“Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada: Historical Case Studies

Chapter 4 Noble and Wolf v. Alley

4 Noble and Wolf v. Alley 1. EXCLUSIVE CLIENTELE Almost half a century after it became the subject of a Supreme Court controversy for its restrictive policies, Beach O’ Pines remains ‘‘exclusive’’ and ‘‘restricted.’’ Visitors to this Lake Huron summer estate enter between stone pillars with notices marked ‘‘strictly private’’ and ‘‘no trespassing,’’ past a guard-kiosk and barrier gate and along a roadway interrupted by speed bumps and stop signs every few hundred metres. The roadway passes handsome summer homes on large wooded lots, and ends at the border of the Pinery Provincial Park. About halfway through the estate there is a sign posted in front of one of the private cottages bearing a friendly but anomalous message of welcome: ‘‘Shalom.’’ One wonders: is the irony intentional? In the 1940s terms like ‘‘exclusive’’ and ‘‘restricted’’ had a specific meaning, an encoded message, and it was ‘‘No Jews Allowed.’’ The message was prevalent throughout the resort areas of Canada in the early postwar years, a symptom of endemic discrimination against Jews in virtually every reach of Canadian society. In the summer of 1948 Maclean’s magazine assigned a junior reporter named Pierre Berton to do a feature article on the phenomenon of Canadian antisemitism. Berton conducted interviews and collected statistics, and to enliven his story he engaged in a direct test. Two letters were sent to each of 29 summer resorts, one The notes to this chapter are on pages 395-410. using the name Marshall and the other Rosenberg. The Rosenberg letter was mailed a day earlier. Marshall received twice as many reservations as Rosenberg, including some from resorts who told Rosenberg they were already full and others who did not reply to Rosenberg at all. Pursuing this technique further, in the autumn Berton recruited two young women to pose as applicants for employment. One assumed the name of Greenberg, the other Grimes. Both had identical qualifications and experience as secretaries, for which there was a large demand at the time. Greenberg always answered an advertisement first, followed by Grimes a few minutes later. After 47 companies were called, Grimes had received 41 appointments for interview, Greenberg only 17. In 21 cases Greenberg was told the job was already filled, yet it was still available to Grimes only moments later. The reporter then called some of the companies to ask about their employment policies. He was told, among other things, that Jews did not have the right ‘‘temperament’’ for certain companies , that ‘‘they don’t know their place’’ and simply that ‘‘we don’t employ Jews.’’1 Pierre Berton was himself surprised and unsettled by what he had discovered . An acquaintance reported: ‘‘The investigation he undertook for the article convinced him of the seriousness of anti-Semitism in Canada, and as he put it, ‘it was an eye-opener’ to him. He feels the tendency is being accentuated rather than diminished, which is a somewhat discouraging view, to say the least.’’2 The young writer’s perception of a distressing ‘‘tendency’’ was accurate, though by 1948 antisemitism already had a long history in Canada. The pioneers of the Canadian Jewish community had struggled against a variety of disabilities transported from Britain, until in 1832 they achieved their objective with the proclamation in Lower Canada of An Act to Declare Persons Professing the Jewish Religion Intitled to All the Rights and Privileges of the Other Subjects of His Majesty in This Province.3 Introduced by Louis Joseph Papineau and the first of its kind passed by any jurisdiction in the British Empire, the Act ensured that there would be no further de jure discrimination against Jews. Its language also revealed that in 1832 Jews were recognized as British subjects who happened to profess a different faith. This accorded with the identity claimed by the Jews themselves, who were as proud of their British origin as any Loyalist. They were a small community, numbering scarcely more than 1,000 people in the first Dominion census in 1871, and well integrated into the commercial middle class of Anglo-Montreal and Toronto.4 Noble and Wolf v. Alley 183 Changes began in the 1880s with the initiation of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe. Yiddish-speaking, poor and uneducated, possessing a culture distinctly non-British, bearing the painful memories of the horrifying pogroms perpetrated by Christian Europeans, the new immigrants clustered in the poorer districts of a few Canadian cities...