Unwelcome Guest

Four passengers off a Trans-Canada Air Lines' flight from London lined up at the room-clerk's window in Montreal's fashionable Windsor Hotel. The first three quickly got rooms. But when the fourth man, a Negro, stepped forward, the room clerk began to fumble with the registry cards and to complain that the airline had mixed up the reservations. He did not say that he had no rooms, but he finally handed the Negro a slip of paper with the address of a cheaper hotel and told him to go there.

The Negro went to the other hotel without a protest, but he had no illusions about why he had been sent away. "The desk clerk was discriminating against me because of my color," he said afterwards. "I walked away feeling that I would never want to put foot on Canadian soil again."

In most cases, the visitor's experience would have caused little stir. But the Negro was Grantley Adams, Premier of the British colony of Barbados and a staunch promoter of Canada-West Indies trade. When an airline official discovered next day that the Premier had been shunted to a second-rate hotel, he promptly reported the incident to the Ottawa government. Windsor Hotel officials hotly denied that any discrimination had been involved; the management insisted that there had really been "a lack of room." But the government seemed more inclined to accept Premier Adams' interpretation of the incident. Last week the External Affairs department sent a note to Barbados expressing "the profound apologies of the government for any inconvenience or slight suffered by the Premier." Said Chief of Protocol H.F.B. Feaver: "We deplore any display of racial discrimination."

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