by Conrad Black
A more edifying, and even amusing, beau geste occurred over the tiny French islands off Newfoundland of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, population five thousand, which had been left with France at the end of the Seven Years War to enable France to service her fishing fleet and continue to train mariners (see Chapter 2). Vichy controlled the islands, which had a powerful radio transmitter that broadcasted pro-Axis propaganda. It was also suspected that the main Western Union telegraph cable from North America to Europe was being intercepted from the islands by the Germans. Charles de Gaulle advised British foreign secretary Anthony Eden that he wished to take the islands and put a stop to these problems, and Eden agreed with him but said the Americans and Canadians should be consulted. The Americans did not want Vichy disturbed, for some inexplicable reason (Roosevelt still had his old navy crony Admiral William Leahy, who used to drive him back from his cottage in New Brunswick during the First World War on his destroyer, as an accredited ambassador to Pétain at Vichy), and the Canadians preferred to evict Vichy themselves. De Gaulle took the initiative, and his own modest naval forces seized the islands on December 24, 1941. De Gaulle’s naval commander, Admiral Émile Muselier, assured the American consul on the islands that the Allies now had complete access to them, and on Christmas Day a bona fide referendum gave 98 per cent support to de Gaulle. The U.S., Canadian, and British media, and the Canadian and British governments, were all very supportive, but Secretary of State Cordell Hull was in a febrile state of agitation and spent much time over New Year’s and into 1942 fiercely lobbying Roosevelt, Churchill, and King (who through most of the war clung to Roosevelt like a treed cat and was certainly not going to fail to be in Washington when Churchill was there, as he then was) to evict de Gaulle from Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. When all the leaders, including his own president, ignored Hull, he issued a press statement calling the takeover by the “so-called Free French ships … arbitrary.” It blew over in a few weeks, but even in his memoirs, written after de Gaulle had established himself as the authentic spokesman for France, Hull still wrote of the incident with comically exaggerated anger.47
Churchill, at this coruscation of his ambitions, insisted on visiting Roosevelt at once, and despite Roosevelt’s efforts to defer the trip, Churchill arrived at Hampton Roads on December 22, 1941, on the battleship Duke of York (sister of Prince of Wales), and flew to Washington, where Roosevelt met him at the air terminal. On that day, just as King was worrying whether he would be cold-shouldered as he had been at the Atlantic Conference, enabling his opponents to dismiss his pretensions to being a confidant of both Western leaders as a fraud, Roosevelt called him and invited him to bring his armed forces ministers with him to Washington on December 26. King was so chuffed that he took the extremely rare liberty, though Roosevelt had urged it upon him, of closing out the call “Good bye, Franklin.” (When he was president, no one except Churchill, his predecessor as governor of New York and presidential candidate, Alfred E. Smith, his mother, his wife, and a couple of relatives and old school chums, called FDR by his Christian name.) On December 26, Churchill gave a memorable address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress and received a very warm welcome, even from former isolationist leaders of Congress. The British prime minister had not left his oratorical prowess at home, and frequently drew great applause, especially when he said, of the Japanese, “They have embarked upon a very considerable undertaking; what kind of a people do they think we are?” This was one of Churchill’s gambits: to claim the most intimate ethnic kinship, and not just a common language, with the United States, a novel concept to the country’s tens of millions of citizens of German, Irish, African, and Italian descent. “Do they not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?” He came on to Canada for several days on December 28 before returning to the United States. Hong Kong was taken by the Japanese in overwhelming strength on Christmas Day, and two poorly equipped Canadian battalions, which had been recently sent there, surrendered with the rest of the insufficient garrison. Of the 1,975 Canadian soldiers there, 557 died, either in action or from mistreatment as prisoners of war by the Japanese.
Churchill was naturally extremely well-received in Ottawa, and he gently told King that, as King had raised domestic Canadian political questions with him, Churchill could report that he had heard from several plausible sources that King would be invincibly strong if he allowed about three Conservatives “a look in” in his government; that is, a coalition. (Churchill did not understand the complexity of French-English issues in Canada, and the danger of a coalition government becoming conscriptionist, as in 1917, and putting intolerable strain on the country.) Churchill emphasized that he was just transmitting information, not presuming to advise. In his visit, he was at pains to emphasize King’s valued and respected status with Roosevelt and himself, and King’s participation in the discussion of all major issues. He was also clear that every Allied country would have to decide for itself the nature of its war participation, lest anyone imagine Britain was asking for conscription for overseas service from Canada. He spoke to Parliament on December 30 and called Canada “the premier dominion of the Crown,” and told the Canadian legislators, and the world, of the French general who had predicted to the French premier in 1940, that “in three weeks, England will have her neck wrung like a chicken. Some chicken! Some neck!” His timing was perfect, and the effect was splendid, and the visit to Canada was a complete success. Churchill did his magic with King, as Roosevelt usually did, and King wrote of his guest, “I found his nature wonderfully kind, sympathetic and understanding” – this of the man who, barely two years before, King had considered too “dangerous” for high office.
The American visit, which continued for some weeks, was also a success. Roosevelt eventually left Churchill as the host in the White House, convening American generals, admirals, and officials, and removed to his home at Hyde Park. The two countries were already in disagreement about the likely timing of a full-fledged effort to liberate Western Europe. The British wanted to concentrate on the Mediterranean and leave the Germans largely to the Russians. The Americans were afraid of a separate peace between Hitler and Stalin still, and Roosevelt did not wish to face his electors again in 1944 without having made serious progress toward the expulsion of Hitler from occupied Europe. (Churchill, of course, could defer elections sine die, and there had not been a general election in Britain since 1935.) Roosevelt and his advisers concluded that the issue could not be forced until the United States had the preponderance of forces in the theatre. The United States and United Kingdom had been holding joint staff talks since the end of 1940, and confirmed their agreement of the Atlantic Conference that Germany should receive priority over Japan as the principal enemy. Roosevelt had already ascertained that King agreed with the Americans on the need for the earliest possible direct assault on Hitler’s Europe, although the British would try for a time to represent themselves opposite the Americans as the head of a unitary Commonwealth. Roosevelt, who had known Canada all his life, knew better.
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Robert Manion, defeated in 1940 at the polls personally, and comprehensively as leader of the Conservative Party, and replaced as acting leader by the inadequate Richard Hanson, was now to be succeeded by a surprising, not-so-new face, nor a very welcome one to King, Arthur Meighen. Senator Meighen would retire from the upper house to contest York South, the constituency neighbouring King’s original riding of York North. The by-election would be held on February 9, the same day as by-elections in Quebec East, to replace Lapointe with St. Laurent as member of Parliament, and in Welland, to bring in labour ministry official and former trade union organizer Humphrey Mitchell (1894–1950) as minister of labour. There was also a fourth by-election in a safe Liberal district. It was convenient that Louis St. Laurent lived in the district where he stood.
On December 17, 1941, the Manitoba Legislature passed a resolution urging conscription
for overseas service, a timely issue now that the United States would be sending conscript armies across both oceans. In November 1941, a Gallup poll had shown that 61 per cent of Canadians were satisfied with the federal government’s management of the war, but that 60 per cent wanted conscription for overseas service.48 Yet King somehow had it in mind that a referendum would be a good idea to settle the issue down. This was a mistake, something he rarely committed in political matters, but it was contemporaneous with another vintage lesson in Kingsian political chicanery.
In Quebec East, the candidate against St. Laurent was a Quebec political gadfly who had become almost the mascot of the nationalists: fascist, separatist, anti-participationist Paul Bouchard (1908–1997). When Bouchard ran against prominent Liberal Joseph-Napoléon Francoeur in 1937, Francoeur had promised “no participation in foreign wars.” In the federal election in 1940, when Bouchard ran against Lapointe, the minister of justice said, “Participation but not conscription for overseas service.” Now, St. Laurent was saying, “No conscription without consulting the people.” The trajectory was clear. In York South, in the 1940 election, Conservative Alan Cockeram had won 15,300 votes to 12,800 Liberal and 5,300 for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) candidate, Joseph Noseworthy. Now, the local Liberal organization did not run a candidate, supposedly out of respect for the former prime minister, Arthur Meighen, but in fact, and informally, in the hope of making Noseworthy a fusion stop-Meighen candidate. Even Quebec East had to be watched closely; Bouchard had only lost by 5,000 out of about 31,000 votes cast, running against Lapointe in 1940, although Lapointe had held the district since the death of Sir Wilfrid in 1919 and had often won 80 per cent or more of the vote, and had carpeted the district for decades with tangible reminders of his official influence. As these elections were stoking up, King, weaving with agility and urgency, was still the spider at the centre of the national web he had been spinning for decades. He prorogued the longest parliamentary session in Canadian history, fourteen months, on January 21, 1942, and opened the next session the following day with the promise of a plebiscite on relief of the government from its 1939 pledge against conscription, which would be held on April 27. King thought the vote would be 65 per cent negative in Quebec but about 70 per cent positive in the country. The English-Canadian conscriptionists were opposed to a referendum, believing that as the national interest required conscription it should simply be imposed, as in 1917, but without an election as there had been in 1917. But this time, it was not so much from conformity with Great Britain alone in a European war, but to get in step with our two senior allies in a wider war. They were both conscripting for world-wide service in a war which had less heavy casualties than in the Great War, and where the issue was clearer. Hitler was much more odious than Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the rout of the great French army brought North America much closer to the front lines. The anti-conscriptionists – mainly, but not exclusively, French Canadian (there were many English-Canadian employers who were none too keen to lose their workforces to the military) – disputed that a pledge given essentially to Quebec in 1939 and repeated the following year when there was still only a “phony war” could now be reopened in a consultation of the whole country.
There was great stress on the Liberal Party, and it took the cabinet ten hours to agree on this formula of arming King with the same power Churchill and Roosevelt wielded without committing to use it, but King put it through. Arthur Cardin, the senior Quebec minister in the vortex between Lapointe and St. Laurent, was wary. In Quebec itself, both Church and state were taking a holiday on this proposition; Cardinal Villeneuve and Premier Godbout wouldn’t touch it. Godbout repeated his confidence in King, but was prone to be more deferential than was politically healthy in Quebec, restating his hostility to conscription but declaring that “if tomorrow Mr. King told me to go to Europe to shine the boots of the soldiers, I would go happily.”49 Quebec, especially in wartime, expects a less self-effacing view of federalism than that. In late April, Godbout gave a platitudinous semi-endorsement of a “yes” vote, at the very urgent request of the prime minister. The Roman Catholic episcopate maintained an absolute silence, calling it a secular matter and repeating its support of the war effort generally. In Quebec, it was hard not to see it as a double-cross, though King engaged in his usual flim-flam. In English Canada, the government was doing the honourable thing before departing from its previous pledges, and in Quebec it was merely asking for the standby authority Canada’s allies already possessed, and the whole device was eventually covered in the Kingsian classic “Conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription” (a straight lift from the Toronto Star of April 28, 1942, but it was effectively King’s line throughout). His expectation was that St. Laurent and Mitchell would win, though it could be close, the fourth by-election, in a safe Liberal district without a prominent candidate would be all right, but that Meighen would probably win. King did not admit even to his diary how far the local Liberal organization had pitched in to help the CCF’s Noseworthy, as he presumably wanted plausible deniability even to himself, but there is no question that, although it was not overt, the Liberals favoured the CCF, in funding and organization. The Globe and Mail and the Committee for Total War – headed and funded by prominent businessmen J.Y. Murdoch of Noranda Mines, C.L. Burton of Simpson’s department stores, and James S. Duncan of Massey-Harris, whom King had considered for a cabinet position – all supported Meighen. So did Ontario premier Mitchell Hepburn, whose hatred for King had not declined and was fully requited.
The first round of the test went well for the government. In Quebec East, St. Laurent defeated Bouchard 16,700 to 12,700, only about a thousand fewer votes than Lapointe’s majority of two years before, running for his seventh term (and following ten consecutive terms in the same district for Laurier). Mitchell was safe enough in Welland; the fourth contest was an easy Liberal win; and in York South, the long uneven battle between King and Meighen ended with the unprepossessing socialist Noseworthy, who had garnered only 5,000 votes two years before, defeating the former prime minister, Arthur Meighen, 16,400 to 11,900. The tortoise had disposed of the hare at last. Meighen, without a seat in either house of Parliament, had been defeated too often and was politically finished, though he lived on for nearly twenty years and made a substantial fortune.
J.S. Woodsworth had died on March 21, 1942, aged sixty-seven. King’s irritating opponents seemed to be dropping like flies, as the Conservatives prepared to bring on the seventh leader he had faced (counting Meighen twice). The referendum campaign intensified. On February 11, an organization calling itself La Ligue pour la Défense du Canada gathered twenty thousand people at the Marché Saint-Jacques in Montreal, where there was a sequence of fiery speakers, including future mayor Jean Drapeau for the youth, future publisher of Le Devoir Gérard Filion for the farmers, and the pièce de résistance was the seventy-four-year-old Henri Bourassa. Though Bourassa spoke moderately as he predicted the imposition of conscription, a window-smashing riot erupted along Boulevard Saint-Laurent, the traditional point of division between English and French Montreal. There was a good deal of anglophobic and anti-Semitic sloganeering. All the newspapers except Le Devoir denounced the rioters and their affiliations, and Godbout spoke darkly about incitements to treason. Bourassa was becoming rather bizarre by this time; in October 1941, he had given a much-publicized address not only praising Pétain, Franco (of Spain), and Salazar (of Portugal), but also Mussolini, on whose crumbling regime Canada and its allies were, with conspicuous success, making war. The young Pierre Trudeau, twenty-three in 1942, strayed into the same areas, illustrating how unworldly Quebec nationalist circles were. Mussolini was now well and regularly described by Churchill as “a whipped jackal.”
On April 27, 71.3 per cent of eligible Canadians cast ballots, 2,946,000 voting “yes” and 1,543,000 voting “no” – 65.6 per cent to 34.4 per cent. Quebec voted about 72 per cent “no” to 28 per cent “yes,” which meant that French Canad
ians were 90 per cent opposed to releasing the government from its pledge and English Canadians were 80 per cent in favour. For once, King had been too cunning for his own good. The question wasn’t a straight referendum on conscription, but everyone knew that was what it was, despite King’s obfuscations. King was shaken by the results, but he ploughed ahead, claiming to have secured the mandate he sought, but giving no hint if he would actually impose conscription. Conscriptionists were infuriated by his evasiveness, and anti-conscriptionists were not impressed by his waffling but were reduced to supporting him as the closest they had to an anti-conscriptionist who could influence events. He had a clearer anti-conscription record than St. Laurent. With his now very divided cabinet, King said he thought conscription would be necessary, but that it wasn’t yet. He was, in fact, correct. It was not necessary. There were some Canadians in Egypt, and the navy and air force were very active, but there was no shortage of manpower for any envisioned combat needs at this point. This fact enabled King to move to the next chapter of his playbook and simply ignore the issue.
Bill 80, revoking Clause 3 of the National Resources Mobilization Act and permitting conscription, was presented in Parliament and endlessly debated. J.L. Ralston offered his resignation as minister of national defence, but King declined it. Arthur Cardin resigned on May 9, but not from the Liberal Party. This somewhat slaked the thirst of the conscriptionists, as it implied they were winning. There were very difficult cabinet meetings through June where King’s conscriptionist colleagues tried to elicit a definite statement, but he declined to be drawn beyond the usual bunk about “conscription if necessary” and “Parliament will decide.” It was tedious and ungalvanizing and far from courageous, but King was right, and he was all that was standing in the way of a terrible national schism. If the Liberals had followed the Borden-Meighen Conservatives into a uni-cultural, Anglo-conscriptionist cul de sac, federalism would have become durably and possibly terminally unworkable. There was no need for conscription; the consequences of imposing it would have been drastic, and there was no rational reason to do it. King vividly saw the danger that if Ralston and navy minister Angus L. Macdonald succeeded in splitting the government, another unholy alliance between the Quebec Liberals and nationalists and the CCF would hold the balance of power and break up the country.