In the streets of Montreal, it is not uncommon to see members of the National Social Christian Party (PNSC) walking around wearing their blue uniforms with a swastika, notes a Canadian intelligence report dated June 21, 1939. Among the party members, there are even soldiers who dare to wear their blue shirts with a swastika over their regulation army uniform, notes Inspector Harvison.
This undercover agent of the federal police is even told by one of Arcand’s men that the army does not oppose this practice because “it knows very well that several of its chief officers […] belong to the movement” of the Canadian Führer.
In the 393 pages of archival documents released by the Canadian government through access to information requests, this is the kind of detail one can read about Arcand’s fascists before he and his top lieutenants were arrested on May 23, 1940, as war raged in Europe. That same day, in England, fascist leader Oswald Mosley, a former member of parliament, was also arrested, as was Rhodesian fascist leader Henry Hamilton Beamish. These far-right leaders may proclaim their total loyalty to the British Empire, but it is to no avail.
The swastika in the Laurentians
What body of ideas were these people attached to? On the evening of June 19, 1936, about 800 people gathered in Saint-Sauveur, reports another document from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), responsible for Canadian intelligence services at the time. They were gathered to hear Arcand speak. Earlier in the day, six cars, including a big-bore Packard belonging to the wealthy doctor Noël Décarie, had left Montreal. They had been followed. On board were key figures in the party, including Major Maurice Scott, a former gymnastics champion who was a lieutenant during the 1914-1918 war before appearing very pot-bellied in a fascist uniform.
In Saint-Sauveur, things did not go as planned. At least 1,000 people were waiting for the fascists outside the hall to protest their presence, according to the police report.
The fact that anti-Semitic activists demonstrated in the Laurentians was not without resistance, even if bilingual posters were posted in the region, as in Sainte-Agathe in 1939, stating that “Jews are not wanted here.”
For the RCMP, those who oppose the Arcand activists belong to various tendencies. According to them, they are sympathizers of the “separatist movement”, members and leaders of workers’ clubs and others that they put in the same bag stamped with the “communist” label. This Friday evening, the meeting with the blue shirts does indeed take place, despite scuffles and a few exchanges of kicks and punches.
The atmosphere was so tense that it was impossible for Arcand’s activists to leave the room before 3 a.m. The rear window of Major Scott’s car was smashed with an iron bar. Some of Arcand’s activists were beaten. The fascists were not held in high esteem, even though they presented themselves as faithful Christians.
Blue shirts and black shirts
In Montreal, RCMP officers observed that fascists, more aware than ever of the barriers to their ideas, often met at the Casa d’Italia on Jean-Talon Street East. They discussed ways to deal with their opponents. There, Italian-Canadians who were in favour of fascism wore Mussolini’s black shirts, while men in Arcand’s blue shirts drank beer like them. The two groups occasionally mixed, the RCMP observed.
After what had seemed promising to observers in 1933, Arcand’s party struggled to make progress. Dieni Gentile, who would be imprisoned for his support of Mussolini’s ideas, offered Arcand’s militants help to fight it out.
The latter are counting on the initiative of an activist, Rosaire Lévesque, “to gather 50 to 60 people he knows” within the Canadian army and on whom “we can count on to follow orders”. Lévesque is particularly eyeing the soldiers linked to the Maisonneuve regiment, whereas Arcand’s troops at least benefit from the support of a sergeant. The PNSC also wants to recover some tough guys from the ranks of the security services set up in certain parish units, in order to reconvert all these fine people into a force capable of showing its teeth.
One of the group’s plans, the RCMP officer explains, is to now present themselves in civilian clothes rather than in Nazi uniforms to certain anti-fascist demonstrators, in order to identify them and immediately make them suffer a bad fate. The idea is to beat them up, Major Scott explains, but taking great care to make it appear that they are the ones who started it…
At a subsequent meeting where the RCMP also infiltrated, a report indicates that Arcand suggested that Quebec City was on the verge of falling to the fascist side. In May 1939, the PNSC expected a crowd of 10,000 people in the Old Capital. A prophecy that, like so many others made by Arcand, a former journalist, did not come true.
As war in Europe seemed increasingly certain, the PNSC’s hopes for reviving its activities hinged on the promise of an upcoming visit by Henry Hamilton Beamish, a British fascist leader who had been a fur trader in Quebec a few years earlier. After starting a fascist movement in England and speaking with Hitler, Beamish had settled in Rhodesia. He sat as a member of parliament in this openly racist state. In 1936, thanks to him, Arcand spoke in English to a huge assembly of far-right activists gathered at the New York Hippodrome.
Exiled in the United States, the writer Klaus Mann, a fierce opponent of fascism, wrote at the time that no one “is unaware of the dangerous activism of the Nazis in New York, Chicago and other American cities.” The extremely wealthy car manufacturer Henry Ford was among those who financed the dissemination of anti-Semitic theories in America. Ford spent a fortune to spread his corrosive ideas. Hitler did not praise Ford for nothing, going so far as to decorate him with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Eagle.
After the war
In other redacted RCMP documents that have just been declassified, it is clear that far-right movements continued to be spied on after the war. In these meetings, activists were told how the world was going based on conspiracy theories with strong anti-Semitic overtones, the RCMP notes.
Hatred of foreigners and immigrants, in the obsession of a plot hatched by occult forces, constantly appears on the menu.
In early 1970, the RCMP infiltrated a meeting held in the lobby of the Caisse populaire Saint-Louis-de-France, located on Roy Street in Montreal. About a hundred people were present at the event, including about twenty women — among whom RCMP Corporal Trudeau noted the presence of Yvonne Giguère, the widow of Adrien Arcand.
Heir to Arcand’s movement, Gérard Lanctôt is there. He denounces communism, left-wing ideas, the spirit of change which, he says, risks sweeping away traditional Catholic society in contempt of the Bible. This authoritarian man is still unaware that four of his own children are involved in the Front de libération du Québec…
But are RCMP officers always well equipped intellectually to analyze speeches? In October 1970, during the political crisis that led the federal government to suspend civil liberties by enacting the War Measures Act, the RCMP spied on a certain Gérard Monet in Shawinigan. This man would be best known for being a chess champion. Among the redacted elements of the reports, we can read that Sergeant Ricard told his superiors, as what he considered to be clear proof of Monet’s subversive activities, that he had bought a book by… Che Guevara, who was not known for being a far-right activist.
Were the risks of mixing up ideas to the point of no longer being able to see clearly sufficiently taken into account within the RCMP?