by Denis Smith
I saw at once that this report was political dynamite. I had been looking for something which would substantiate my suspicion that, in charging that the Conservative government had caused the rise in unemployment, the Liberals were once again trying to rewrite history in total disregard of the facts and to their advantage. But instead, I had laid my hands on something of more far-ranging sensation. True, it proved my suspicion to be well-founded. But it went much further. It discredited the former Liberal government for failing to prepare against a recession of whose imminence it had been warned, and which in fact had begun to reveal itself… five months before the Liberal non-precautionary budget and eight months before the general election which had evicted the Liberal government.119
Nicholson decided not to use the document himself because it was restricted, but to deliver it to his political friend the prime minister. He explained to Diefenbaker that it would rebut the claim that “Tory times are hard times.” Besides, he joked, if Diefenbaker made use of it, Nicholson might escape the charge of revealing official secrets. The prime minister was fascinated as he skimmed through the report, “taking in each page in about four seconds.” He thanked Nicholson for his help, and smiled inscrutably.120
On January 20 Diefenbaker carried the “hidden report” into the House, and once Mike Pearson had made his mistake, the prime minister knew that its revelation would mark the dramatic climax of his denunciation. He showed no hesitation about using a confidential document offering advice to a previous government. The weapon was too tempting to neglect; the very daring of his act would deepen the shock of his words. “I intend to establish as clearly as the printed word will make possible,” he hinted, “that … my hon. friends concealed from the Canadian people the facts.”
Across the way, Mr. Speaker, sit the purveyors of gloom who would endeavour, for political purposes, to panic the Canadian people at this time … You (Mr. Pearson), secured the advice of the economists in your own departments and were advised as to what the situation was in March 1957. This record [the “Canadian Economic Outlook”] was given to each and every one of you… They had a warning … Did they tell us that? No. Mr. Speaker, why did they not reveal this? Why did they not act when the House was sitting in January, February, March and April? They had the information … You concealed the facts, that is what you did. What plans did you make? Where was that shelf of works that was going to be made available whenever conditions should deteriorate?…When we came into power and looked for the so-called shelf there was not one solitary suggestion of a program available to meet the situation.121
Diefenbaker slashed away. For Donald Fleming, “It was his finest hour … It simply overwhelmed Pearson and crushed him.”122 For Paul Martin, this was “one of the greatest devastating speeches” in Canadian history.123 But for the eloquent CCF member Colin Cameron:
It was a rather tragic scene we witnessed … I give the Prime Minister full marks for a magnificent hatchet job … And yet I wonder if that is the role which the Prime Minister of Canada should play. I wonder if he should have rushed with such relish into the abattoir … When I saw him bring whole batteries of rhetoric, whole arsenals of guided missiles of vitriol and invective in order to shoot one forlorn sitting duck - a sitting duck, indeed, already crippled with a self-inflicted wound - I wondered if the Prime Minister really believes in the humane slaughter of animals.124
After the speech, Pearson crept out of the House in dismay, while Diefenbaker basked excitedly in the cheers of his followers.125
An election now seemed inevitable. The prime minister played the line for another ten days. On Saturday morning, February 1, his cabinet approved Diefenbaker’s proposal to seek a dissolution of parliament. The main headline in the Globe and Mail that morning had already announced it.126 The prime minister flew to Quebec City to meet Governor General Massey, returned with his approval, and late in the afternoon rose in the House to announce that parliament had been dissolved for an election on March 31 because the government needed a majority to protect itself from Liberal obstruction.127 The unspoken reason was that Diefenbaker, his cabinet, and his caucus expected to crush the opposition. Forsey learned for a second time that calculations of crude political advantage, not constitutional propriety, ruled Canadian electoral politics. In this belief, Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker were perfect soulmates.
CHAPTER 9
Visions, Dreams, and Fallen Arrows
1958-1959
FROM THE OUTSET, JOHN DIEFENBAKER’S 1958 CAMPAIGN WAS extraordinary. Allister Grosart planned a whistle-stopping cavalcade by rail across the nation, passing at least twice through each region.1 It began on February 12 in Winnipeg. Long before the speeches started, Winnipeg Auditorium was jammed with noisy enthusiasts. When the doors to the hall were closed, crowds outside surged and broke them down. The prime minister, surrounded by colleagues, candidates, and camp-followers, was mobbed as he struggled to the podium. That night, and in the weeks to come, the leader’s words found resonance in his listeners’ hopes and dreams. Diefenbaker’s audiences became his worshippers as his passionate phrases floated over them. Merril Menzies’s themes of 1957 had been sharpened and simplified. Diefenbaker promised not material prosperity alone, but a vision of northern development that would make the community morally and politically whole. “I saw the opportunity,” he later wrote, “of giving leadership in the building of a great nation in which the population of Canada would more than double by the century’s end.”2 The country’s new riches would be drawn, overwhelmingly, from the vast and unknown northlands of the Shield, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. For Diefenbaker, the north was as unpopulated by Native peoples as it had been for the English monarchs who first claimed it. In that assumption, he reflected the common understanding. But he saw a place for Native Canadians, as individuals, within the nation. They were among the neglected and excluded with whom Diefenbaker identified himself.
To reach the territories, Diefenbaker promised funding for a program of “roads to resources” that would open the empty lands first to mapping, surveying, and prospecting - and then to exploitation and settlement. Canada’s destiny, he insisted, lay over this northern horizon, and it was a destiny to be shared by all the nation’s southern citizens. Diefenbaker was one of them, an “average Canadian.” He served them, he dedicated himself to them, and in 1958 they followed him as a man of his word. In a great peroration he swept back the curtain of the tabernacle. “This is the vision, One Canada. One Canada, where Canadians will have preserved to them the control of their own economic and political destiny. Sir John A. Macdonald saw Canada from east to west: he opened the west. I see a new Canada - a Canada of the North… This is the vision!”3
Pierre Sévigny was there to hear “this magnificant flurry of eloquence.” Diefenbaker, he understood, had succeeded in “grasping the people” to him. “When he had finished that speech, as he was walking to the door, I saw people kneel and kiss his coat. Not one, but many. People were in tears. People were delirious. And this happened many a time after.”4 Eddie Goodman saw the same thing happen elsewhere. “Wherever we went in Ontario during the 1958 election, we were greeted by thousands who literally just wanted to touch the hem of Diefenbaker’s garment. In Leamington, a lovely small town in southwestern Ontario, more than four thousand people lined up to shake his hand. By the end of the night his hand was so tender that he could not touch it… I have never seen such adulation before or since in political gatherings in this country.”5
While Diefenbaker led the crusade, his ministers and candidates shared the aura. William Hamilton described Sévigny’s introduction of the prime minister in Montreal’s Craig Street armoury: “ ‘Levez-vous, levez-vous, saluez votre chef! Rise, rise, salute your chief!’ And that whole place, thousands upon thousands of people, jammed into that auditorium, just tore the roof off in a frenzy.”6 For Michael Starr,
That was the most fantastic election. We ministers were crossing paths back and forth like it was ne
ver done before. I spoke at five meetings in Saskatchewan, starting at ten o’clock at Cutworth. I said, “Who in the world is going to be there at ten o’clock?” The place was jammed, 550 people. It was fantastic.
I went into little places. Smoky Lake, Alberta, where nobody ever saw a minister. Canora, Saskatchewan. Every meeting was jammed; outside there were speakers for those who couldn’t get in. It was just fantastic, the most extraordinary experience that I have ever had.
I got the biggest thrill in some of these small places out west. The halls would be filled with people, and sitting there in the front would be the first Ukrainian immigrants with shawls and hands gnarled from work. I would speak for about twenty minutes in English and then I would switch to Ukrainian and the tears would start to run down their faces. A man came to me one day and he said, “Now I can die, I have met a minister of Ukrainian extraction.”
This really swept the West. I don’t care who says what won the election: it was the emotional aspect that caught on. Diefenbaker used to come to meetings in that election and the people would mob him, virtually mob him, and he would have to back up. They would be swarming at him just to touch his hand.7
In his account of the Diefenbaker years, Peter Newman titled the chapter on this campaign “The Charismatic Rampage of 1958.” The prime minister’s audiences, he said, “came away lost in a cause they did not fully comprehend.”8 The campaign could hardly be described except in the language of religious revival. Many were swept along; others joined in to be on the winning side. Gordon Churchill wrote to Diefenbaker that “there is no doubt something amazing is happening … The people are out to finish the job they began last summer.”9 The prime minister moved back and forth across the country preaching conversion and commitment. Opposition leaders knew that their prospects were hopeless and struggled lamely to keep up a facade of confidence in the face of small and silent audiences. Too often their words revealed their desperation. Mike Pearson chose the path of humility, admitting Liberal failures and setting his “quiet reasoned approach” against his opponent’s “agitated eloquence.” That only seemed to make his partisans cringe.10 When he called Diefenbaker’s “roads to resources” a scheme of construction “from igloo to igloo,” Diefenbaker pounced on him again for his Liberal condescension.11 While campaign contributions rolled into Conservative accounts, the opposition parties remained destitute. Grosart had a national campaign fund of $2.5 million to dispense (more than twice that of 1957), and distributed $6000 each to constituency organizations in every province.12
“The vision” first proclaimed in Winnipeg quickly became “the Vision,” something almost tangible that Diefenbaker called forth each night. “Join with me,” he implored his audiences, “catch the Vision.” “Everywhere I go I see that uplift in people’s eyes that comes from raising their sights to see the Vision of Canada in days ahead.” The campaign had become a mission of healing. “Instead of the hopelessness and fear the Liberals generate,” the Chief explained, “we have given faith; instead of desperation we offer inspiration.”13 A simple campaign poster contained black footprints and the slogan “Follow John!”14 And the electorate responded, in the cities, in the small towns, in the prairies - even in Quebec, where Maurice Duplessis threw the Union Nationale machine into the campaign to keep up with his own voters. “We had a stopover at Three Rivers last night,” Diefenbaker wrote to Duff Roblin on February 23, “where some 3200 sat down to dinner. It is almost unbelievable, the feeling that exists in Quebec among our followers. I don’t forget there has been optimism expressed in the past as to the outcome, but this time the leaders, without exception, tell me that they have never seen anything like this in fifty years.”15 Two weeks later Diefenbaker’s secretary, Marion Wagner, wrote to Derek Bedson from the prime minister’s train that he had been mobbed during a short stopover in Montreal: “They were almost hysterical and just wouldn’t let him put a foot off the train … Actually it was a bit frightening.”16 Everywhere, as the winter campaign concluded, Diefenbaker’s ministers predicted massive majorities.
After his third trip of the campaign into the province of Quebec, Diefenbaker flew back to Prince Albert on election eve “in buoyant spirits.” Olive was with him, stoically disguising the back pain that had dogged her throughout the winter. The prime minister followed his morning round of mainstreeting on election day, rested in the afternoon, and began to receive reports of “a smashing victory,” as the Globe reported, “while he relaxed in a hotel room bed in his underwear.”17
The victory was unprecedented. Diefenbaker and the Tories had won 208 seats (with majorities of seats and votes in every province except Newfoundland), the Liberals only 48, the CCF 8, and Social Credit none. In Quebec, Conservatives took 50 percent of the popular vote and fifty of seventy-five seats; in Saskatchewan, 51 percent of the vote and sixteen of seventeen seats. The country had bonded with its new Chief. When Diefenbaker spoke to the nation on television that night, he told his audience that “the Conservative Party has become a truly national party composed of all the people of Canada of all races united in the concept of one Canada … This is a victory … not for any one person of the party but rather a victory for the kind of Canadianism in which we all believe.” He compared his circumstances -puzzlingly - to those of Abraham Lincoln at his first inaugural, and called, in Lincoln’s words, for “intelligence, patriotism, Christianity and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favoured land.” With the prayers of Canadians to aid him, he hoped for “that wisdom that comes from Divine guidance.”18
On election night, Pearson cabled Diefenbaker offering his congratulations and wishes for “health and strength” in face of the heavy duties of office. Next morning the prime minister acknowledged “your warm and generous telegram” in more than routine terms. “Olive and I were deeply moved by your kind personal reference … May I extend to Marian and yourself our best wishes for the years ahead and my own assurance that I shall ever hope to maintain that friendly personal relationship which has always existed between us and which transcends whatever differences there may be between the public roles we are individually called upon to fill.”19
The same day an avid election watcher in Washington, Vice President Richard Nixon, wrote to Diefenbaker:
I want to take this opportunity to congratulate you on your overwhelming victory at the polls yesterday.
I, personally, could not have been more pleased that you have now earned a majority mandate from the Canadian people. Now that the election is over, I assume I can make that statement without being charged with attempting to interfere in Canadian political affairs!
As I told you when you were in Washington, I followed your first campaign with great interest. There is no question but that history will record that you are one of the truly great political campaigners of our time. The fact that within the space of just a few months you were able to do what you did against what appeared to be insurmountable odds, is an achievement which has seldom been equalled in history.20
Diefenbaker was flattered and returned the compliment. “I need not say,” he replied, “how much your reference to me as a campaigner means to me, coming from one whose record merits the accolade of the greatest campaigner of our time.”21
THE DIEFENBAKERS FLEW OFF IN EARLY APRIL FOR A SHORT HOLIDAY AT THE MID Ocean Club in Bermuda, where Olive could rest her back and John could reflect on his great triumph. The victory - and the widespread praise that followed it - had confirmed his sense of destiny. “It was an interesting study,” he wrote to a university president, “to watch Canadians in all political faiths during the campaign respond to the challenge of a greater Canada which in reality is but an extension northwards of Sir John A. Macdonald’s national policy.”22 Yet he was also unnerved by the overwhelming display of confidence and expectation implied in the election result. To Elmer, he wrote: “When I think of the tremendous problems facing me in the days ahead I am frightened but - never dismayed. The rest will make it possible
to face up to them.”23 In principle, he recognized the dangers of his good fortune. “One thing which must be guarded against is complacency and its twin arrogance, which are often the aftermath of great political victory. As for me I intend to maintain as close a relationship with the people as is possible and to ask various outstanding Canadians to give me the benefit of their views from time to time.”24 He wrote to ask his Conservative colleagues in the new House of Commons “that you let me have your opinions on urgent national problems as soon as you can conveniently do so but not later than two weeks from now.”25
With the first Conservative majority in Quebec since 1887, the prime minister was widely expected to broaden his cabinet representation from that province. This would be a necessary step towards consolidating support in Quebec and assuring “as close a relationship with the people as is possible” among French-speaking voters. But Diefenbaker fumbled. Among the new Quebec members there were several with impressive records.26 Diefenbaker asked his cabinet about potential Quebec ministers from the new crop of members, and in mid-April William Hamilton offered two suggestions, both negative: avoid naming Pierre Sévigny, on the grounds that both English- and French-speaking supporters would resent him as “personally self-seeking and not too competent, with a social-climbing wife who has done nothing whatsoever to make people like either of them better”; and delay any offer to Charles-Edouard Campeau, an accomplished former director of planning for Montreal, until he had gained some “feeling of this government’s attitude” on patronage questions. After that, Hamilton thought Campeau might be suitable for public works.27 Diefenbaker had little basis for judging his Quebec members and hesitated for four more weeks. In mid-May he appointed Raymond O’Hurley, an English-speaking former timber-grader, as minister of defence production, and Henri Courtemanche, deputy Speaker during the short parliament of 1957-58, as secretary of state. Neither could handle his role, and neither added political credit to the government. As in 1957, none of the new Quebec members was brought into cabinet. Meanwhile, Léon Baker’s rage grew in the obscurity of the solicitor general’s office, and Paul Comtois read newspapers beneath the cabinet table to avoid discussion in a language he could not grasp.28 Without any trusted advisers from Quebec, Diefenbaker relied upon his correspondence secretary Claude Gauthier, his English-speaking cronies, and a few French-speaking correspondents for his limited knowledge of the province. He seemed unaware that his response to Quebec’s support might be inadequate, yet in that initial misstep he probably lost the chance for another parliamentary majority. He could never make up for it.29