Canadian Video Interview with Rockwell Provokes Protests in Commons

Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson agreed this weekend that he would investigate some aspects of a television broadcast beamed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s video network a week ago, showing a filmed interview with the United States leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell. The program has been denounced in the House of Commons as well as by the Canadian Jewish Congress and others outside Parliament as “an irresponsible action” giving publicity “to a self-confessed follower of Hitler and preacher of genocide.”

One of the leaders in the attack was John Diefenbaker, former Premier and now head of the parliamentary opposition, the Progressive Conservative Party. He told Commons he saw no reason why the CBC should give Rockwell that kind of attention, nor “why Nazism should be glorified in this way.” Milton Klein, a Liberal Party member from Montreal, charged Rockwell had used the occasion ‘to vilify Negroes and Jews in millions of living rooms.” Another member of the opposition, Marcel Lambert, of Edmonton, accused the CBC of catering “to nonconformist oddballs.”

The strongest protest, however, was voiced outside Parliament by Michael Garber, president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Charging the CBC with being “guilty of an act against the public interest,” Mr.Garber said that no arguments about “public exposure” of the Nazi could justify “the publicity given Rockwell personally and to his lies and invectives.”

Noting that Rockwell gets no such publicity in his native United States, Mr.Garber said “Canadians must regret deeply that CBC has committed a serious disservice to the interests of our Canadian society by giving currency to the rantings and ravings of this tragically unbalanced but dangerous United States citizen.” He said the Rockwell broadcast “was an obvious quest for sensationalism in which the public interest and human sensibilities were almost wholly disregarded.”