11. What campaign did our brothers in Canada carry out, and why?

¹¹ During the 1940’s, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Canada faced fierce opposition. Hence, in 1946, to publicize the State’s disregard for the right to freedom of worship, our brothers there held a 16-day campaign in which they distributed a tract entitled Quebec’s Burning Hate for God and Christ and Freedom Is the Shame of All Canada. This four-page tract exposed in detail the clergy-instigated riots, police brutality, and mob violence committed against our brothers in the province of Quebec. “Lawless arrests of Jehovah’s witnesses continue,” stated the tract. “There are about 800 charges stacked up against Jehovah’s witnesses in Greater Montreal.”

12. (a) How did opposers react to the tract campaign? (b) Our brothers were charged with what crime? (See also footnote.)

¹² Quebec’s Premier Maurice Duplessis, working hand in glove with Roman Catholic Cardinal Villeneuve, reacted to the tract by declaring a “war without mercy” against the Witnesses. The number of prosecutions quickly doubled from 800 to 1,600. “The police arrested us so many times that we lost count,” said a pioneer sister. Witnesses who were caught distributing the tract were charged with the crime of publishing “seditious libel.”b

13. Who were the first to be tried on charges of sedition, and how did the court rule?

¹³ In 1947, Brother Aimé Boucher and his daughters Gisèle, aged 18, and Lucille, aged 11, were the first to be tried in court on charges of sedition. They had distributed Quebec’s Burning Hate tracts near their farm in the hills south of Quebec City, but it was hard to picture them as lawless troublemakers. Brother Boucher was a humble and mild man who quietly tended his small farm and occasionally traveled into town by horse and buggy. Still, his family had endured some of the very abuses mentioned in the tract. The trial court judge, who hated Witnesses, refused to admit evidence that proved the Bouchers’ innocence. Instead, he accepted the prosecution’s position that the tract stirred up ill will and that thus the Bouchers should be found guilty. So the judge’s view boiled down to this: It is a crime to tell the truth! Aimé and Gisèle were convicted of seditious libel, and even young Lucille spent two days locked in jail. The brothers appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, the land’s highest court, which agreed to hear the case.

14. How did the brothers in Quebec react during the years of persecution?

¹⁴ Meanwhile, our courageous brothers and sisters in Quebec continued to preach the Kingdom message in the face of unrelenting and violent attacks​—often with outstanding results. During the four years after the start of the tract campaign in 1946, the number of Witnesses in Quebec increased from 300 to 1,000!c

15, 16. (a) How did the Supreme Court of Canada rule in the case of the Boucher family? (b) What effect did this victory have on our brothers and on others?

¹⁵ In June 1950, the full Supreme Court of Canada, made up of nine justices, heard the case of Aimé Boucher. Six months later, on December 18, 1950, the Court ruled in our favor. Why? Brother Glen How, a lawyer for the Witnesses, explained that the Court agreed with the argument presented by the defense that “sedition” requires incitement to violence or insurrection against government. The tract, however, “contained no such incitements and was therefore a lawful form of free speech.” Brother How added: “I saw firsthand how Jehovah gave the victory.”d

¹⁶ The Supreme Court’s decision was, indeed, a resounding victory for God’s Kingdom. It eliminated the basis for all the other 122 pending cases in which Witnesses in Quebec had been charged with seditious libel. Further, the Court’s ruling meant that citizens of Canada and the Commonwealth now had the freedom to voice their concerns over the manner of government. Moreover, this victory broke the back of Quebec’s Church-State attack on the liberties of Jehovah’s Witnesses.e