HISTORY THROUGH OUR EYES

June 1, 1939: Quebec’s notorious Padlock Law upheld

On June 1, 1939, we reported that the chief justice of Quebec’s Superior Court had upheld the province’s Padlock Law the previous day.

The now-infamous law had been adopted by the government of Maurice Duplessis in 1937. It allowed the authorities to padlock for up to one year any premises being used to disseminate communism or Bolshevism, although it did not define those terms.

The case before the court had been brought by Louis Fineberg against his son-in-law Muni Taub, who was also his tenant. The authorities had served Fineberg notice they would padlock the premises if Taub did not vacate within four days. Fineberg had sought $285 in damages from Taub. According to historian Pierre Berton in his book The Great Depression, it was the Canadian Civil Liberties Union that had persuaded the men to participate in making their situation a test case for the law.

The chief justice rejected the defence argument that the law was unconstitutional, and ruled — in a decision that we reprinted in full — that its purpose was to protect the province against Communist propaganda, and did not create a criminal offence (a matter falling under federal jurisdiction); rather, he wrote, the law dealt with the use of property.

Thus, the law stood. This photo from our archives shows police padlocking the United Jewish Peoples Order on Esplanade Ave. on Jan. 27, 1950.

In June 1950, the Superior Court once again upheld the Padlock Law in another case, Switzman v. Elbling. However, that case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which in 1957 struck down the law as unconstitutional on jurisdictional grounds and because it violated the right to free speech.