Yesterday, I drove into Montreal to visit the Bibliotheque Nationale near Berri to find the Coderre Report. That library in their database claims they have the complete report on hand for consultation. I am working on my second draft of Milk and Water
They didn't, so I wasted 9 dollars parking in their underground. Oh Well.
The Report was widely described in the Press of the Day. March 14, 1925.
What I really want to find is the testimony, 10,000 pages of it, because I want to see what WASN'T included in the papers of the day. That's more telling.
Here's what Jules Coderre wrote about my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, in a section of the report entitled TOO MANY MASTERS.
"There is more. Not only must the Superintendant of Police submit to the constant and narrow direction of the Executive, but he is also placed under the jurisdiction of another functinonary whose position and powers are ill-explained to me, so ill that I can find nothing regarding them in the Charter. I am referring to the Director of Services placed there as an intermediary, I am given to understand, between the different departments and anyone outside and any given department.
The Superintendent of Police tells me that Mr. Jules Crepeau is over him. And what proves it beyond a doubt is the liberty the latter takes in ordering the suspension and even the withdrawal of proceedings against theatres which were based on cases made and instituted by the superintendent of police. What proves it better still, is the liberty, really too great, which he took during the inquiry, of suspending Constable Trudeau for a reason entirely foreign to the accomplishment of his duties, and just at the moment that Mr. Trudeau had revealed in his evidence the strange actions of Mr. Crepeau.
For the police to be placed under the power of the Executive Committee is regrettable, but that is explicable, if not excusable, but that he should also be submitted to another functionary, forced to submit to his intervention, that he should see another functionary countermand the authority of his orders, that is absolutely intolerable and lends itself to great abuses.
Particular cases mentioned at the probe convince me profoundly and I can admit no avowable motive in support of such untimely interventions."
Now, that's why I'd like to read the testimony! I know that at least one case had to do with underage theatre patrons... because W.E. Raney claimed as much in his testimony to the US Senate hearings on Prohibition in 1926, where he read out from the Montreal Star news story covering the Publication of the Coderre Report, March 14, 1925.
Juge Coderre doesn't seem to know that my grandfather's brother, Isadore, was VP of a theatre chain, or he might have been a little less perplexed.
And, then, in 1927 the Laurier Palace fire, where scores of young children, mostly male, where killed in a crush to the door after smelling smoke.
My grandfather testified first at the Inquiry into that fire, but his actions as exposed in the Coderre Probe, but two years before, were never brought up.
Read the first draft of Milk and Water. Below, a listing for the Inquiry in Archives Canada, claiming they have testimony and such at their Montreal office. But the link goes to the Bibliotheque Nationale, a defunct page. So I am not optimistic about finding it.
