D R A F T — I NEED THE HANSARD REFERRED TO
I would then need to analyse it vis-a-vis this article, and maybe add something to the headline below, i.e. invented or what?

Source:  La Presse, Dernière édition.  Montréal, samedi 24 novembre 1962.  Page couverture.  Suite sur la page 2.
 

Day 4

Donald Gordon does it again

“No French Canadians sufficiently competent”!

“No French Canadians sufficiently competent”!    “Donald Gordon récidive”  par
Marcel Gingras.

by Marcel GINGRAS

OTTAWA – With his habitual brutal frankness, exempt from all preconceptions, he warranted, – the president of Canadian National Railways, Mr. Donald Gordon, just repeated in Ottawa his remarks of Tuesday.

At the end of his four days of testimony before the parliamentary committee on railways, he once again maintained that it has been and still is impossible for him to find a French speaking Canadian to occupy one of the top posts of the company he directs.

“That seems quite strange to me”, the member from Laurier, Mr. Lionel Chevrier, then replied.  “How can you not manage it when the government, last year, found three French speaking Canadians for the board of directors of the railway”.

(The administrators Mr. Chevrier spoke of are:  Messrs. Guy Charbonneau and Jean-Louis Lévesque, of Montréal, and Mr. Georges Ayers, of Lachute).

“The government, replied Mr. Gordon, could choose from the whole of Canada, whereas I had to choose among the employees of the company.”

The latter argument does not stand up, as we know, because Mr. Gordon himself was in fact from outside the company when he became its president.

At the time when Mr. Chevrier was Transport Minister, several times in his own name and in the name of Mr. St-Laurent, he entreated Mr. Gordon to have a look at French Canada.

Each time, the latter promised to do so, but his efforts were not very fruitful.

See GORDON on page 2

GORDON

Continued from page 1

It was readily recounted in Ottawa that Mr. Gordon had one day issued an invitation to the current vice-president of Hydro-Québec, Mr. Lessard, to whom he had offered one of the vice-presidencies of the company.

Interested, Mr. Lessard had agreed to discuss the offer which he nonetheless quickly declined when he realized that he was only wanted to play a bit part.  The real work of his post would have been done by an Anglo-Canadian.

It was this offer to which Mr. Gordon referred last Tuesday when, replying to a question of Mr. Chevrier, he had said to him:  “You know as well as I do that I have already offered a post to an eminent French Canadian who refused it”.

The National Railways, it can no longer be concealed, have always ignored the candidacies of French speaking employees.  They could have much better employed than they had done the services of Mr. J. A. Boivin, former traffic director of the metropolitan region, by naming him vice-president of the Saint-Laurent region, but did the idea even occur to them?

In all their history, it seems that it only happened once that a French speaking Canadian was summoned to a high office, which was when a son of the former senator, Belcourt, had occupied the post of secretary of the company for a few years.

Homage to Mr. Gordon

The final sitting of the committee ended in a short verbal duel between the Transport Minister, Mr. Balcer, and one of his predecessors, Mr. Chevrier.

The latter opened fire, accusing Mr. Balcer of a lack of consistency in his ideas.  The current government, as we know, took a year to renew Mr. Gordon’s mandate.

When it did, last year, Mr. Balcer had become Transport Minister and this gesture/act, according to Mr. Chevrier, did not dovetail with certain statements made by Mr. Balcer in 1958.

In the final days of the electoral campaign of 1958, Mr. Balcer, in a televised speech, had spoken of the [[[[ la mainmise ]]]] of the bureaucracy on the liberal team.

“All our Members,” he had said, “were quickly put in their places by the number one bureaucrat of the federal administration, Mr. Donald Gordon, he to whom we pay, with our taxes, a salary of at least $75,000 a year and who could give [[[ a fig ]]]] for French Canadians and their claims”.

“I don’t remember having said that, replied Mr. Balcer.  I am French Canadian like you and I would like to see the greatest possible number of our own in top executive posts in the company, I would even like to see a president.”

“As for Mr. Gordon, I am fascinated by his work.  He is an excellent administrator.”

“I agree,” returned Mr. Chevrier, “but except in regard to French Canadians.”

It was upon this homage, hardly biased with reserve, that the examination of the annual report of the Canadian National Railways terminated.
 
– 30 –
 

Notes: Notice how Gingras ends this article. He implies that Gordon has been formally answering for the French-Canadian issue in virtue of the annual report. However, in virtue of the fair employment practices law, it is forbidden for him to discriminate; he cannot collect prohibited data for the purpose of hiring and promotion; he cannot be answerable to the Parliament for NOT hiring french-canadians or french-speaking Canadians in spite of the law against discrimination. He has been made to answer for NOT doing something he is forbidden by LAW to do. He can only hire outside when there is no one inside the CNR to fill a job. He has been pilloried as a racist and burned in effigy for obeying the fair employment practices law; in a national company like the CNR, there will obviously be 9 or 10 times the number of employees who “speak” English, or who are maybe “anglo-saxon”, than the French, who, nationwide, constitute a numerical minority. Obviously, for the reasons stated by Gordon on 20 Nov 1962, he cannot put more French Canadians into CNR jobs and on the board of directors, than are available to him.