Padlock Law

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Padlock Law
Parliament of Quebec
Long title
  • An Act to Protect the Province Against Communistic Propaganda
Citation1 George VI Ch. 11
R.S.Q. 1941, c.52
Enacted by
Legislative Assembly of Quebec
Enacted byLegislative Council of Quebec
Royal assentMarch 24, 1937
Status: Struck down
This article is part of
a series about
Maurice Duplessis
Pre-premiership politics (1923-1935)

Politics

Economy

Legacy and cultural references

The Act to Protect the Province Against Communistic Propaganda (

Attorney General of Quebec to close off access to property suspected of being used to propagate or disseminate communist propaganda.[1] The law was introduced by the Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis and made it illegal to "use [a house] or allow any person to make use of it to propagate Communism or Bolshevism
by any means whatsoever". This included printing, publishing or distributing of "any newspaper, periodical, pamphlet, circular, document or writing, propagating Communism or Bolshevism". Violations of the Act subjected such property to closure by the Attorney General, including the locking of access doors with padlocks, against any use whatsoever for a period of up to one year and any person found guilty of involvement in prohibited media activities could be incarcerated for three to thirteen months.

The law was extremely vague; it did not define Communism or Bolshevism in any concrete way.[2] It denied both the presumption of innocence and freedom of speech to individuals. There were also concerns[by whom?] that the law would be used in order to arrest individual activists from international trade unions. Two union leaders were nearly arrested in that period.[3]

The federal government under Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King could have used its power of disallowance to nullify the Padlock Law, as it had done to overturn equally controversial laws that had been passed by Alberta's Social Credit government around the same time.[4] However, King chose not to intervene in Quebec.

The

implied bill of rights that underlies the Canadian constitution, but this view was not shared by the rest of the majority.[6]

Gallery

References

  1. ISBN 9780771015304
    .
  2. ^ Keith, J. E. (August 1, 1937). "Is Quebec going fascist?". Maclean's. Retrieved July 25, 2020.
  3. ISBN 2-89052-243-1
  4. ^ Editorial, "Democracy in Danger", in Canadian Forum, Vol. XVII, No 206 (March 1938): 403.
  5. ^ Forsey, Eugene A. (February 7, 2006). "Padlock Act". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved July 19, 2020.
  6. ISBN 077352536X
    .

External links
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