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The Time Elon Musk’s Grandfather Almost Exposed the Atomic Bomb

A speech at a fringe political convention sent Canada’s wartime censors into a panic

Twenty years ago, I was working on my PhD thesis on Canada’s media censorship system in the Second World War. I fell into it: a Yoda experience with Fulgence Charpentier, a 103-year-old Ottawa political columnist who’d let slip during an interview that he’d been a press censor during that war and had protected all the office’s records. Coincidentally, Jeff Keshen, then head of the history department at the University of Ottawa, had written his doctoral thesis on the nasty press censorship of the First World War. The University of Ottawa was willing to give me a full scholarship and some money to live on. And when Keshen told me to go the archives and come back with a book, our deal was sealed.

A lot of people asked me what I found. There were political discoveries: how much many of the big papers in Quebec loved the French collaborationist government in France; how censorship was used to cover the near-treasonous split between the senior generals in the Canadian Army and the federal government (generals threated to resign en masse around Christmas of 1944 while conscript troops were mutinying over plans to send them to the fighting front).

The censorship system was both subtle and effective. Mackenzie King’s government harnessed journalists’ deference to the more successful colleagues by hiring top-tier reporters and editors as press censors. Newspapers didn’t have to submit their stories to censors, but anything passed by the censors was immune from prosecution under the War Measures Act, even if a war secret somehow slipped through. (The CBC self-censored, with managers having personal responsibility for anything that went on the air.)

If a war secret did get out, the censors could have the news wire systems shut down to try to prevent it leaving the country and warn every editor in Canada not to publish it. They also sent out circulars every month with lists of forbidden topics. These included anything that lowered public morale; stories about German prisoners of war in Canada that might cause the Germans to treat captive Canadian soldiers more harshly; convoy sailings and weather forecasts, which U-boat captains desperately wanted; and, of course, secret weapon research.

When people asked about my research, I had a couple of shorthand stories that didn’t need a lot of explanation. One included a screwball chiropractor who got up in front of a Social Party convention at the Royal York Hotel in April 1944, sixteen months before Hiroshima, and spilled the secret of the Manhattan Project. The press censors, all of them senior newspaper reporters on leave for the war effort, had to stick a lot of fingers in that dike.

Last spring, United States president Donald Trump and his henchthugs were threatening to deport some of the president’s foreign-born enemies, including one tech edgelord who might be dumped in Canada. I did some googling and found this “enemy” was the grandson of a Regina chiropractor and thought, “Could it possibly be the same guy?” Turned out, it was.

April 1944. The Allies are massing armies in southern England to invade Nazi-occupied........

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