Repression and Resistance: Canadian Human Rights Activists, 1930–1960

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Lambertson reviews horrors—some well known, some less well known—of
mid-20th-century Canadian history. Among them are Duplessis’s Padlock
Law in Quebec, the internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II,
and discrimination against Canadian blacks in Dresden, Ontario, in the
1950s. He tells of heroic Canadians who assisted these victims, even
though they often won no popularity for themselves by doing so. Certain
historians complain—and with good reason—that we Canadians berate
ourselves unnecessarily. We accentuate the negative and minimize our
successes. Nevertheless, even if our horrors pale in comparison with
those of others, we did have our horrors, and we should know about them.

As victims of discrimination themselves, Canada’s Jews—from whom
some insurance companies demanded surcharge because of their
religion—became involved in other people’s problems. Such members of
the Labour Progressive Party (Canada’s Communist Party) as Fred Rose,
MP, and Joseph Salzberg, MPP, fought in the federal parliament and the
Ontario legislature against all types of racial and religious
discrimination.

Lambertson includes some fascinating factoids. In 1946, a Gallup Poll
indicated that Canadians preferred Germans to Jewish immigrants.
Americans are well aware that in 1939, when the Daughters of the
American Revolution banned African-American singer Marian Anderson from
their building, Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to sing at Washington’s
Lincoln Memorial. A few years later, in 1944, Toronto’s Granite Club
refused to admit Marian Anderson. Shortly thereafter, a young black man
named Harry Gairey could not skate at Toronto’s Icelandia rink, and
Owen Sound refused permission for Marisse Scott, also black, to study
nursing in the local hospital.

The book ends with a review of Diefenbaker’s struggle for a Bill of
Rights, begun when Mackenzie King was prime minister and implemented by
his own government. That it was a mere Act of Parliament that any
successor government might change limited its credibility, and
Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas suggested a federal–provincial
conference to embed it in the constitution. For reasons that are not
entirely clear, Diefenbaker refused.