by Denis Smith
Ah – the leader sighs, after not so long a pause – but you see there are no successors. He would illustrate by example. Fulton? Fulton had ditched himself, against all advice, by accepting the provincial leadership in British Columbia. He had no judgement. Fulton could never lead this party.
Hees? Hees had been like a son to him. But he had destroyed himself, running off with Bassett in 1963. Had he stood fast, he would be the next leader of this party. But not now. Not ever.
McCutcheon? A snort for McCutcheon’s qualifications.
Who is there? The premiers? He had asked all of them – Robarts, Roblin, Stanfield – asked each of them to come and take their place in Parliament. He had even told Roblin, before the last election, there would be possibilities for him if he would come in – that was as far as he could go, you see – but, no, none of them would come forward.
There is no one, the leader says, sorrow in his voice, because, you see, no one can lead this party until he has sat in Parliament.144
When Camp next met Diefenbaker at the leader’s call in March 1966, he found himself, unaccountably, in the presence of Richard Jackson of the Ottawa Journal. As the party leaders tore at each other daily in the House, Diefenbaker wished to initiate the party president into some secrets. From a bottom drawer he pulled a file containing the congressional committee testimony of Elizabeth Bentley about Pearson’s wartime associations in Washington, and passed it across the desk. Camp read, and waited to learn the meaning of the occasion. Diefenbaker told Camp that he had a duty to remain leader just as long as Pearson was prime minister of Canada.145
There was clearly nothing Camp could do to persuade Diefenbaker to make a gracious and voluntary exit at a time of his own choosing. So in May 1966 – knowing the explosive content of the leadership issue – he spoke to a private meeting of Tories at the Albany Club in Toronto to propose an ingenious means of defusing the timebomb. The party, he believed, must have a new leader before the next election, which meant a convention by the spring of 1968. To reach that point, Camp suggested a procedural reform in the party to give its members a regular means of reassessing the leadership. The next annual meeting after an election in which the party had not gained power, he proposed, should face an automatic ballot on whether or not to hold a leadership convention. For 1966, Camp intended to soften any direct challenge to Diefenbaker by making leadership review the issue in his own contest for re-election as party president. Over the summer he found widespread support for his approach, and on September 20 he made it public in an address to the Toronto Junior Board of Trade. While Camp argued his case in general terms and did not attack Diefenbaker directly, his target and his objective were obvious. “Where the leader does not know the limits of his power,” he argued, “he must be taught, and when he is indifferent to the interest of his party, he must be reminded.” Canadian parties could no longer remain “huddled about obsolete political platforms, debating the past, divided on their leadership and leaving their future to the fate of accident.” The Globe and Mail applauded Camp’s courage, but the Telegram – while admitting he was “a doughty fighter” – considered him “badly overmatched” in another contest with the Chief and imprudent in his timing: “This is no time for Mr. Camp to lead a new rebellion. Mr. Diefenbaker has earned the right to decide for himself when he should step down.”146
Two days before Camp’s speech, Diefenbaker had shown his own confidence at a seventy-first birthday party in his parliamentary offices by reminding reporters of John A. Macdonald’s last campaign at the age of seventy-six. In one year, he boasted, he would again occupy the prime minister’s office on the floor below. Afterwards, he asked his aide Greg Guthrie: “Do you think I overdid it? Do you think I rubbed it in enough?”147
For six weeks Camp engaged in a national campaign for leadership review as the first stage in renewing the party system for a more democratic age. Beyond the call for review, his prescriptions were vague, but leadership was the compelling issue. Provincial party associations in Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and British Columbia voted in favour of reassessment; a ginger group of a dozen Conservative MPs declared themselves in support of Camp; and an editorial review of Canadian newspapers large and small, prepared in October for Diefenbaker, revealed fifty-nine in favour of a leadership review and only ten opposed.148
When Diefenbaker addressed a closed Conservative meeting at the Albany Club soon after Camp had launched his public campaign, he was challenged by an Ontario minister, Allan Lawrence, who suggested that a leadership convention might unite the party. Jim Johnston worried that this kind of “blunt impertinence” was wearing Diefenbaker down; he was “losing his genius for wisecracks and good repartee.” A battle of resolutions swept party meetings across the country, as Camp, Diefenbaker, and their respective advocates manoeuvred for strength at the annual meeting. Frequently, Camp and Johnston – both noticeably balding – were mistaken for one another, sometimes under threat of violence from their own supporters. Erik Nielsen matched Diefenbaker’s rhetoric in his defence by describing Camp’s supporters as the Bay Street barons and crown princes of privilege, “petty little men” intent on disembowelling a great national party. Diefenbaker’s loyalists – who included up to seventy members of the parliamentary caucus – arranged for the Toronto lawyer and former MP Arthur Maloney to contest the party presidency against Camp; and Johnston issued an agenda for the annual meeting without consulting Camp or other members of the national executive. It called for elections on the final day of meetings instead of the first day, in the expectation that a voice-vote declaration of confidence in Diefenbaker on the first day would dispose of the leadership issue. But at the executive meeting on the eve of the annual meeting, Camp’s supporters overruled the Johnston agenda and restored the election of officers to a place before the leadership vote. By this time the dissidents included the two leading officers of the Ontario party association, Elmer Bell and Eddie Goodman; Senator McCutcheon, who had performed invaluable fundraising for the party during the 1965 election; and, it appeared, the three Tory premiers Robert Stanfield, John Robarts, and Duff Roblin.149
John Diefenbaker remained intransigent. He wanted to see Dalton Camp defeated, and he refused any efforts of compromise. When Johnston offered him a draft statement for delivery to the Ontario party meetings at the end of October which promised his retirement once the centennial celebrations of 1967 had ended, he baulked. “I can’t read that,” he insisted. “It’s fine, but I can’t read it. I told them that we would not discuss leadership. Besides, I can’t make myself a lame-duck leader over such a long period.” When Johnston spoke once on the telephone to Camp about reconciliation over the agenda, Diefenbaker pronounced the conversation a grievous error. While the leader still dreamed of defeating the government and leading another victorious campaign before centennial year, Johnston saw disaster ahead. Aside from Diefenbaker himself, he sensed, the loyalists in the House were growing weary of the battle. In the last days before the annual meeting, the infighting came down to a war of tactical advantage between Camp’s allies in the association and Johnston’s staff in the national office. Camp’s forces won all the preliminary battles.150
As Diefenbaker prepared for his opening speech on November 14, he was advised by staff and friends to take all possible positions: to promise retirement, to fight on, to call for an immediate leadership convention, to ask for an immediate vote of confidence. Johnston pleaded with him not to provoke his opponents with any more mention of Gladstone and Macdonald hanging on in their old age, to which the Chief retorted with a glare: “I’ll talk about Sir John if I like … Don’t give me any of that stuff.”151
Two hours before the convention opened in the ballroom of the Chateau Laurier hotel, the front rows of seats were occupied, mostly but not entirely by young supporters of Dalton Camp. Soon the room was overflowing. Diefenbaker deferred his arrival until the preliminary speeches were finished, taking his seat onstage in what had become a “continual roar” of
voices. As Joel Aldred rose to introduce the leader, Johnston revealed to Camp that the timing was perfect: he had secretly arranged with the CBC to begin a direct television broadcast at that moment. The result turned out bittersweet for the loyalists. “It was this manoeuvre – although we could not have anticipated its importance at the time – which took that dreadful evening into Canadian living-rooms. It let the nation see, as no one could ever describe it, the method by which the old Chief was attacked. From coast to coast, they saw it while it was happening, live, in their capital city.”152
Diefenbaker – the acknowledged master of his crowds – spoke in desperation to a cold and mostly silent audience. “Throughout his address,” Arthur Blakely wrote in the Montreal Gazette, “they were well-mannered, aloof, and hostile. They sat on their hands whenever one of the chiefs infrequent sallies started a round of applause. They converted into utter fiascos, by the simple device of doing nothing, the attempts to give Mr. Diefenbaker standing ovations at the beginning and end of his speech.”153 As Diefenbaker turned in anger on Dalton Camp, seated nearby on the platform beside him, demanding to know when and why Camp had betrayed his loyalty to the party leader, there were boos and cries of derision. Diefenbaker was shaken. The audience was not listening; he had no hope of controlling it. “Is this a Conservative meeting?” he cried in anguish. “No leader can stand if he has to turn around to find who’s tripping him from behind.” He cut short his words and turned from the rostrum, his face inflamed and his eyes darting wildly in distress. Johnston was quickly at his side, while the room broke into uproar and members of the platform party fled in disorder and embarrassment. “I’ll quit tomorrow morning,” he told the national director. “I’ll resign in the morning. I told you what I would do if there was any widespread showing against me … I’m getting out.” As they struggled out of the ballroom to the elevators, Diefenbaker was surrounded by delegates who had failed to get into the auditorium, most of them his supporters. They cheered him and wished him well.154
Diefenbaker’s team spent a late night calculating how to break up the party, leaving a small rump of dissident MPs behind while the loyalists regrouped in a new party. Next day, as delegates continued to flow into Ottawa, the Diefenbaker forces took heart that the previous night’s display would boomerang against Camp. Registration continued during the day in increasingly chaotic and uncertain conditions, in which both sides could register delegates without proper checking of credentials. Diefenbaker stayed away, only later slipping in a side door to meet groups of delegates privately.
The crucial vote on the party presidency came that afternoon. Camp and Maloney delivered their campaign speeches to a chastened audience. The most memorable lines were uttered by the challenger:
I have no obligation to our national leader, I have no obligation to him whatsoever except one, which by reason I suppose of my Renfrew County upbringing is really to me, terribly important. And that is the single obligation that we all owe, each and every one of us to the man we picked as leader, loyalty and respect.
That means among other things that in regard to the Right Honourable John George Diefenbaker, sometime Prime Minister of Canada, present leader of the opposition and the national leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, when he enters a room, Arthur Maloney stands up! When the day comes that he decides to lay down the mantle of leadership which we gave him, he will do so in a blaze of glory.155
Afterwards delegates dispersed to their provincial meeting rooms to cast their votes for president, and early that evening the result was conveyed to John and Olive by telephone. Camp had won, by a vote of 564 to 502. And in added rebuke, delegates had elected Flora MacDonald as national secretary of the party.156
After four years of scattered combat, Diefenbaker’s legions had at last been outnumbered. But he had one final redoubt. The loyal core of his caucus gathered that evening in the parliamentary office of the whip, Eric Winkler, to demonstrate their support for Diefenbaker. The fantasy of a new party had faded, but seventy-one MPs signed a declaration of loyalty requesting Diefenbaker to remain as leader of the party. The signatories included seven ex-ministers, among them George Hees. A week later the caucus purged six of its members – who had not signed the pledge – from the party’s national executive. The Tories, Bruce Hutchison commented in the Winnipeg Free Press, were performing “high tragedy reduced to low farce.”157
With Maloney’s defeat in the vote for president, Johnston and his national office staff abandoned management of the annual meeting and left its direction to Camp and Goodman. Diefenbaker’s supporters lost interest in the proceedings, and when delegates straggled into the hall on November 16, no one was clear what would happen. Goodman introduced debate on the leadership resolutions – which, it was easily agreed, would be decided by secret ballot. As the discussion began, Diefenbaker arrived in the Château lobby, where his supporters mobbed him noisily. “I saw none of those people,” Diefenbaker recalled, “who had jeered me down so short a time before.” He did not enter the meeting hall, but encouraged his friends with the stoic lines of the Scots ballad: “Fight on, my men./ I am wounded but I am not slain./ I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile/ and then I’ll rise and fight again.”158 Inside the meeting, the dissidents were now in a majority on the floor, and the simple motion of confidence in the leader proposed earlier by Goodman’s resolutions committee was amended to read: “That this party expresses its support of the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, its national leader, and acknowledges its wholehearted appreciation of his universally recognized services to the party; and in view of the current situation in the party, directs the National Executive, after consultation with the national leader, to call a leadership convention at a suitable time before January 1, 1968.” The resolution was adopted by a resounding vote of 563 to 186.159
CHAPTER 14
“An Old Man Dreaming Dreams”
1967-1979
AFTER NOVEMBER 15, DIEFENBAKER WAS DELUGED WITH MESSAGES of sympathy, delivered by telegram, telephone, letter, or by “tear-stained visitors,” almost all of them assuming he would immediately resign as leader of the party. Liberal MPs, who only months before had shown their contempt and hatred for him in the House, let him know of their respect and avoided mention of his embarrassments in debate. Paul Martin told Jim Johnston: “We’ve had plenty of differences, but I just want you to know that I don’t think he should ever have had to take that.”1 Diefenbaker did not resign, but consulted endlessly with his advisers Jim Johnston, Gordon Churchill, Alvin Hamilton, Waldo Monteith, David Walker, and others. Loyalists and dissidents alike, in caucus and national executive, were concerned to hold the party’s remnants together. As centennial year began with no word from Diefenbaker about his plans, MPs reported growing dissatisfaction in the constituencies. Johnston expected mass desertions, and shared the opinion of Churchill and Monteith that Diefenbaker should bow out in favour of an interim leader. The right occasion seemed to be a free-time CBC broadcast on “The Nation’s Business” scheduled for January 18. On the day before, Diefenbaker called Johnston in to say that “the time had come for him to speak. He had been silent, and the party had been floundering.” Davie Fulton was the only candidate for the leadership who had made his intentions clear, and the Chief was not about to let Fulton succeed him. Johnston went home to draft a resignation statement hedged with qualifiers, and returned the next morning to find Diefenbaker and his staff preparing a different speech. “Don’t you see that once I say I am going, I have no more power left to hold this party together? I must stop Fulton.” Diefenbaker gleefully seized Johnston’s statement for his archives, but when Churchill and Monteith arrived he took it from his briefcase and read it to them. They laughed. As Diefenbaker finished, Johnston grabbed the page and tore it to pieces. “Here, that’s mine!” Diefenbaker shouted. “You can’t do that. You’ve destroyed the evidence.”2
Diefenbaker taped the broadcast in ebullient mood. He thanked the “thousands of Canadians” who h
ad recently sent him warm messages, deplored the divisions in the party provoked by Dalton Camp, and called for an immediate leadership convention to be made up entirely of democratically elected constituency delegates. He would not allow the party to become “the plaything or the puppet of a powerful few.” He left his own future typically obscure. “I know that some will interpret what I am saying as being a swan song. Let me say at once – this is no swan song. Those who will interpret it that way do not know me. I have never in the past, and I shall not now, desert the course of a life-time, of at all times upholding principle and standing for those things which in my opinion are good for Canada, for the people of this nation – never forgetting the humblest of our people.”3 What did he mean? What his aides in the studio could see was that “half the staff in the control room was in laughter.” What he had done was to force Dalton Camp to react to the unexpected – if any surprise from the Chief could be called unexpected. Camp announced a meeting of the party’s executive committee for January 28 and suggested that the convention would take place in the autumn.
Diefenbaker had not reopened the fight against a leadership convention, but his allies hoped to command a majority in the executive meeting and so to confine his opponents at every turn. They failed to do so. Camp had persuaded Eddie Goodman to become chairman of the convention and the planning committee, which allowed Camp to step out of Diefenbaker’s focus and to canvass his own prospects as a potential candidate. When the meeting opened, Camp vacated the chair, the meeting transformed itself into the convention committee, and Goodman was confirmed as chairman. Roger Régimbal, a Quebec MP supported by the Diefenbaker lobby, was elected co-chairman. The meeting agreed that delegates should be elected from constituencies on the basis of the new, 1965 redistribution, which would require several months of reorganization and unsettle entrenched local executives. Diefenbaker’s demand that delegates-at-large should be excluded was rejected. But there was no agreement on a convention date. Johnston, in consultation by telephone with Diefenbaker, who was away on a fishing holiday in Florida, gained agreement that the date should be “not later than September,” to be confirmed after Goodman met with Diefenbaker on his return. Two weeks later the committee settled on an early September gathering in Toronto.4