Montreal's Taste in Mayors

Bustling Montreal, biggest Canadian city (818,000) and No. 3 French-speaking metropolis of the world,* has a Gallic taste in mayors, and last week she exercised it again. Her last mayor was flamboyant Camillien Houde, who distinguished himself in a number of ways. He got the city into so much financial hot water that a provincial commission had to be set up to manage the city's affairs. He got more hearty laughs out of Queen Elizabeth than any other Canadian official when Their Majesties visited the Dominion in 1939. And this year he issued a proclamation (later suppressed by the censor) advising his French-Canadian constituents not to register for the Canadian draft.

When that happened, the Dominion Government descended on clowning Camillien in dead of night and bundled him off to a detention camp (detention for Canadians, internment for aliens). His fellow detainees promptly elected him chairman of the camp entertainment committee. Legally last week Houde was still Mayor of Montreal, and right up to election day his salary ($10,000 a year) was paid to Mme. Houde while he earned in addition 20-c- daily for work in the camp. Even under this cloud, last week Camillien Houde saw his political henchman Leon Trepanier win 15,591 votes, just 974 votes short of victory in a listless election.

The winner by this tiny margin was another unusual figure, an insurance tycoon, J. Adhemar Raynault, who once before left his business to serve briefly as Mayor of Montreal, gave the city an administration active in Red-baiting. No spendthrift, M. Raynault slashed civic expenses. In his Gallic thrift Mayor Raynault had the mayor's official $1,400 fur robe stuffed away in a city vault to save the annual 3% furrier's storage charge. Moths ate all but the buttons.

Labor groaned at his election, called him a "tool of the power trust." More important, Montreal suspected that Mayor Raynault was a political stalking horse for Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis, Quebec boss of the conservatives. Duplessis, no friend of Great Britain, lost his provincial premiership and control of the Legislature in the first flush of Canada's war enthusiasm a year ago, but is struggling for a comeback. He represents a great body of French Canadians who are getting almost as wary of World War II as they were of World War I (when there were ugly antidraft riots). If Mayor Raynault is a symptom of a resurgence of Duplessis sentiment, Canada may have to clap many more French Canadians into detention camps to keep French Canada in line. ^

*No. 1: Paris. No. 2: Marseille.

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