Frédéric Dorion

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Frédéric Dorion (August 23, 1898 – July 15, 1981) was a Quebec lawyer, politician, and later the chief justice of the Quebec Superior Court. He led a group of Independent MPs in the Canadian House of Commons who opposed conscription during World War II.

Dorion left Laval University to join the Royal Flying Corps in World War I. After the war he worked at his family’s law firm in Quebec City and helped organize the Conservative Party in Quebec in the 1930s. He had brothers who also went into politics: Charles Napoléon Dorion was a Conservative MP from 1930 to 1935, and Noël Dorion was a Progressive Conservative MP from 1958 to 1962.

Dorion was strongly anti-conscription in World War II. He won a by-election in Charlevoix—Saguenay on November 30, 1942, defeating Thérèse Casgrain. In October 1944 he formed the Independent Group with Sasseville Roy, a loose party of anti-conscription MPs, and Dorion became their leader. Other anti-conscription Quebec MPs joined: Liguori Lacombe, Wilfrid Lacroix, and Emmanuel D’Anjou. Roy said the group stood against the Liberal and Conservative parties’ influence and looked after Quebec’s interests in Ottawa. Dorion accused Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s Liberals of secretly allying with the Labor-Progressive Party.

The entry of the Bloc populaire into provincial politics angered Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, who shifted federal support to Dorion and his followers for the 1945 federal election. After an attempt to start a new party led by Arthur Cardin failed, Dorion was re-elected as an independent in 1945. In 1949 he spoke out against extraditing Count Jacques Charles Noel Duge de Bernonville, a Vichy official tied to the Nazis. Dorion represented the Count in court and argued that there was bias in how the case was treated.

Dorion joined the Progressive Conservative Party on May 4, 1949, and led the party’s campaign in the Quebec City area. He was defeated in the 1949 and 1953 elections as a PC candidate. In 1963 he was appointed to the bench as chief justice of the Quebec Superior Court, where he served about ten years. He is best known for writing the 1965 Dorion Report, which investigated federal government corruption during the Rivard Affair.