Rogue Tory

by Denis Smith

  Diefenbaker’s new role as an MP meant a great expansion of his home neighbourhood. For John and Edna, Prince Albert and Saskatoon were now linked by two thousand miles of steel to Ottawa’s Union Station, the Château Laurier, Wellington Street, and the Parliament Buildings. John maintained his partnership in Prince Albert with John Cuelenaere and returned home for Christmas, Easter, and the summer recess, shipping boxes of legal files relentlessly in both directions as he travelled.36 But his focus was on the House of Commons. The Diefenbakers took a room in the Château (like many other MPs, including R.B. Bennett before them), and lived their life out of John’s parliamentary office in the Centre Block. Edna acted as John’s unpaid assistant, sat above him in the members’ gallery, and spread her network of friendship and information-gathering quickly into the press gallery and across to the government benches. The journalist Patrick Nicholson recalled that Edna’s “radiance … bubbling with joie de vivre” brought light to John’s “gloomily barren little back-bencher’s office on the fifth floor of the Parliament Building.”37 The Diefenbakers’ close political partnership was unusual in Ottawa, and Edna’s enthusiastic support for her husband did much to cement his valuable attachments in the press gallery. The only common criticism of Edna in the parliamentary community of the early 1940s was that she talked too much about “my Johnny” and his brilliant prospects. The Liberal MP Paul Martin, who was soon a friend, said: “I have my ambitions too, but I have my wife better trained.”38 Along with Edna’s infectious spirits, there was a shade of gaucherie as well.

  When John Diefenbaker entered the House of Commons, it was a small, exclusive, staid, slightly shabby but comfortable men’s club. Its members still gloried in the reflected aura of the Westminster Parliament and took for granted that they were participants by adoption in mankind’s highest, most sophisticated political institution, the shining product of centuries of political evolution. This was not an altogether vain belief, for it had the effect of raising standards of decorum and debate in this outpost of empire – as did the impressive mass of the buildings, halls, and debating chambers themselves, in grand imitation of Westminster’s own parliamentary gothic. For Diefenbaker, privileged entry into the House his father had extolled to him as a child was a dream achieved. Once he was there, the House became his second and true home, and he stayed in it until his death thirty-nine years later. His attachment to parliament always remained with him, even as Canadian politics swirled and shifted around him. By the end, he was the last parliamentary romantic in the chamber.

  Within days of his election victory, Diefenbaker received letters from the party’s national organizer, J.M. Robb, and the defeated leader’s private secretary, R.A. Bell, about planning for the forthcoming session. Bell noted that in Manion’s absence a House leader would have to be chosen by the caucus and that Manion had asked him to say Diefenbaker was one of the prospects. He should therefore prepare a speech for the opening debate, in expectation that he might be chosen.39 Robb ventured further: “A House Leader will have to be selected. In looking over the list, I can see no one any stronger than yourself. I hope you will not take offense if I just give you my opinion that if this matter of House Leader should be presented to you, I would give it very great care. It might be better to be patient and abide [sic] your time.”40

  Diefenbaker was daunted. He copied the letters and sent them to his mother in Victoria:

  Personally I do not know, even if it is offered to me, that I will accept it, as it seems too great a responsibility to be assumed, and I do not think that I have the necessary ability to fill the position. However, I intend to go ahead and prepare a speech which will have to be delivered early in the session. I had intended not to say anything at all for the first two or three months, but, in view of the lack of debating strength in the House, it seems that I will have to alter my intention, and that I will have to speak.41

  His mother offered cautionary words a week later:

  How does it feel to be member of Parliament? how about the leadership, you should think it over very carefully. There is no doubt about your having the abality, to fill the position you know the jealousy there is in this world, and you must think about your health, not having had experience and the responsibility will so great and enother thing, the ones that has been there for years will be wild and might not work with you as they should when you get to Ottawa you will know what is best.42

  The Conservative caucus met on the day of John Diefenbaker’s arrival in Ottawa, choosing R.B. Hanson as House leader from a field of six.43 Soon afterwards the new member wrote proudly to Mary Diefenbaker on his first sheet of House of Commons letterhead. He seemed content that he had not sought the House leadership, although he explained that the decision of caucus had been prearranged in any case.

  Well, I have my seat – third row on the right in the same column as Hanson and the whip, – I have been sworn in and am now a full-fledged member.

  I refused to let my name stand for the leadership as I couldn’t hope to get anywhere as everything was pretty well cut and dried…

  Between ourselves there is more log-rolling and back-biting here in one day than there is elsewhere in a year…

  The war situation makes us all very fearful and there will be no functions after the opening…44

  In his first experience of the parliamentary caucus, as in the leadership convention of 1938, Diefenbaker kept his distance from the internal scramble for influence and advantage. Whether out of naivety, indifference, or incapacity, he established a pattern of aloofness that he later maintained. Others might intrigue; he would hold himself above or beyond that battle with a certain sense of his own dignity.

  With John in Ottawa, his mother now became an intermittent correspondent, offering her son a flow of family gossip, complaint, advice, strangled emotion, and prejudice in her semi-literate hand. On May 24 she wrote:

  How does it feel to be setting in the seats of the mighty? hope you are enjoying yourself and that you like it at Ottawa. You know John ambition is a funny thing and whn you get it, it means nothing, at least you are never satisfied.

  Well I hope you will do good work down there. The war comes first of all. The British needs all Canada can give her in evrything I am afraid we are going to have a bad time fighting those devils The loss of life has been terrible one wonders why it should be. One thing I know that cruel, bloodthirsty nation will get what is coming to her in the end…

  Elmer came home this afternoon he is all het up about the hunks, and Grits, with him they are all in the same class, he has been working hard, and has done very well … How does Edna like it there? she must get fed up sometimes she has a lot of time to put in.45

  When parliament opened on May 16, 1940, John Diefenbaker was in his place, “somewhat overawed at taking my seat in the House after all those years of trying.” Despite his rhetorical talent, he decided to give himself a few weeks, “until I was at ease in my new surroundings,” before venturing on his maiden speech.46 But on May 27 he was on his feet with his first questions demanding protection for northern Saskatchewan “against enemy activities.” He held up a handful of resolutions “from various bodies in Saskatchewan demanding that the government do something toward controlling the nazi influence within their province.” He referred to “the critical situation – I call it critical advisedly – arising from subversive activities in Saskatchewan,” the result, he claimed, of the recent release from detention of enemy aliens. He asked for “the immediate recruitment to full strength of the Prince Albert infantry and artillery units” as a means of restoring public confidence. He offered no evidence to support his alarmist claims of Nazi subversion on the Canadian prairies. The minister, in reply, pointed out that aliens under detention were only released after examination by special tribunals. Other members echoed Diefenbaker’s alarm as the police made emergency arrests across Canada; the Conservative member for Toronto-Parkdale, Dr H.A. Bruce, warned that there were “thousands of Quislings” awaitin
g the moment to betray the country.47 Within days, Diefenbaker was appointed to the House Committee on the Defence of Canada Regulations, which henceforth met in secret to consider the emergency rules and review cases of wartime arrest and internment.48

  The all-party committee, under the chairmanship of the minister of national revenue, J.L. Ilsley, held twenty-five meetings between June 13 and August 1, 1940. It then reported unanimously, with a series of modest proposals for amendments to the defence regulations.49

  John Diefenbaker rose to deliver his maiden speech in the House of Commons on June 13, 1940 – “an awesome ordeal,” as he recalled the occasion. He had roused himself to an unusual pitch of nervous preoccupation. “I felt that I was in a great vacuum, surrounded by a material of one-way transparency: I could see the others in the House, but they could not see me; and perhaps they could not hear me. Never before or since have I experienced anything like it.”50

  Diefenbaker explained to the House that he was speaking in debate on the emergency regulations, following the minister of justice (Ernest Lapointe), because he had been named to the special committee to examine those rules. The speech was a short and emphatic declaration of patriotism. The new member supported the government in its wartime restriction of liberty, repeated his concern that potential subversives had been released from detention in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, asserted the loyalty of most Canadians of German descent, and called for an end to census statistics based on country of origin: “Let us build up in this country an unhyphenated Canadianism that is dominant, proud and strong.” His extreme but vague condemnation of “the trade of treachery and of traitors, the undermining of the country from within,” was explicitly linked to his belief in general loyalty: “There are those who are disloyal; and in the interests of the majority of loyal citizens of various national strains, those who are treasonable must be shown their place, so that those who are loyal and patriotic shall not be denied the fruits of their loyalty.”

  Diefenbaker warned that in Saskatchewan there was “an ever rising body of opinion” that subversives were still at liberty. He called for creation of a national home defence corps to pre-empt the formation of vigilante committees in the west, and urged an immediate national registration of adult males. This would not only provide the names of “men all over the dominion who want to serve,” but “would bring to light the names of many who are to-day in Canada without having complied with the immigration regulations and who are in position to carry on subversive activities.”

  Finally, Diefenbaker called for the rigid suppression of unpatriotic writing: “Why should such anti-British publications as the Saturday Evening Post and the Chicago Tribune be allowed to enter the country? What is the use of having a department of information to furnish dependable information to the people if such information is neutralized, if not completely destroyed, by malicious articles appearing in these particular papers?” Prosecutions under the war regulations, he noted, could only be carried out against newspapers or magazines published in Canada.

  In his peroration Diefenbaker asserted that while the armed forces defended Canada abroad, parliament had the parallel task of waging war against “malicious disaffection” within. Just as “our gallant boys” would not fail Canadians overseas, parliament “must not fail them” at home.

  The atmosphere of war and the member’s uneasiness about his German name and ancestry had produced a curiously ambiguous opening for John Diefenbaker’s parliamentary career. The prime minister must have felt some relief that the gadfly from Prince Albert had been tamed by taking him at once into the government’s confidence on the special committee.51 One of the first acts of the committee was to recommend passage of a sweeping treachery bill, providing for the death penalty for conviction on charges of giving assistance to the enemy. It reflected, and may have been partly inspired by, the new member’s opening remarks in the House. The bill was quickly introduced and passed third reading on July 25.52

  John Diefenbaker was not the only MP disoriented by the early and disastrous months of war. With the fall of France on June 16, the Conservative House leader R.B. Hanson reversed his party’s position on compulsory military service. He approached Mackenzie King to ask for full conscription for overseas service, and renewed the Conservative appeal for a coalition government to enforce it. King responded the next day by introducing the National Resources Mobilization Act, which authorized national registration and conscription for home defence, but he maintained his commitment against compulsory overseas service. King rejected Hanson’s request for coalition as a veiled attempt to remove him from power, but did offer a merely consultative role in the War Committee of cabinet to the leader of the opposition. Hanson refused, and King noted complacently in his diary that the Tories “can say nothing more from now on about every effort not having been made to meet their wishes for inside knowledge.”53

  On declaration of war in September 1939 the government had proclaimed a state of emergency under the War Measures Act. This proclamation effectively suspended both the federal constitution and the normal lawmaking and critical roles of parliament, allowing the cabinet to govern by fiat. A mounting stream of wartime orders-in-council and regulations – cabinet decrees with the force of law and unchallengeable in the courts – were issued under the authority of the act, dealing with all aspects of Canadian life. Consumer prices, industrial production and marketing, rationing, transportation, wages and employment, internment, press censorship, and free speech all fell under the arbitrary rule of the wartime cabinet and the federal bureaucracy. The House of Commons was left with no more than a vestigial role, approving taxes and annual spending estimates, examining those few bills the King government chose to submit to parliament, and seeking information about the nature and extent of the national war effort – but always within the limits of a self-imposed commitment to sustain Canada’s war. For five years Mackenzie King and his cabinet colleagues were the country’s benign dictators.

  In these circumstances, the Conservative Party was triply handicapped. The emergency constitution deprived parliament of a central role; the Conservative opposition had only forty seats in the House; and the party benches conspicuously lacked brilliance. House leader Hanson was a former minister and a competent debater, but he had only two other members with ministerial experience, Earl Rowe and Grote Stirling. Hanson could be silenced, apparently at will, by Mackenzie King’s intimidation. The party’s most trenchant debater, Arthur Meighen, was harmlessly isolated in the Senate. There were a few colourful eccentrics like Tommy Church, the former mayor of Toronto, on the back bench, but the party depended on its slim crop of newcomers to give it strength. Among them, Howard Green of Vancouver, Gordon Graydon of Peel, and Art Smith of Calgary made favourable impressions.54 Dr Herbert A. Bruce, a distinguished surgeon and former lieutenant governor of Ontario, represented the traditional conscriptionist sentiments of the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Tory establishment. Despite his nervousness, the new member from Lake Centre, Saskatchewan, soon established himself as the party’s most theatrical critic in the House. The tall, erect lawyer had a dominating presence: he could strike a compelling phrase, he was indefatigable, and he revealed a talent – sometimes mischievous, sometimes portentous – for getting under the skin of any minister who showed signs of self-importance.

  During the 1940 and 1941 sessions of parliament, John Diefenbaker’s interventions in the House were relatively infrequent and cautious. In November 1940 he asked for, but was refused, a parliamentary inquiry into reports that CBC radio had banned broadcasts by members of the parliamentary opposition. He made passing suggestions for the inclusion of a Canadian member in an imperial war cabinet (on Borden’s First World War model) and for the return of R.B. Bennett to Canada as coordinator of aircraft production, in emulation of Lord Beaverbrook’s role in the United Kingdom.55 But most of his questions and comments were routine references to the domestic effects of war, relating to farm prices and marketing, defence contracts,
or national registration and enlistments. They were carefully placed within a framework of patriotic admiration for the Canadian armed forces, the British people, and the Churchill government. His most persistent themes were that the Canadian government had neglected the interests of prairie farmers and had failed to mobilize Canada’s resources, both material and human, with sufficient dedication.56 These were part of the opposition’s stock-in-trade, reflecting English-Canadian interests and anxieties.

  By 1942 Diefenbaker had identified himself with two general lines of criticism, one relating to conscription, the other to the processes of government. Call-ups and exemptions for service within Canada, he claimed, were being unequally and unfairly applied, and conscription for overseas service was required. The King government faced growing complaints in English-speaking Canada during 1941 that its promise to Quebec not to send conscripts abroad was wrong. After the overwhelming Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Indochina, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies in December 1941 – and surrender of the Canadian contingent at Hong Kong – the domestic political pressures obliged Mackenzie King to seek some respectable way out of his commitment. In January 1942 the government announced that it would seek release, by plebiscite, “from any obligations arising out of past commitments restricting the methods of raising men for military service.” Diefenbaker responded for the Conservatives that a decision in favour of full overseas conscription should be taken by the House of Commons in a free vote without regard for “political considerations.”57