Throughout the 1930s the daily newspapers and radio provided detailed reports and commentary on world events based on dispatches from international wire services. The Japanese conquest of Manchuria and their expansion in China, the election of Adolf Hitler and his antisemitic laws, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the occupation of Rhineland were all seen as significant events with little impact on Canada. The Spanish Civil War evoked a much stronger reaction, especially in Montreal where the Catholic Church and the nationalists endorsed Franco’s crusade to topple the Spanish Republic. The conflict began in July 1936, but it was not until October that evidence of Republican atrocities convinced the Vatican and the Canadian church to actively support Franco. On 21 October, Le Devoir published an editorial essay describing attacks on the Church and clergy. The essay was based on one of the first detailed reports from the Vatican confirming numerous murders of priests and nuns. The report was bound to have an impact on Catholics, but the civil war might have remained a distant event were it not for the news that representatives of the Spanish Republic were to follow up a rally in Toronto with one in Montreal. The Canadian Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, formed in Toronto with both CCF and Communist Party leadership, had invited Dr. Norman Bethune, a Montreal surgeon and social activist, to Toronto to speak at their event and to take charge of a medical mission to Spain which was the Committee’s major endeavour.^[1]

            A recently formed Montreal branch of the Committee, chaired by McGill law professor Frank Scott, arranged to bring the delegation to Montreal, renting the Mount Royal Arena. They were apparently unaware that the weekend of their meeting coincided with the annual Festival of Christ the King, an event in the liturgical calendar created in 1929 and embraced in Quebec as the occasion for a great catholic manifestation. Large crowds were expected to hear speakers extol the Roman Catholic world view and attend outdoor mass in the Champs des Mars.^[2] News that the delegation included a Franciscan priest, declared apostate by his order and the church hierarchy, added momentum to a student and Jociste-inspired protest movement. Rumours that the protesters planned to wreck the Committee’s meeting led Scott to call the Director of Police to seek assistance. The Director refused, telling Scott, “Montreal is a Catholic city, you do not know what you are doing holding such a meeting.” After some 300 students marched to city hall demanding action, the Mayor cancelled the arena permit.^[3] The police were told not to intervene in the planned student demonstrations if they were peaceful. Attempts to hold the rally at Victoria Hall in Westmount were foiled by crowds parading through the streets and shouting “down with the communists.” Apart from an invitation-only lunch at McGill University, neither Bethune nor the Spaniards were able to speak in Montreal. The delegation took the night train to New York City and Bethune left for Spain.^[4] That Sunday, a crowd estimated at 100,000 heard Mass at the Champs des Mars and listened to speeches denouncing communism from civic leaders. Bishop Gauthier, a powerful speaker, concluded his address with the words “Catholics your day has come.”^[5]

            A large majority of the Anglo-Celtic population was indifferent or neutral regarding Spain and accepted the Non-Intervention Agreement negotiated by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. All three English-language dailies endorsed the Agreement and the Canadian government’s decision to enforce the Foreign Enlistment Act to prevent Canadians from joining the Republican cause. Despite this, there was considerable support for Frank Scott’s critique of mob rule:

Canadian democracy is in a perilous state if a sane and considered statement for a lawful government is prevented from being given in a British country by threats of violence from irresponsible elements.^[6]

The bombing of Guernica on market day, 26 May 1937 inflicted hundreds of civilian casualties becoming one of the most notorious incidents of the war, memorialized in Picasso’s famous work of art. In 1937, eye-witness reports provided graphic evidence of the impact of the Luftwaffe attacks but Catholic spokesmen tried to prove that the “Reds” had burned the town before retreating. Le Devoir maintained this lie chastising the English press for persisting in the belief that Guernica had been bombed.^[7]

            Norman Bethune, who had proved to be a difficult colleague in Spain, returned to Montreal in June. His speech at the arena, to a reported 10,000 men and women, was without incident. He then set out on a cross-Canada fundraising tour on behalf of Spanish children affected by the war. Le Devoir was not impressed; the Carnet du Grincheux column commented that few “authentic Canadians,” but many “hooked noses” were among the crowd that greeted Dr. Bethune at Windsor station.^[8]

            One casualty of the ongoing conflict was Edmond Turcotte, the Editor of Le Canada,who had offered mild support for the elected government of Spain and condemned the bombing of Guernica.^[9] Ernest Lapointe and the liberal party organizers were determined to avoid being dragged into the controversy and replaced Turcotte with a less “radical” editor, Eustache Letellier de St Just. This left just one French-language newspaper, the weekly L’authorite, to promote the Republican cause until Jean-Charles Harvey, the author of the anti-clerical novel Les Demi-civilisés, established a literary and political weekly, Le Jour in September 1937.  Le Jour fully supported the Republican cause.

            Activists among liberal-left Montrealers continued to hold meetings and raise funds for the Republic. In January 1938, students at McGill organised a model parliament with professors and alumni participating. They were to debate a resolution condemning the democratic nations for betraying Spain through their support for the Non-Intervention Agreement. David Lewis, a McGill Rhodes Scholar, who had returned to Canada to become National Security of the CCF , acted as prime minister. It proved difficult to find anyone to oppose the resolution which passed unanimously. Students from the Université de Montréal, who arrived to stage a protest, disbursed when confronted.^[10]

            As the war in Spain continued, conflict between militant Catholics and those who supported the Republic was easily provoked. André Malraux, the internationally acclaimed author of La Condition Humaine, arrived in Montreal on his North American tour to raise funds for a Republican ambulance corps. L’action Catholique, the semi-official newspaper of the Quebec Archdiocese, described Malraux as a man who “sought to undermine our civilization.” The editor urged Premier Duplessis to invoke the recently passed Padlock Act to prevent Malraux from speaking at the arena. The city denied the permit without relying on the new law so Malraux was limited to smaller meetings at McGill, the Unitarian Church and a downtown hotel.

            Newspaper coverage of the last Republican offensive, the Battle of the Ebro in late July 1938 was extensive, but news about Spain now had to compete with the annexation of Austria, renewed Japanese aggression in China, the Czech Crisis which began in May, and the British attempts at rapprochement with Mussolini.

            Catholics throughout North America welcomed the demise of the Republic and the triumph of the Spanish church. Franco’s victory was publicly celebrated by the new Papal delegate to Canada, Monsignor Antonutti, who, on his arrival in Quebec City in October 1938, offered words of thanksgiving for the religious liberty Catholics would now enjoy in Spain, free of the “Reds” who had killed thousands of priests and religious.^[11]

            Throughout September 1938, the city like the rest of the Western world was caught up in the events unfolding in Czechoslovakia. The wire services provided details of Hitler’s demands for the annexation of the Sudetenland “to protect” the German-speaking population who lived there. This remnant of the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire had never been citizens of Germany but that was a distinction few addressed. On 15 September, British Prime Minister Nevile Chamberlain agreed to Hitler’s demands and sought to persuade the Czechs and their French allies that the sacrifice was necessary for the peace of Europe. All Montreal newspapers favoured appeasement except for LeJour. The Montreal Star, for example, printed the views of its Ottawa correspondent who reflected the Canadian government’s view that “if the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia is essential to the peace of Europe then it is to be preferred to the catastrophe of war.” The next day’s editorial further declared that even if Hitler continued to “wreak havoc among the Danubian nations, that was better than war.”^[12] Not everyone agreed. Montreal’s militia regiments, like their counterparts in the rest of Canada, were ready to mobilise although no orders from Ottawa had come. Local officers told the Star that Canada would raise 750,000 men. “Offers of service” from numerous young men as well as veterans were occurring daily. The Czech consul in Montreal also reported men that were volunteering to come to his country’s aid, but an attempt to organise a demonstration on behalf of Czechoslovakia was opposed by Mayor Raynault as “intended to provoke incidents.” We have, he stated, “nothing to do with the quarrels of Europe.”^[13]

            Leopold Richer, Le Devoir’s parliamentary correspondent reported that a “slight majority of the cabinet favoured participation if war broke out”, but Quebec MPs and all five Quebec cabinet ministers were firmly opposed. There was however “danger from loyalists ready to sacrifice Canadian interests.”^[14] Richer and his colleagues need not have worried. The Prime Minister remained committed to the policy of appeasement, rejecting the proposals of the Defence Department to accelerate rearmament. The 1938 estimates had included three million dollars to purchase two destroyers HMCS Restigouche and HMCS Ottawa from Great Britain, an expenditure justified by reference to coastal defence. Small increases were also provided for the RCAF but the army was deliberately neglected. During September 1938, when the Czech crisis seemed likely to lead to war, the cabinet agreed to provide an additional six million dollars to the RCAF to purchase “modern first-line aircraft” in the United States. A Canadian delegation travelled secretly to Washington and forged an agreement with the United States Army Air Force but the Prime Minister and his chief advisor, the arch-isolationist O.D. Skelton, acted swiftly to withdraw the funds “as the emergency was now over.”^[15]

            Newspapers began reporting on the forcible expulsion of Polish Jews in Germany and Poland’s refusal to allow them to return. On 8 November, the son of one of the thousands stranded at the German-Polish border shot a German embassy official in Paris providing the excuse for a massive pogrom  in Germany. On the night of 9-10 November, organized groups prompted by Nazi officials attacked Jews, their businesses and synagogues all across the country. Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, was followed by mass arrests of the victims, further restrictions of rights and a fine of one billion marks. As entails of the terror unleashed by the Nazis became available, the kind of moral outrage so few had shown over Czechoslovakia transformed public opinion and reversed much of the support for further appeasement of Germany.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the Montreal Star, where Kristallnacht was described as a “horrifying explosion of calculated plunder that has literally stunned mankind… Apologists in democratic countries have been silenced.” It is now time for Canada to “assume its fair share in the government of the world…backed by bombers and battleships.” Munich, the Star’s editorialist argued, has “proved to be a mistake…” It was now time to:                                               

prepare for Armageddon on the playing fields and in the munitions factories… If we cannot save Eastern Europe or shelter China we can build defences at sea and in the air that will preserve inviolate the free nations we call British and the whole of the unterrified western hemisphere.^[16]

The city’s Jews began preparations for a mass meeting at His Majesty’s Theatre on 20 November, the day selected by the Canadian Jewish Congress for nationwide rallies. The Toronto meeting filled Maple Leaf Garden with large crowds in the streets outside. The gathering in Montreal packed the theatre with more than 2,000 listening outside in loudspeakers.

            The speakers at the meeting included the Chief Justice of the Quebec Superior Court Robert Greenshield, Rabbi Harry Stern, the leader of  Reform Judaism in the city, H. J. Trihey K.C. the Irish hockey all-star, Anglican Archdeacon Gower-Rees, and W.A.C. Gifford of United Theological College. All endorsed opening Canada’s borders to Jewish refugees as well as condemning the Nazis.

The Star’s editorial of 22 November titled “Why Tanganyika?” argued for the admission of large numbers of “shrewd, industrious and thrifty Jews” to Canada with the establishment of “self-supporting settlements… in the manner of the Mormons in Utah or the United Empire loyalists.” The newspaper’s views on Kristallnacht and the refugee question led the official newspaper of the Nazi Party in Germany to condemn it, calling the newspaper the “Star of David” and pointing to the treatment of Canada’s indigenous people as the real atrocity.^[17]

On 24 November, Georges Pelletier, the Le Devoir editor, published an essay in response to the Star’s editorial. Pelletier was opposed to all immigration but especially Jewish refugees. Jews, he wrote, were “gens de ville” not the sort of colonists the Star proposed to bring to Canada. His colleague, Omer Héroux, claimed to admire the ability of the Jews for staging thirty protest meetings on the same day all across Canada but asked if it was a good idea to bring refugees to a milieu where there is such a strong animosity towards them.^[18]

Kristallnacht led many in the city’s Anglo-Celtic community to end their support for appeasement and, for a brief period in late November and early December, to press for the admission of Jewish refugees. French Canadian public opinion leaders remained resolutely committed to isolationism and stood firmly opposed to any relaxation of immigration restrictions, especially those related to Jews. As winter embraced the city and seasonal unemployment added thousands to the relief rolls, international events seemed less urgent.

The Anglo-Celtic and Jewish press closely followed British attempts to find a compromise between Arabs and Jews in Palestine and all newspapers carried detailed reports from India on Gandhi’s hunger strike protesting British rule. The death of Pius XI and the election of Cardinal Pacelli as Pius XII was the dominant story of early March and then, without warning, Hitler moved to secure what was left of Czechoslovakia. Most Canadians recognized that another line had been crossed and that Hitler would no longer claim to be uniting Germany into the Reich. Rumours of an ultimatum to Romania added to the tension, creating what has been called “an underground explosion of public opinion” in most of the English-speaking world.^[19] Neville Chamberlain echoed his response in his Birmingham speech on 17 March 1939. The British Prime Minister seemed to have abandoned appeasement, but until 29 March when the British and French governments issued the Polish Guarantee, it was not clear whether action would follow words. The Canadian Prime Minister also appeared to be reversing his commitment to appeasement telling the House of Commons that:

If there was a prospect of an aggressor launching an attack on Britain with bombers raining death on London, I have no doubt what the decision of the Canadian Parliament and people would be. We would regard it as an act of aggression menacing freedom in all parts of the British Commonwealth.

This statement provoked the expected reaction from both French and English Canadian isolationists. Le Canada, the voice of the Liberal Party in Montreal, buried King’s words on page 6. The Star described King’s speech as a declaration that “Canada is ready to play its part in the defence of democracy” and identified King’s policy with Chamberlain’s decision to confront Hitler.^[20]

            On 30 March, following Chamberlain’s offer of a “guarantee” to Poland, Mackenzie King spoke at length in parliament contradicting his earlier statement by declaring (in the words of the O.D. Skelton) that:

The idea that every twenty years this country should automatically and as a matter of course take part in a war overseas for democracy or self-determination of other small nations…and to these ends risk the lives of the people, risk bankruptcy and political disunion, seems to many a nightmare and sheer madness.

            The next day Earnest Lapointe rose to deliver a speech wildly hailed as a much-needed clarification of Canada’s position. Lapointe “lashed out at those people in Quebec who have unalterably opposed Canada’s participation in British wars.” Neutrality, which would for example involve “interning British ships,” was impossible, as such action would lead to civil war in Canada. Lapointe reaffirmed his opposition to compulsion and promised he would not serve in a government that imposed conscription for overseas service.^[21] Neither King nor Lapointe had anything to say about the need to prepare Canada’s military for the possibility of war.

            The government’s reluctance to face reality was further demonstrated when the Minister of National Defence presented his estimates for the fiscal year 1939-40 to the House of Commons in April 1939. Ian Mackenzie reported on the substantial rise in defence expenditure which had occurred in the past three years and noted that the new estimates called for a further increase from thirty-six million to fifty-four million dollars. His proposals were however presented with the explanation that:

Canada should be prepared to defend by force of arms, if necessary: (1) Our religion, our freedom and our institutions; (2) our coasts and coastal regions, our centres of population and industry, our main ports and focal sea areas where trade routes converge in the vicinity of our main ports; (3) our neutrality in a war in which Canada is not a belligerent (4) internal order.^[22]

The Minister’s statement was made in the full knowledge that, in the event of a war involving Great Britain, public and cabinet opinion would demand full Canadian participation including an expeditionary force. As early as 1936 Ian Mackenzie had participated in a Cabinet Committee chaired by the prime minister with Ernest Lapointe and Charles Dunning, the finance minister in attendance. A brief written by the Director of Military Operations Col. H. D. G. Crerar offered an outline of the changes in the international system and then noted that:

If a long-term appreciation would appear to be impractical a comparatively short-distance view might reasonably be attempted. Such a view would embrace the fact that Germany has reached a dominant position in European politics; that its military preparations, which have been proceeding on a colossal scale… are rapidly approaching comparative completion; that its economic and financial situation appears to be such that within a short period, perhaps a year the only alternative to a serious internal situation will be an external distraction such as that afforded by a war aimed at expansion of its frontiers.

It is possible that the impending outbreak will be initially confined to Central and Eastern Europe. It is quite impossible to assume it will remain so restricted… What is equally evident… is that neither the nations forming the British Empire nor, indeed, the United States, can remain unaffected by any development which holds an obvious threat to the continued existence, as a world power, of Great Britain.

Crerar’s specific recommendations included the development of armoured fighting vehicles, mechanized transport and modern automatic small-arms sufficient to allow one-third of the militia to “mobilize without delay on a war footing.” Modern aircraft to equip twenty-three squadrons were also on a list which the military updated each year.

The realistic proposal could have little appeal to a cabinet committee chaired by Mackenzie King and including Ernest Lapointe. It had even less appeal to O. D. Skelton and Loring Christie who attended the meetings on behalf of External Affairs. Quite apart from theirpersonal commitment to isolationism, both men shared a determination to exclude the military from any role in policymaking and insisted that the military must submit plans “according to the scheme of policy and liabilities” laid down by the civil arm.^[23]

            The Ottawa isolationists, Canada’s “guilty men”, were not alone in resisting the tide of public opinion in English Canada. The Canadian Neutrality League attracted a number of academics including McGill’s Frank Scott who advocated for neutrality, not just the right to remain neutral. He made contact with André Laurendeau and other nationalists proposing an agreement to work together to avoid participation in a British war. Full agreement could not be reached and the manifesto was never released.^[24]

            A more consequential form of opposition to participation came from a number of United Church of Canada ministers, who maintained their pacifist beliefs after the large majority had abandoned such ideas. The United Church and its monthly periodical, the New Outlook, actively promoted appeasement, peace movements and the League of Nations until Kristallnacht when articles in the New Outlook argued that Christians needed to reassess their position. The CCF leader J. S. Woodsworth protested the retreat from pacifism in a letter, asking for a clear statement of what the church would do if England was attacked. Woodworth’s letter began a debate that dominated the magazine, renamed The Observer, throughout 1939. The views of the majority were soon evident. As one reader put it, “Cannot you and other pacifists distinguish the moral significance of different wars… war with all its horror is a less dreadful alternative than that which Hitler would force on the world.”^[25]

On 17 May 1939, Canadians of all political persuasions put aside their differences to greet King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. A pattern of giddy enthusiasm as well as pomp and ceremony began at Quebec City where tens of thousands gathered to watch the royal couple disembark to begin a month-long cross-Canada tour. Montreal offered an even more enthusiastic and extravagant welcome including thousands of schoolchildren, Catholics at the Delormier baseball stadium, and Protestants and Jews at McGill’s Molson Stadium, filling the streets and waving Union Jacks as the motorcade drove around the track. Émile Vaillancourt, a publicist and promoter of French Canadian culture, was in charge of arrangements. He planned the ceremonies for “le roi du Canada.”

To enact on a grand scale his vision of Canadian society wherein the presence and visibility of French Canadian culture and French Canada’s ongoing ties to Great Britain would demonstrate national unity.^[26]

The culmination of the Royal visit to Montreal came when 1,500 guests, carefully selected from the city’s communities including Jews, Italians and other ethnic groups, were seated with French and English-speaking Montrealers. The press was wildly enthusiastic about the day’s events while the CBC broadcasts, in both languages, offered detailed accounts of every event. When the monarchs crossed to the United States to visit the New York World’s Fair and join Franklin Roosevelt at his home in Hyde Park, both the CBC and newspapers were close by, telling the story with enthusiasm and incredible detail.^[27]

            On 17 June, La Jour published the results of a public opinion poll organized by the Montreal Psychological Institute affiliated with McGill University on attitudes towards the Royal visit to the city. Among French Canadians, 44 percent thought that the visit had made them feel closer to the Empire, while 33 percent were willing to support sending an expeditionary force if Britain was at war. Fifty-five percent of English-speaking Montrealers surveyed reported feeling closer to the Empire with 59 percent favouring an expeditionary force. A further 18 percent were undecided and 22 percent were opposed. Le Jour did not provide information on the size sample or the methods used but the results suggest that the visit had a marginal effect on long-established views of Canada’s place in the world.

News about the Royal Tour in Canada and the United States continued to be a major story but most of the City’s newspapers reported on the fate of the 907 Jewish refugees aboard the German ocean liner St. Louis. The refusal of the Cuban authorities to honour passengers’ visas was front page news on 1 June and wire services reports were printed daily until the St. Louis sailed to Antwerp on 8 June. The British, Belgian, French and Dutch governments agreed to provide visas allowing refugees to avoid returning to Germany. On 7 June a number of prominent Toronto-based Canadians had sent a telegram to Mackenzie King who was in Washington with the Royals, asking him to “show Christian charity” and admit refugees to Canada. The Prime Minister asked his key advisor O. D. Skelton for advice. After a consultation with Lapointe who was “emphatically opposed” to the idea and a discussion with the senior immigration official Charles Blair about immigration regulations, Skelton told King that nothing could be done.^[28] No similar requests came from Montreal where the issue quickly faded from view. The story of St. Louis was the subject of a Canadian Jewish Chronicle editorial on 16 June in which A. M. Klein, the editor wrote:

For two weeks the ship was the unholy nightmare of the New World haunting it with an accusing finger, disturbing but not disturbing enough to rouse it from its triple-locked smugness… at the moment of the world’s moral crisis, a crisis indicated in tabloids  by the fate of the nine hundred it was not the New World but rather the Old which lived up to the tradition of humanity and civilization.

There is no evidence that the ship’s officers or passengers sought entry into Canada but the St. Louis story became important in Canada’s modern collective memory of the broad issue of attitudes and policy towards Jewish refugees in the 1930s.^[29]

The summer of 1939 was marked by a series of cries in Europe and China. The Tientsin Incident, which for a time threatened war between Britain and Japan, the Russo-Japanese War in Mongolia and Manchuria and the conflict between Germany and Poland over Danzig filled the front pages. How much did all of this affect the citizens of Montreal? On 3 July 1939, the Star lead editorial, titled “What’s the Good of Worrying” advised the average Canadian citizen “to go about his business and not take WAR as INEVITABLE until the armies are on the march.” Canada must prepare “rapidly and effectively as possible to play its part” in a war that threatened the continued existence of the British Empire as well as “the survival of our whole modern civilization” but there was “no use in losing in advance this war of nerves.”

One way of tuning out the noise was through music, and in June the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM) offered an extraordinary opportunity to hear three different conductors lead three consecutive performances of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Montreal’s own Wilfrid Pelletier, Paul Stassevitch and Eugine Ormandy were each welcomed by large, enthusiastic audiences. The OSM continued its summer concerts at the Chalet Mount Royal as did the Société d’Opéra Français which performed Carmen there with tickets at twenty-five cents. Baseball fans were encouraged by the news that the Montreal Royals were now the farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers though it turned out to be another dismal season, with sixty-four wins and eighty-eight losses. On 23 July, the baseball stadium, Parc Delormier, was the scene of the Jociste-inspired mass wedding of 105 couples who were married simultaneously by Archbishop Gauthier and 104 priests. The event took place in the middle of a summer heat wave and hundreds of spectators fainted during the ceremony.

Summer ended on 23 August when a Treaty of Non-Aggression between the Soviet Union and Germany was signed. War now seemed inevitable and the announcement of a pre-cautionary stage of Canadian mobilization followed on 25 August. Four Montreal-area militia regiments were activated with orders to supply volunteers to guard vital locations that might be targeted by “fifth columnists.” Canadians were getting ready to go to war despite the best efforts of the isolationists.

Citations

---

[1] Le Devoir, 21 October 1936.

[2] The celebration to take place on Sunday 23 October was publicized in all French-language newspapers

[3] Sandra Djwa, The Politics of Imagination: A Life of F. R. Scott (Toronto 1982), p. 171.

[4] Harvey Levinson, Montreal’s Response to the Spanish Civil War (M.A. Thesis, Concordia University, 1976).

[5] Le Canada, 24 October 1936.

[6] Diwa, Politics of Imagination, p. 173.

[7] Le Devoir, 3 June 1937.

[8] Le Devoir, 19 June 1937.

[9] Turcotte’s Fair Well editorial was published on 29 April 1937. Sec Marie-Eve Tanguay, La pensée d’Edmound Turcotte (M.A. Thesis, Université de Montréal, 2008) [online]

[10] Levinson, Montreal’s Response to the Spanish Civil War, Chapter 2.

[11] An English translation of the speech is available online at collections mun.ca, Memorial University’s Archives.

[12] Montreal Star, 20 and 21 September 1938.

[13] Montreal Star, 21 September 1938. My father recalled how he and other employees at Bell Telephone discussed joining the signal corps or the air force in September 1938. He may have been dissuaded by the proximity of my birth, 28 September 1938

[14] Le Devoir, 20 September 1938.

[15] James Eayrs. In Defence of Canada: Appeasement and Rearmament vol 3 (Toronto 1965) p. 151-152. For a sympathetic treatment of O.D. Skelton, see Norman Hilmer, O.D. Skelton: A Portrait of Canadian Ambition (Toronto 2015)

[16] Montreal Star, 14 November 1938.

[17] The event in Montreal is described in the daily newspapers for November 22, 1938. See the Canadian Jewish Chronicle 25 November 1938 for speech summaries and a report on the Toronto meetings.

[18] Montreal Star, 24 November 1938.

[19] Le Devoir, 26 November 1938. See also the discussion of Pelletier’s views in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle 2 December 1938

[20] Le Canada 21 March 1938; and Montreal Star, 21 March 1938.

[21] All city newspapers reported both speeches. See also Lita Rose Betcherman Ernest Lapointe: Mackenzie King’s Great Quebec Lieutenant (Toronto 2012).

[22] Canada, Debates House of Commons, April 1939.

[23] Eayrs, In Defence, p. 83.

[24] David Lenarcic, “Pragmatism and Principle: The Canadian Neutrality League 1938-1939” JCS vol 29 No2

[25] David R. Rothwell, “United Church Pacifism, 1939” The Bulletin 1973. See also Gordon L. Heath’s “Irreconcilable Differences…” Historical Papers, Canadian Society of Church History 1999 (online)

[26] There is extensive press coverage, For the Montreal arrangements see M. P Ungar, The Last Ulysseans: Culture And Modernism In Montreal (PhD Thesis, York University, 2003) p. 275-276 online

[27] Mary Vipond, “The Royal Tour of 1939 as a Media Event” Canadian Journal of Communication (2010).

[28] Irving Abella and Harold Toper, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 (Toronto 1983) p. 67

[29] “MS St. Louis” Canadian Encyclopedia online

Montreal newspapers used United Press dispatches to cover the voyage of the St. Louis without suggesting a Canadian Connection. Le Devoir largely ignored the event except for a line in the editorial column, Le carnet de Grincheux, which read “When Israel is King it will not be stranded in Havana” See also, Pierre Anctil and Alexandre Comeau’s “The St. Louis Crisis in the Canadian Press: New Data on the June 1939 Incident” Canadian Jewish Studies vol 31 (2021). This article is part of a large body of work by Pierre Anctil which seeks to prove that French Canada was less antisemitic than many historians have argued. Having read the French Language press in the 1937-1940 period on this topic I am unable to accept Anctil’s revisionism.