Au nom de l'ordre ou de la liberté? Le Congrès juif canadien face à la répression des libertés civiles et des droits des minorités religieuses au Québec (1945–1954)

Abstract

The analysis of the positions taken by Canadian Jewish Congress on the issues affecting the repression of civil liberties and the infringement of the rights of religious non-Catholic minorities in Quebec in the decade following the Second World War shed new light on our understanding of the place held by representatives of the Jewish community in the social human rights movement in Canada. The CJC – the main voice of the community – in fact remained on the fringe of the movement protesting the Duplessis regime, refusing to condemn the Padlock Act and supporting the repression of the Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious minorities considered to be “seditious” or “subversive.” The controversies that ensued due to these positions demonstrate the ideological, regional, and class divisions the Jewish community and the “human rights community” were undergoing in the postwar period. They expose the tensions that existed within the CJC, between the leaders from Ontario and the Canadian West and their counterparts in Quebec, confronted more directly with the repressive “great darkness” and the pattern of inter-faith relations in this mainly Catholic province. On a theoretical level, this study demonstrates that human rights are a fluid discursive category that may be mobilized differently according to activists, based on their ideologies, their identities, their interests, and the local context in which they operate.