil service, usually at lower levels, that bilingualism, though given lip service in the federal capital at Ottawa, is ignored throughout the rest of the nation; that even their own province’s economy is dominated by English-speaking Canadians. To War—No! Caouette shares their insecurity and makes it his platform. The son of a Quebec civil servant and the fourth of 15 children, he was forced by pinched family finances to give up a classical education and go to commercial school. He struggled to run a grocery store, sold used cars, finally became a Chrysler dealer in the town of Rouyn (pop. 18,500), 320 miles northwest of Montreal. But he never made big money. In 1939 he dropped in at a Social Credit meeting in Rouyn, listened, and decided that the movement’s economic theories made sense. After the lecture he stepped forward and asked to become a worker.

Like thousands of other French Canadians, he ignored the notifications that he had been drafted to fight in World War II—”that English war.” “Why should you fight for the right to starve and die in your own country?” asked Caouette. He made his first political speech in 1941, and never forgot the cheers. Three years later, he ran as a Social Credit candidate in a provincial election, got licked, lost again in 1945 when he ran for the federal Parliament. In 1946, when his opponent died, he won the by-election to replace him, but lost again in 1949, 1957 and 1958. Then Caouette discovered TV, and soon claimed a Sunday afternoon French Canadian audience of a million and a half.

“Pension, Ah-ha!” On TV and at rallies, Caouette sticks to the stomach and the pocketbook. “When I’m up there,” he says, “and I talk about the people in Montreal who had to dig in garbage pails for chicken last Christmas, I really feel their hunger. I feel their misery. I identify.” He vaguely blames the “big interests,” meaning the English-speaking people who rule Canada. “Have you ever heard of them lacking money to build a cannon? No. But family allowances, old-age pensions, money for the blind, ah-ha! That’s another matter.” And he continues: “No one doubts the abundance in the country now. Look at the stores. They have spring sales, before-season sales, after-season sales, Christmas sales, pre-sale sales. The question is how to spread purchasing power to distribute the goods.”

Before election day, Caouette will have carried his message to 74 of Quebec’s 75 ridings—all but icebound lies de la Madeleine in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And for the rally that will climax his campaign, he has rented the 13,728-seat Montreal Forum, home ice for the Canadiens hockey team. “It won’t be Imperial Esso hockey night in Canada,” cries Caouette. “It will be the night of national liberation.”