CANADA: Bedroom Farce

The Canadian Parliament's least happy duty is to act as a divorce court for the provinces of Quebec and Newfoundland. It is an arrangement originally made as a concession to populous Roman Catholic Quebec, which frowns on divorce and declines to establish a court of its own. The sole ground for a parliamentary divorce is adultery. Over the years, as the number of petitions grew (to more than 600 this year), Ottawa tacitly winked at its suspicion that Montreal detective agencies were doing a lucrative trade arranging the evidence. But last week an aggrieved husband named William Eccles blew...