Native Son

The one man Canada needed most last week was Ernest Lapointe. For two decades Ernest Lapointe had manipulated the strings that pull the geographical subdivisions, the racial and religious antagonisms of Canada into one nation. Last week the issue of conscription for overseas service threatened to snarl the strings as badly as it did in World War I. But the great manipulator's fingers were limp.

Ernest Lapointe, 65 years old, worn out by diabetes and the strain of war work, lay ill in a Montreal hospital. Once he stirred from a coma, looked up into the eyes of his wife and daughter. "You all alive?" he said. "Good. So am I. We'll celebrate. Give me some water. . . ." Then he died.

Thirty-seven years ago, when he was first elected to Canada's House of Commons, Ernest Lapointe was a French Canadian small-town lawyer, 6 ft. 3 in. of gawking bumpkin. He could speak only a few words in English and knew little of parliamentary procedure. Before his frame had filled out to 240 lb., he had mastered English and political procedure as thoroughly as he learned the lesson that intolerance and bigotry in Canada are two well-banked fires forever threatening to set the Dominion ablaze.

In 1917 Lapointe saw Canada become embittered, intolerant, nearly fly apart over the issue of conscription, which French Canada opposed. He never altered his own opposition to it. In 1919 he ran into the bluntest fact in Canadian politics when, as the logical successor to the late, great Sir Wilfred Laurier, he was kept from the Liberal Party leadership by a deal designed to prevent another Catholic French Canadian from becoming Prime Minister. To break the Party stalemate he threw his support to the then untried William Lyon Mackenzie King in a deal of his own. For French Canada he retained special language, education and religious rights.

Ernest Lapointe was a national figure as envoy to London, Geneva and Canberra, as Acting Prime Minister and a power behind the Administration; yet he remained a native son from whom Quebec expected--and got--special attention to provincial interests.

In a key spot as Minister of Justice in World War II, he was accused of Fascist methods in enforcing the occasionally unfathomable Defense of Canada regulations. Because he spoke out for a declaration of war and strong support to Britain, rabidly anti-British groups in Quebec called him "Judas Lapointe." Tory imperialists claimed that he and Mackenzie King purposely slowed up the war effort. But when the chips were down in 1940, Ernest Lapointe's threat to resign if Quebec did not back the Government's war policy did more than anything else to drive the antiwar Nationale (Lapointe called it Nazionale) Party of Maurice Duplessis out of office.

As thousands of French Canadians filed past his body lying in state in the provincial legislature at Quebec city, a disturbing thought ran through many a mind: there was no one to replace him. Louis Alexandre Tascherau was one possible candidate--but he was 73. Quietly competent Joseph Adelard Godbout, Premier of Quebec, was another--but he was inexperienced in national politics.

What inspired most of the worry was that patrician, patronizing Arthur Meighen, who sponsored conscription in 1917, had been dusted out of the Senate, made Conservative leader and heeled with Tory funds to start a conscription crusade (TIME, Nov. 24). Without Ernest Lapointe to pull the proper strings at the proper time, such a crusade might end in a free-for-all.

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