by Denis Smith
The year 1950 saw the outbreak of the Korean War, the beginning of rearmament, and a vastly increased defence budget. The cabinet’s annual measures extending transitional emergency powers year by year since 1945 had now brought it to a new period of wartime crisis justifying further emergency legislation. With the creation of the Department of Defence Production in 1951, those powers centred more and more distinctly in the hands of one minister, Clarence Decatur Howe. Howe relished his power, was impatient of criticism in the House, and could easily be roused to fury by the taunts of George Drew, Donald Fleming, Howard Green, or John Diefenbaker. He gradually gave his opponents a dictionary of pithy lines to quote against him. “If we wanted to get away with it,” he replied on one occasion to Howard Green, “who would stop us?”7 Even the charming Louis St Laurent, in his complacency, could turn short tempered when faced with these troublesome critics across the centre aisle.8 In the end they could not defeat the government’s measures, but they made mighty nuisances of themselves in debates that the Liberals seemed to regard as time-consuming distractions.
Through this parliament, Diefenbaker retained chairmanship of the Conservative caucus justice committee, but his leadership was erratic. The indefatigable Donald Fleming filled in for him during these lapses. When revisions to the Combines Investigation Act were introduced in 1952, Fleming noted that “I carried the lead at all stages. Diefenbaker took no part in the proceedings at any stage.”9
He was in limbo. His role in opposition now stretched over twelve years, two failed leadership contests, and two general election defeats for the party. The Conservatives were little stronger in the House than they had been when he entered the chamber in 1940. George Drew was secure in the leadership, at least until another electoral disaster. Diefenbaker was not close to Drew, although he believed he had his respect, and he remained distant from many of his caucus colleagues. Several younger MPs threatened his predominant place as a parliamentary critic. His Liberal opponents treated him with undoubted caution, but seemed less fearful of him than in the early years. He was unusually thin-skinned for a politician: “morbidly sensitive,” in the journalist Blair Fraser’s phrase. And his wife was gone.10
Diefenbaker’s sense of destiny wavered. He toyed with the prospect of abandoning politics and returning to legal practice in Ontario.11 Yet he was conspicuous, a favourite of the press, and the party’s most sought-after public speaker. He craved the limelight and took on more speaking engagements away from Ottawa. He was especially buoyed by the adulation of the minority communities whose rights and interests he promoted -Jehovah’s Witnesses, Ukrainians, Jews, Indians, all those English-speaking Canadians who felt themselves to be outside the old British Canadian mainstream. For them he held a beacon that justified his quest.12
Above all he revelled in the contest of politics. If he was briefly indecisive about a future in opposition, he would surely rise to a challenge. The 1952 redistribution of parliamentary seats gave him that challenge.13 Saskatchewan’s dwindling population (it had lost 64,000 residents in the decade since 1941) meant that the province would lose seats. The Liberal government proposed to amend the Constitution to limit the extent of that loss, but in the end the province would have one less member than in the existing House. Redistribution was still conducted by self-interested wrangling in parliamentary committees with Liberal majorities, with the boundaries finally confirmed in a Redistribution Act. For the prairies, the job was again managed by the unrelenting partisan Jimmy Gardiner.
The result was that Lake Centre constituency, in the middle of the province, was shorn of ninety townships possessing an overall Diefenbaker majority. The remnant was merged with Moose Jaw and parts of Regina to produce a constituency with strong Liberal and CCF voting strength. “The riding,” Hees protested to the House, “has been literally mutilated … For all practical purposes one can say that it has been obliterated.”14 The mutilation was deliberate and defiant. The Liberal majority sought to rid the House of an annoying antagonist.
For many Saskatchewan voters that was too much. Diefenbaker’s supporters urged him to fight on wherever he had the best prospect of election, and a plan soon emerged to fashion a non-partisan nomination for him in Prince Albert. Diefenbaker’s own story is that the project was inspired and proposed by two Prince Albert political opponents, Fred Hadley (a Liberal) and Tommy Martin (a Social Crediter), during a fishing trip with him to Lac La Ronge in July 1952 - to which Diefenbaker’s response was “Oh, the idea is ridiculous.”15 The truth seems to be that the idea originated among Conservatives, who tacitly approved a non-partisan front as a means of strengthening Diefenbaker’s chances. His political friend George Whitter, a former Conservative candidate in Prince Albert, recalled that he first proposed to Diefenbaker that he should run in his home town. The MP took some time to respond, but Whitter remembered that during a fishing trip to Lake Waskesiu “after quite a talk you gave me the go-ahead to start the ball rolling. This was to try and repeat Lake Centre, by getting people of all political beliefs to pull together.”16 Whitter then arranged a private meeting of Prince Albert Tories, “to set the stage and then disappear to the back ground ranks. We wanted new blood, new faces and above all people from other parties who were friends of yours. I was delegated to see Fred Hadley as he was a known Liberal and Kiwanian.”17
From this point the cover story was played out, Diefenbaker acting the innocent. Hadley invited him north for another fishing trip, and one evening while the party listened on radio to Adlai Stevenson’s acceptance of the Democratic nomination for president, Hadley asked: “Why don’t you run in Prince Albert?” Diefenbaker feigned surprise, “spent the next couple of days fishing, and very little more was said about my contesting Prince Albert.” For the record, Diefenbaker insisted that he had agreed only to think about the request after his return to Ottawa. But his brother, Elmer, who was present, wrote triumphantly to their mother on a postcard from Lac La Ronge: “We’re just going back to Waskesiu & John has enjoyed himself as much as I. This is a great spot & we got the big fish. Fred Hadley has a fine cabin here.”18
Diefenbaker showed his usual caution in an uncertain situation. He allowed preparations to go ahead in Prince Albert, but consulted supporters in his old constituency about the chances there. He agreed with Bill Brunt that Elmer should tour Qu’Appelle riding to survey prospects in that district. The outlook seemed best in Prince Albert, but nothing was guaranteed.19
While Diefenbaker claimed ignorance, Hadley and his mostly non-Conservative associates worked diligently to prepare the way for “the big fish” in Prince Albert. The regular Conservative organization faded out of sight as Whitter had proposed, an all-party executive appeared, and “Diefenbaker Clubs” sprang up throughout Prince Albert constituency during the autumn. The MP returned home at Christmas, and again at Easter, to face what he called “one of the most extraordinary examples of citizenship in action that I have ever known.” But he had still not made up his mind and he worried over his dilemma without resolution until the end of April 1953. In February, one of the organizers in Prince Albert wrote to Diefenbaker projecting a local majority and urging “that you should declare yourself anytime now - to be fair to us - and to the other constituencies which you are considering.”20 Diefenbaker spun it out for another three months. Finally, after addressing an enthusiastic mass meeting at the Orpheum Theatre in Prince Albert on April 23, he let himself be convinced, accepting nomination at an overflow convention in May.21 The forces of destiny - with suitably discreet nudges -were at work again. Local enthusiasm for him was genuine, and once the issue was settled he responded with fresh zest for the battle. But in private he was typically pessimistic. He wrote to Olive Palmer: “I am a long faced, dour, melancholy person every time I think of getting into the P.A. fight, but being in I must get out and work. There is quite a lot of encouraging support but it wouldn’t bring a win at this time. I have to take 3,000 votes from each of the other parties. What a menacing picture. However
, a faint heart never won an election either.”22
In December 1952 Conservative MPs believed they had been handed a winning election issue with publication of the Currie Report on irregularities in domestic military spending. The report confirmed more than one hundred improprieties, the result of inept administration and minor fraud, which had gone uncorrected despite repeated internal complaints since 1949. For the press and the opposition, the most colourful claim of fraud was that “horses were hired by army personnel and placed on the payroll.” The assertion stuck in the public mind, despite the prime minister’s subsequent denials and the investigator’s equivocal insistence that horses were indeed being paid “under the names of non-existent labourers.”23
Whether horses or wraiths, the government was embarrassed. When the House resumed after Christmas, the prime minister proposed the creation of a select committee to examine military spending since 1950 - a diversion, Diefenbaker claimed in response to the motion, intended to produce a whitewash. Donald Fleming, Douglas Harkness, J.R. Macdonnell, and Davie Fulton added their protests, but the government’s majority held. Fleming observed caustically that the Conservatives needed someone on the select committee “who was tough, a fighter, a lawyer with experience in cross-examination, a sense of tactics, and a knowledge of the rules. The need was tailored precisely to the specifications of John Diefenbaker, but John was not responsive where a tedious committee job was involved.” Fleming took the place that Diefenbaker declined, and as expected, the Liberal majority produced an innocuous report in May under Conservative protest.24 The issue died without arousing more than mild public amusement and a faint echo in the next election campaign.
For the Conservatives, the other contentious issue of 1953 was the government’s annual proposal to extend special emergency powers for one further year - a measure that delegated wide discretionary authority to the government. The Conservatives’ front-bench team of Drew, Green, Diefenbaker, Fulton, and Fleming hammered away on the perennial complaint that the Liberal Party preferred rule by decree to normal parliamentary government. The Liberal majority seemed unaffected. The session ended early to allow a substantial delegation of MPs to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and in mid-June parliament was dissolved for a summer election.
The government felt confident enough to campaign without any visible program. Drew responded with a sixteen-point manifesto, but emphasized that, if victorious, he would reduce taxes immediately by $500 million. In the existing atmosphere of prosperity and political apathy, that was rash. The Liberal Party suggested that the Conservative leader was irresponsible, and demanded to know what helpful programs - such as the universal old age pension adopted in 1950 with all-party agreement - he would eliminate to achieve his goal. Drew and all his candidates remained on the defensive for the rest of the campaign. The government, after all, was Liberal, practical, benign, and all-wise. It was foolish to imagine that any ragtag bunch of inexperienced critics, however scrappy, could improve on that blessed regime and its smoothly integrated public bureaucracy. Conservative candidates in 1953 were up against the divine order of things.25
Diefenbaker declined his invitation to the coronation in order to begin the Prince Albert campaign. “Experience,” he wrote, “should have taught me that the only thing a Conservative candidate could expect there approached extinction.”26 But he had a new all-party team of enthusiasts headed by Fred Hadley, and he threw himself frantically into the summer campaign. He began by instructing the Conservative national office that all advertising in Saskatchewan would require his personal approval. In Saskatchewan this would be his, rather than the Conservative Party’s, election campaign.27
Diefenbaker’s drivers took him over dusty roads to every point in the constituency, to Weirdale, Snowden, Big River, Torch River, Nipawin, Shellbrook, Codette, and Canwood, returning late at night to Prince Albert while Diefenbaker slept in the back seat. At Canwood, Diefenbaker’s companion and driver George Whitter recalled that the candidate promised “to kiss a couple of old ladies … if you won the election.” At Big River there was a restless meeting dominated by “a huge drunk lumber jack,” but by the end of the evening “he was with us instead of against us.” Finally, there was a meeting in Nipawin and another drive home. “It was fair night in P.A. and we must have passed hundreds of cars in the dust coming back … You were exhausted and sound asleep, but just as always when we hit the steel planks on the P.A. bridge you woke up.”28
Four times in July Diefenbaker campaigned nationally for the Conservative Party, in Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, flying overnight and catching his rest where he could between banquets and fairground meetings. But when he returned to Prince Albert he professed no connection to the party. Among his colleagues in the House, only Davie Fulton spoke in the constituency, drawing large French-speaking crowds in Albertville and Devil’s Lake in enthusiastic support for Diefenbaker.29
The candidate for Prince Albert was by now an accomplished stump orator who played the crowd with ease, his voice resonating tremulously as he mocked his opponents, jowls shaking, eyes piercing, an outstretched arm delivering lightning bolts, his denunciations ending with jaws fixed in righteous self-satisfaction. He covered the essential Conservative themes of Liberal arrogance, extravagance, and indifference to parliament. But above all he offered himself as the tribune of his people. The crowds listened in awe and admiration to this Saskatchewan prophet who stood beyond party. For them it seemed a matter of indifference whether the Conservatives formed a government, but he had to be in parliament.
Diefenbaker had campaigned at a merciless pace, and on voting day his organization toiled from dawn to deliver his voters to the polls. When the counting ended, he had won Prince Albert with a majority of three thousand and one. “This was a stunning home-town victory,” wrote Dick Spencer, “for the man who had, until this night, been rejected by the very people whose love and loyalty he wanted most.”30 But nationally - as everyone expected - the Liberals retained an overwhelming majority against marginal opposition gains. Thirty-three of the Progressive Conservatives’ fifty-one seats were in Ontario, with only six in the prairies and four in Quebec. Diefenbaker was once more the sole Conservative MP from Saskatchewan. On August 11 the Calgary Herald reflected editorially: “The Conservative Party may now realize, at long last, that it made a grievous error at the Ottawa convention in 1948. It chose the wrong man for its leader!”31
DIEFENBAKER HAD RENEWED HIS YOUTHFUL FRIENDSHIP WITH OLIVE FREEMAN Palmer, now widowed and a senior civil servant with the Ontario Ministry of Education in Toronto. After Edna’s death, John’s weekend trips to Toronto grew frequent, although he kept his meetings with Olive discreetly quiet. Even his close friend and adviser Bill Brunt took months to discover the identity of Diefenbaker’s Toronto friend. But David and Bunty Walker were in on the secret, conspiring in good humour with John and Olive to contain knowledge of the courtship. In 1952 the couple became engaged. Olive slipped naturally into the role of counsellor, comforter, and family correspondent, with frequent chatty letters to John’s mother and brother. In December 1953 John and Olive were quietly married in a Baptist church ceremony in Toronto.32
Olive Diefenbaker, like Edna, was a supporter and protector of her husband - although in very different ways. Where Edna had softened his stiffness and self-importance, and eased his relations with clients, voters, the press, and politicians, Olive sustained him with her complete loyalty, dignity, strong will, and sense of propriety. Edna had encouraged John’s mischievous and irreverent side, as did some of his secretaries, but Olive did not. She was “a stern Baptist” and a teetotaller who took herself seriously and lacked her husband’s impish sense of fun. She was not, like Edna, simply resigned to John’s ambition. She joined him late in his career, helped to revive it, and dedicated herself to its fulfilment. She reinforced his grievances, his suspicions, and his sense of destiny. She was a formidable aide to her husband for the rest of her life. John
was devoted to her - perhaps even intimidated by her - and as sensitive to her pride as to his own.33
John’s mother was now over eighty and demanding more attention from her two sons than ever. Olive understood the family balance and gave Mary her constant, flattering attention. John’s visits to Saskatoon continued, often with the supporting presence of his wife.
John’s brother, Elmer, had returned to the family home from Prince Albert in the late 1940s, drifted through a variety of travelling sales ventures that never amounted to much (including an agency for “lovelight perfume lamps”), and came to rest as an organizer for the Saskatchewan Retail Merchants’ Association. In the Diefenbaker family there was room for only one vocation. On his travels throughout the province, Elmer soaked up political gossip and transmitted every scrap of trivia, prejudice, lore, and misinformation to his brother in a never-ending flow of meandering reportage. John encouraged the correspondence, and Elmer gradually assumed the role of disciple and devoted assistant. The traveller’s job seemed more and more a front for his amateur intelligence service.
Diefenbaker remained senior partner in his Prince Albert law firm through the mid-1950s, sharing in the company’s profits but contributing only intermittently to the firm’s work. The other partners, Jack Cuelenaere, Roy Hall, and Clyne Harradence, were initially prepared to put up with the imbalance because the Diefenbaker name drew business through the door. But Diefenbaker’s absence in Ottawa, and his congenital disorganization, meant that files often went astray. The papers that he moved back and forth between Prince Albert and Ottawa, recalled Harradence, “weren’t packed, they were just dumped” in boxes. “Armfuls of correspondence, some of the legal files that he had been working on … we never saw again.” Diefenbaker wrote to Hall in 1953 to complain over the office’s neglect of one estate that “I am getting in wrong over this … This is a large estate and will do me irreparable harm unless it is looked after. I cannot understand what has happened about it.” On another occasion Diefenbaker lost a bank draft. Secretaries were periodically directed to clean out and sort the disordered drawers in Diefenbaker’s office desk of clippings, correspondence, bus tickets, stamps, and refuse, but chaos soon returned. The staff knew that when Diefenbaker swept up the morning’s incoming mail, it might disappear forever. Hall remarked to Harradence in the early 1950s: “Could you ever imagine this man being prime minister of the country? He can’t even run a four-man law office.”