Branches of the CCLU: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa

The Canadian Civil Liberties Union (CCLU) was the product of the Padlock Act, or the Act to Protect the Province Against Communist Propaganda, passed in 1937 in Quebec. This statute made it illegal to print or publish any newspaper, periodical, pamphlet, circular or document propagating communism or bolshevism and to house any organization propagating these views. The Attorney General was empowered, upon receiving satisfactory proof of these activities, to order the closing of the house where the activities were taking place for up to one year. Section fourteen of the legislation further allowed the Attorney General to confiscate and destroy any document banned under the Act. Since the Act did not define bolshevism or communism, leaving this up to the discretion of the Attorney General, the Act was used against various left wing political dissidents including the CCF and trade unions. Years later, during the proceedings of the 1950 Senate Special Committee on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, members of the Jewish and Ukrainian communities would claim to have also fallen victim to the Padlock Act.

In reaction to the Padlock Act we see the stirrings of Canada’s first rights associations. Montreal’s Emergency Committee for Civil Liberties was replaced in 1937 with the Montreal branch of the CCLU. A collection of autonomous organizations across Canada, the CCLU soon had branches in Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa, stimulated in large part in opposition to the Padlock Act. Additional groups were formed in Winnipeg and Ottawa in 1938-9. Unlike the Canadian Labour Defense League, the CCLU was “a non-political organization, the object of which is to maintain throughout Canada the rights of free speech, free press, free assembly, and other liberties, and to take all such action as seems advisable in furtherance of their subject.” The branches of the CCLU were dedicated to the protection of rights irrespective of background or belief system and did not favour the CLDL’s working class politics; the ideal was to incorporate people from varying ideological camps. Montreal’s CCLU quickly garnered support from the Student Christian Movement, Fellowship of Reconciliation, League for Social Reconstruction, CCF, Montreal Presbytery of the United Church and local trade unions in their call for disallowance of the Padlock Act. Within a few years the Montreal branch had recruited 1000 members. The CCLU was never, however, a functioning national network, but a collection of disparate groups with only limited links to each other.

Ross Lambertson describes the original branch of the CCLU in Montreal as follows: "At first Frank Scott was not publicly associated with the group (although by 1940 his name appears on the letterhead as a member of the advisory council), but he appears to have had considerable influence behind the scenes. Many of the original executive members were either friends or colleagues, for the most part respectable intellectuals and professionals with a strong bias towards social democracy and (in some cases) radical Christianity. For example, the chair, Hubert Desauluiers (the only francophone of the group) was the provincial president of the CCF, the vice-chair, R.L. Calder, Q.C., ran for office several times as a CCF candidate and served on the provincial executive of the party, and the legal counsel, J X Mergler, was one of the founding members of the Montréal branch of the LSR. Radical Christians were represented by R.B.Y. Scott, a professor at United Theological College who
was active in the FCSO, and Eugene Forsey, a social democrat with strong ties to the FCSO, as well as the LSR and CCF." (Lambertson, 38-9).