For the week of October 28, 2024.
On October 29, 1925, Édouard Lacroix was elected to the House of Commons as the Member of Parliament for Beauce. He was an entrepreneur, industrialist, and politician, who played a leading role within the French Canadian nationalist movement of the 1920s to 1940s.
Lacroix was born on 6 January 1889 in Saint-Marie de Beauce, Quebec. The son of a mill owner, he studied at the Collège des Frères des écoles chrétiennes in Saint-Marie and started working at the age of 14. He worked as a lumberjack, log driver, measurer, and more, becoming familiar with how the forestry industry operated. In 1911, he started his own wood-trading company, La Maison Édouard-Lacroix, and bought several sawmills in the following years. Lacroix mainly sold pulpwood to paper mills, but also harvested and processed lumber in northern Ontario.
In the early 1920s, Lacroix received a major contract from an American company to cut plywood at Lac Portage and deliver it to Maine. Soon afterward, he created the Madawaska Company and established operations in Maine. He continued to expand his business ventures, buying more mills, building infrastructure, and then rationalizing his operations. Before long, he controlled a substantial part of the forest industry along the Canada-United States border, his burgeoning empire having expanded to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Maine, and New Hampshire. He was one of the few French Canadian millionaires of the beginning of the 20th century.
Lacroix was first elected to the House of Commons in 1925 and served as a Liberal Member of Parliament for the riding of Beauce until 1944, winning five elections. He supported setting a minimum wage for workers, especially loggers, and advocated for state economic intervention to restore social equity. At the same time, he entered provincial politics in Quebec and helped organize the new Action libérale nationale party in 1934. This party helped defeat the Liberal government of Alexandre Taschereau through its support of the Union nationale, led by Maurice Duplessis. Lacroix became chief lieutenant within the Action libérale nationale from 1936 and 1937. He voted against a plebiscite on conscription during the Second World War in 1942. That same year, he helped found another provincial party, the Bloc populaire canadien. Lacroix became one of its four elected members in the Quebec legislative assembly in 1944.
Lacroix’s health declined as a result of Parkinson’s disease, which forced his retirement from politics in 1945 and business in 1946. He died at Saint-Georges-de-Beauce on January 19, 1963, at the age of 74.