Rogue Tory

by Denis Smith

  The speech carried forward the government’s summer promises of largesse. Old age, blind, disabled, and veterans’ pensions would be raised; funding for provincial old age assistance would be increased; agricultural floor prices would be introduced; cash would be advanced for farm-stored grain; supplementary and married women’s unemployment insurance benefits would be extended; hydroelectric power and water storage projects would be assisted on the Saint John, South Saskatchewan, and Columbia rivers; a new national development policy would promote resource exploitation; an aggressive trade policy would open up markets for Canadian products abroad.93 The outlook seemed benign and the government’s intentions generous. This was a pre-election agenda.94

  From Ottawa, Queen Elizabeth flew off to Washington with the Canadian prime minister, for the first time as a state visitor there in her role as queen of Canada. This constitutional sleight-of-hand must have meant little to the Americans, who wanted only to see the British monarch, but it was a triumph in Diefenbaker’s eyes. In Washington the prime minister met with President Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dulles, and Vice President Nixon, and established that “there was no limit to Mr. Eisenhower’s congeniality and friendliness.” He raised with the president the issues of American agricultural surplus disposal policies and Canadian criticism of the government’s entry into the integrated air defence system. Eisenhower assured him of the American wish to cooperate and to avoid conflict with Canada, and Diefenbaker left feeling confident that “Canada’s position was more clearly understood and … our interests would be better protected.”95

  At home in parliament, the government proceeded quickly with its legislative program.96 Louis St Laurent had announced his intention to retire as Liberal leader in September, but would carry on in the House until his successor was chosen in January. Both St Laurent and M.J. Coldwell, the CCF leader, promised cooperation in achieving the ministry’s electoral promises. With the Tories in the ascendant, there was nothing to be gained in fractiousness - and everything to be gained in avoiding a government defeat in the House. St Laurent put his party’s interest in the language of the public good: “In the final analysis our view is that the will of the majority in parliament and, even more, of the majority in the country, should prevail.”97 There was little doubt now about who enjoyed the benefit of that majority will.

  There was no danger of defeat in the House, but the government did not have a totally free ride. Liberals repeatedly chided the government with talk of increased unemployment and recollections that “Tory times are hard times.” There were, indeed, worrying signs of an economic downturn that sent the cabinet scurrying for policies to stimulate jobs - including winter works, more funds for public housing, and tax cuts for individuals and businesses. In November the first hints of confusion over the integration of Canadian and American air defences began to emerge as the opposition pressed for details of the deal. Diefenbaker wrote to his mother that “the Liberals keep kicking me around … I need not tell you that when I was a boy and saw my way to this position, I didn’t know how much work there was (and worry).” Diefenbaker was still unable to organize his time efficiently. “This weekend,” he reported, “the P.M. of England (Macmillan) and the Foreign Minister will be here. That means an almost all night session on Friday night for me.”98 In late November he lamented: “Today I should be getting ready for the Dominion Provincial Conference on Monday. I am really not ready for it at all and will have to put in many many hours of work. Unfortunately, I promised to go to Toronto to a Shrine meeting tonight and I am trying to get out of that because it is just impossible.”99

  Still, the pleasures outweighed the pains. Diefenbaker enjoyed his celebrity, his hectic and unending travel, his sense of hobnobbing with the great and titled, his opportunities to embellish the family legend.

  Last evening Olive and I entertained the Governor General and he was accompanied by Brigadier MacLean who is an outstanding Clansman and maintains the Highland tradition in every way and came in Kilts.

  I told him that I was going to Paris to the meeting of the fifteen heads of State in the middle of December and on my stop-over in England I would like to go up to Northern Scotland to Kildonan and go over the place where your grandparents came from. He immediately entered enthusiastically into the plan and is going to arrange to go with me, and I will spend a day or so in Sutherlandshire, Inverness and Argyle, and when I see you at Christmas time I hope to have lots of information for you.100

  As he descended into Paris for the NATO heads of government meeting he told his mother:

  This Conference will be the most important since the war for the Free world and I hope that I shall be able to do something. Certainly I will never attend a world Conference again that will be more important to peace and the future…

  Yes and one year ago today at this very hour I became Conservative leader!!101

  On December 21 John and Olive returned to Canada, to spend Christmas Day in Saskatoon. This was the prime minister’s celebration, hosted and catered in his private railway car resting by the CN station - on the very site, Diefenbaker recalled, where he had engaged Wilfrid Laurier in conversation almost fifty years before. Diefenbaker’s mother came by ambulance from the University Hospital to join John, Olive, and Elmer for the day. Immediately afterwards, the couple departed with the Grosarts for a holiday at Lord Beaverbrook’s house in Nassau, Bahamas, and for sea fishing on the Beaver’s chartered cruiser.102 By early January they were back in Ottawa.

  DESPITE ITS OCCASIONAL MISSTEPS, THE DIEFENBAKER GOVERNMENT WAS ENJOYING a long honeymoon in office. The press was refreshed to see new faces, intrigued by the prime minister’s energy, and gentle in its early judgments. The public, quickly accustomed to what it had done on June 10, decided that it liked the idea of dishing the Grits and turned its enthusiasms to the Tories. The Gallup Poll over the summer and into the autumn showed growing Conservative support across the country. Thoughts of a second and decisive round were bound to arise, and there were strong temptations among ministers to enter a new campaign while opinion was at full tide in their favour.103 It seemed likely, though, that the opposition would not oblige them by combining to defeat the minority government in a House of Commons vote. Ministers knew that the Liberals, CCF, and Social Credit were tired, demoralized, and debt-ridden: they would hang on in the new parliament as long as they could. But how soon, in that case, could a new government legitimately ask the governor general for a fresh dissolution of parliament without a defeat in the House? The issue had been disputed thirty years before, when Lord Byng’s refusal of a dissolution to Mackenzie King just eight months after an election threw the country into constitutional turmoil. At the centre of that conflict was Eugene Forsey (then a young lecturer at McGill University), who took the governor general’s side in the dispute with King and his defenders. Although King’s election victory in 1926 meant that Forsey lost the battle, his honour seemed secure and his reputation blossomed with publication of his Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth. He was still, as we have seen, an antagonist of the Liberal Party in the 1950s. Diefenbaker considered him his doughty ally.

  But Forsey was above all a parliamentary constitutionalist, and Conservative talk of an early election reminded him of King and 1926. Early in August he wrote to the Ottawa Journal to raise the alarm. Howard Green had said that only the queen’s visit prevented an election in the autumn, and that there would be an election before the summer of 1958. Forsey objected. Parliament was elected “to transact public business, and ought not to be dissolved except for grave and substantial reasons of public policy.” A fall election without a session of parliament would be “a gross violation of the Constitution.” A snap election after a short fall session would be just slightly less unconstitutional, unless there had been obstruction or a government defeat. And a fresh election by July 1958 could only be justified if the government were defeated, or repeatedly sustained by the Speaker’s casting vote or by narrow ma
rgins of one, two, or three votes, or if there had been “prolonged obstruction” of House business. If the government’s program were approved by parliament, he asked, “what right has any Government to put the country to the tumult and expense of a second election within a year merely because some of the support comes from people with a different political label?” The Journal printed the letter, but omitted its stinging conclusion:

  To announce, eight or ten months in advance, that whatever Parliament does, it will be dissolved next spring seems to me to be a very odd way of showing respect for Parliament. Elections are serious matters. They disrupt business. They interrupt the orderly conduct of foreign policy. They cost money, millions to the public treasury, millions more to the parties and the candidates. A second election within a year can be justified only on grounds of public necessity. A clear majority for the Government over all other parties is a convenience for the Government. It is not, in itself, a public necessity. It becomes so only if the conduct of the opposition parties makes it so. Mr. Green, and you, may feel confident that this will happen. If it does, the remedy is ready to the Government’s hand. But until it does, a party committed to restoring and maintaining the rights of Parliament should allow Parliament to do the public business it was elected to do.104

  Forsey copied the letter to J.M. Macdonnell, and at the end of October, hearing “persistent talk” of an election, he sent it also to the prime minister with a covering letter. Forsey commented to Diefenbaker that, with parliament now in session, the only new element was Conservative irritation at Liberal attacks. But that was “no reason for dissolving a newly elected Parliament.”

  I can hardly believe that the Government contemplates asking for a dissolution in the near future except for some such grave reasons of public policy as I outlined in my letter to the Journal; and I should hate to see Conservative Ministers preaching the King doctrine that a Government is entitled to a dissolution any time it feels so inclined. I am afraid the Liberals would make devastating use of the Conservative arguments in 1926, and the Conservative Party would to a large extent lose what I think was its main advantage in the last election: a public conviction that it was acting from principle. The Government’s course since it took office has strengthened that conviction. I think it would be a tragedy for the party and for the country if anything were done to weaken it.105

  Ten days later Diefenbaker wrote to reassure Forsey:

  I am glad that you wrote to let me have your comments on a possible early dissolution of the present Parliament. I fully agree with you concerning the weighty reasons which should govern any request for dissolution of a newly elected Parliament and I should like to assure you that these reasons will be in my mind should the occasion here arise to consider requesting such a dissolution. It is the purpose of the new Government to make its decisions on those parliamentary and democratic principles in which we both believe so profoundly.106

  Forsey had given Diefenbaker’s political conscience an uncomfortable nudge. The temptation to dissolve early remained strong; but with Forsey on the watch, Diefenbaker would have to take care about his justifications.

  In mid-January the Liberal Party held its leadership convention, which, as expected, brought Mike Pearson into the succession in easy competition against Paul Martin. Pearson had the advantage, for a defeated party, of an engaging personality and a non-partisan record. His distinguished career as secretary of state for external affairs had just been capped by receipt of the 1957 Nobel Prize for Peace for his inspiration in creating the United Nations Emergency Force. Diefenbaker begrudged that award, but felt confident he was a match for Pearson in the House of Commons. On the weekend of the Liberal convention the prime minister was immobilized in bed with a strained back, so he was free to watch - and joke about - the proceedings. “I saw one of the banners that the Young Liberals carried which was en tided ‘Diefenbaker Raw Deal.’ Even so, advertising wherever it comes from is always acceptable so long as one doesn’t have to pay for it.”107

  Diefenbaker was now living day by day awaiting the opportunity to dissolve the House. He wanted an election in the first few months of 1958, but directed all his sensitive antennae to detecting the right occasion for the choice. Despite Forsey’s warning about constitutional proprieties, the leader’s calculations were absorbingly political. “The session is rapidly coming to an end,” he wrote to his mother on January 31. “The legislative programme for the session has all but been completed and about all that remains is the passing of the Estimates. Everybody seems to expect an election. There is a general demand that it should take place soon. What decision I will come to will have to be determined within the next short while.”108 By this time he was at the point of decision and already on the road as though the campaign had begun. The week before, he and Olive had been in Winnipeg for a large public reception - “we shook hands with 3500 people (and my hand is very swollen)” - and a Ukrainian dinner for six hundred.109 Then he was in Halifax for a few hours to receive an honorary degree from St Mary’s University. The next day he was back in Ottawa for a ceremonial presentation in front of the Parliament Buildings of a sleigh built by his grandfather, an appropriate symbol both of his own national roots and the rigours of a winter election.110

  The prime minister had been handed his pretext for an election on January 20, 1958, when Pearson took his seat as leader of the opposition. The subject of debate was a vote of interim supply, and a Liberal motion of non-confidence was expected. In the minority House, it was always possible that the two smaller parties might vote with the official opposition to defeat the government and force an election, even though the Liberals might not intend it. A motion that assured CCF support for the government, however, would not risk that. In the aftermath of his convention victory, Pearson received conflicting advice about how to make his debut. Should he enter the House swinging - and risk defeating the government - or should he hedge his criticisms in some way that would assure a government majority? The over-ingenious Jack Pickersgill provided him with the answer, and Pearson went into the House without telling his own caucus what he would do.111

  After a standard assault on the government for a failing economic record, Pearson told the House that an election would “prolong and perhaps intensify the uncertainty and the fear for the future which now exists.” Canada’s trade was stagnating, export markets had been threatened, the budget was in deficit, Canadians were worried and confused. Before an incredulous audience, which included many in his own caucus, Pearson called for a government that would “implement Liberal policies,” and invited the Conservative cabinet to resign.112

  That would bring the Liberal Party - defeated, discredited, and failing in the opinion polls - back to power without an election. Was there a more perfect demonstration of Liberal arrogance? Pearson slouched to his seat in uncertainty over what he had done. “Mike, it is sad to see you come to this,” Donald Fleming called out. Diefenbaker could scarcely believe his good fortune. He turned across the aisle to Howard Green and laughed: “This is it.”113

  And then, clutching a mass of loose foolscap sheets in his left hand, rallying all his fury and his sarcasm for one mighty explosion of rhetoric, he rose to reply. He spoke for more than two hours, with a break for the dinner recess. His wattles shook, his eyes glared, his index finger stabbed the air before him. Liberals heckled and Diefenbaker bulldozed them. Conservative back-benchers cheered him on. “Pearson,” recalled Fleming, “looked at first merry, then serious, then uncomfortable, then disturbed, and finally sick. His followers knew all too well that he was destroyed.”114

  Diefenbaker contrasted Pearson’s boldness at the leadership convention with his new cowardice: “On Thursday there was shrieking defiance; on the following Monday there is shrinking indecision … The only reason that this motion is worded as it is is that my hon. friends opposite quake when they think of what will happen if an election comes … I do not want to speak of this motion in crushing terms, but there is no other e
xpression that can be applied to it than this. It is the resignation from responsibility of a great party.”115

  The prime minister had prepared himself for an attack on the Conservative economic record. Now he was angered by the realization that the Liberal Party had made itself look ridiculous, but would not hand him a voting defeat that would justify dissolution. He was determined to humiliate the opposition, to destroy any lingering atmosphere of civility in the House, to create his own justification for an election - and probably to win it decisively in this single performance as well. He was thinking and feeling on his feet as the speech took its destructive shape.

  Sometime before this fateful day, Diefenbaker’s friend Patrick Nicholson had come to him with what he called a “hidden report” prepared in February and March 1957 as one of an annual series of confidential documents for ministers on the economic outlook.116 Nicholson had obtained it through some direct inquiries after Paul Martin had casually told him the previous summer that the Liberal government “had been warned of trouble ahead.”117 Yet now the Liberal Party was blaming the Tories for that trouble. Nicholson smelled Liberal deceit; and once he had the report, he was convinced. It was signed by the associate deputy minister of trade and commerce, Mitchell W. Sharp. As Nicholson pointed out, the report noted symptoms of economic slowdown “that typically are found in the later stages of a cyclical expansion.” Costs were rising, export sales were falling, housing construction was declining, investment and consumer spending were likely to be down, unemployment was growing at more than the usual seasonal rates. “This,” said the report, “is a disquieting pattern.”118 Nicholson was alarmed.