Adrien Arcand
Adrien Arcand (1899 – August 2, 1967), was a Quebec born Canadian journalist, fascist and self-proclaimed Canadian führer who led a series of Quebec based far right political movements in the 1930s and 1940s. Arcand published and edited several anti-Semitic newspapers during this period, most notably Le Goglu, Le Miroir, and Le Chameau. He received funds from politician Richard Bedford Bennett (who was Prime Minister of Canada from 1930-1935) to operate his newspapers.
The political party he established in 1934, the Parti national social chrétien (National Social Christian Party), advocated anti-communism and the deportation of Canadian Jews to Hudson Bay.
At the start of World War II, he was arrested and interned for the duration of the war as a security threat. His party, then called the National Unity Party, was banned. In the internment camp, he sat on a throne built by other prisoners and spoke of how he would rule Canada when Hitler conquered it.1
Arcand ran for the Canadian House of Commons on two occasions. Despite being shunned by mainstream Quebecers in the post-war years, he managed to come in second with 29 per cent of the vote when he ran as a National Unity candidate in the riding of Richelieu?Verchères in the 1949 federal election . He came in second again with 39 per cent of the vote when he ran as a Nationalist in Berthier?Maskinongé?Delanaudière in the 1953 election.
Arcand never wavered in his belief in Adolf Hitler, and, in the 1960s, was a mentor to Ernst Zündel, who became a prominent Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi propagandist in the latter part of the twentieth century.
On November 14, 1965, he gave a speech before a crown of 900 partisans from all over Canada at the Centre Paul-Sauvé in Montreal. As reported in La Presse and Le Devoir, he took the occasion to thank the new Mount Royal Member of Parliament, the Liberal future Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and former Conservative Party of Canada leader George Drew, for taking his defence while he was interned.
1 This story is told in Dangerous Patriots: Canada's Unknown Prisoners of War, by William Repka and Kathleen Repka, New Star Books, Vancouver, 1982 (ISBN 0-919573-06-1 or ISBN 0-919573-07-X), in the section by Charlie Murray, who was imprisoned with him for being a union organizer.
