by Conrad Black
The Massey Commission, chaired by Vincent Massey and the politically hyperactive Dominican priest Georges-Henri Lévesque, dean of social sciences at Laval University and adversary of the Duplessis government, presented its report in early 1951. It proposed the complete domination of broadcasting and television by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, heavily supplemented in funding, with independent licences only for scattered low wattage radio broadcasting as alternatives to the CBC. It also proposed direct federal government assistance for universities; the creation of a generously endowed Canada Council for promotion of the arts; a national library; and a new National Gallery building, several specific museums, and more generous funding and greater definition for the National Archives and the National Film Board. The concept of aid to arts and sciences generally was a good one, but Massey and Lévesque’s faith in the CBC was exaggerated, and trying to leave network broadcasting and telecasting exclusively to the public sector was a bad idea. Lévesque as co-chair had been the choice of Massey and St. Laurent jointly, and Duplessis rightly saw it as a declaration of war on him, given the many public differences he had with Lévesque. (Duplessis once told eminent British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge that the key to governing Quebec was to keep “the Dominicans and Jesuits quarrelling with each other.”* He promoted the University of Montreal’s School of Industrial Relations, headed by Jesuit Émile Bouvier, as a rival to Lévesque’s Laval faculty.)
The Liberal policy biases led to unnecessary frictions. Canadian culture had struggled to define itself in the shadow of the United States, and there were a number of symphony orchestras, ballet companies, the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, and some competent writers and painters, but few of them received any recognition outside Canada. Massey claimed to be “laying the spiritual foundations of Canada,” a typically grandiloquent personal mission statement. Most of the recommendations were useful, but Massey and Lévesque would have done better calling for an opera house and a national arts centre (both of which required decades for the country to build) than plunging into a partisan jurisdictional war with Duplessis which they could not (and did not) win.
St. Laurent was again pressing the St. Lawrence Seaway in Washington in late September 1951, but the government there was rather immobilized following the Truman-MacArthur dispute, and was in the midst of the anti-communist campaigns of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and others and congressional witch hunts in what President Truman called the “red herring” of unearthing domestic communists.
St. Laurent returned from the United States to welcome Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip on their first trip to Canada, where they made a very good impression, and for the opening of Parliament. The establishment of a St. Lawrence Seaway Commission was announced, as well as a committee to investigate the advisability of the South Saskatchewan hydro project, and the beginning of implementation of Vincent Massey’s ambitious program for promotion of the arts. The year ended amid a vigorous debate over legislating against retail price fixing, which Drew had tried to provoke the government into trying to end by enforcing closure, but St. Laurent, having taken the debate, thought better of such a controversial measure, and the bill was adopted in January 1952.
The National Conference of Canadian Universities had recommended federal aid to universities, as had the Massey Commission, but this was bound to be a delicate issue, especially with Duplessis, as it was indisputably a provincial jurisdiction. In a development that replicated his acquiescence in a federal pension scheme, Duplessis agreed, but for one year only. Duplessis had attacked the measure when it was proposed in November as “a dangerous usurpation,” and he said that the “problems of the universities cannot be solved by intrusions, even gilded ones.” But in the New Year, he agreed to allow the grants, which were fifty cents per capita for the whole population, or seven million dollars, about 30 per cent of that for Quebec. Duplessis had proposed that 5 per cent of the personal income tax be conceded to the provinces instead, as it was a concurrent jurisdiction where there was no concurrence in practice, but St. Laurent produced a piously ceremonious response worthy of King that such payments to the provinces were illegal, as if all the governments involved could not change the law if they wished. Duplessis, looking forward to another election in the spring of 1952, let it pass. The federal Liberal, Ontario Conservative, and Quebec Union Nationale governments were all solidly and immovably in place. So was Ernest Manning’s Social Credit government in Alberta, which was about to win a fifth term, the first two having been won by William Aberhart; and Tommy Douglas’s CCF government in Saskatchewan, which was about to win a third consecutive term. And so would be W.A.C. Bennett’s Social Credit in British Columbia, about to start a twenty-year incumbency, and Joey Smallwood’s Liberals in Newfoundland, three years into a twenty-three-year tenure. The federal official Opposition was not really effective, but Duplessis, and Drew’s successor as the Conservative premier in Toronto, Leslie Frost, were very strong and were the real opposition to the federal government.
The seventy-seven-year-old Winston Churchill had led his Conservative Party to victory in Great Britain in October 1951 – his first successful election as party leader in fifty-two years in Parliament and after eleven years as Conservative leader. After a few months as Defence minister in addition to prime minister, he requested the return to Great Britain to take over Defence of his favourite field marshal, Viscount Alexander, who had had a very successful term as governor general of Canada. As an indication of the high regard in which he held Alexander, St. Laurent convened the entire Privy Council of Canada in a farewell ceremony. The last British governor general had perhaps been the very most successful since Elgin, or even Carleton, who had departed 156 years before. St. Laurent nominated Vincent Massey to replace Alexander, and be the first Canadian holder of the office, a choice that was received positively throughout Canada, even by Le Devoir.*
As Alexander departed, King George VI, a popular and dutiful monarch who had not sought the throne but had it thrust upon him, died, at fifty-six. He was widely mourned, but his daughter took the throne as an instantly popular queen, a youthful twenty-five-year-old to lead the British monarchy as Queen Elizabeth II into a new, and in some respects diminished, era.
Duplessis returned to his electors on July 16, after a typically strenuous campaign in which his opponents were led by the former federal MP for Joliette, Georges-Émile Lapalme. Duplessis referred indiscriminately, and in a deliberately and humorously confusing way, to both Godbout and George Marler, the acting leader, as well as Lapalme, as the leader of the Opposition, disparaged Lapalme as a nonentity parachuted in from the Liberal backbenches of Ottawa and a follower of the excitable and communist-backed Iranian politician, Premier Mohammad Mossadegh (based on a couple of Lapalme’s unguarded comments). Duplessis had fainted in his bathroom while injecting himself with insulin for his diabetes, incurring a fractured hip, and campaigned with a cast on his torso, but he maintained a very heavy schedule. Lapalme accused Duplessis of running a Gestapo and of selling out Quebec’s natural resources to Americans at risible prices, including the immense iron ore projects of northern Quebec, on which St. Laurent had publicly congratulated him. On election eve, Duplessis spoke to fifty thousand of his constituents and neighbours in Trois-Rivières, only a block away from his opponent, the mayor of the city, J.-A. Mongrain. The mayor had a sound amplification system, and the wind was blowing toward Duplessis as Mongrain made the sort of wild allegations that no sane person would make in a debate. Duplessis quieted his audience, and while Mongrain’s followers were applauding, Duplessis replied in hilarious terms to his opponent’s excesses, which the mayor had uttered under the mistaken impression that he was entirely among friends. These Quebec elections were always a bit boisterous but were also good entertainment. Duplessis ran on prosperity, low taxes, massive education and public-works spending, and his autonomist but anti-separatist promotion of Quebec’s interest. Duplessis won, sixty-nine constituencies to twenty-three, and 51 pe
r cent of the vote to 46 per cent Liberal, but with about a three-to-two lead among the French-speaking population. It was a respectable performance by Lapalme, certainly, but a solid win to bring Duplessis even with Sir Lomer Gouin and Louis-Alexandre Taschereau as the only four-term premiers in Quebec history.
All Canada was growing and prospering, and as the concerns about another world war settled down and postwar prosperity took hold, electorates were pretty content. One of the Liberals’ election slogans in 1953 would be “For the Best Years of Your Life, Vote Liberal” – Duplessis’s, in the campaign just ended, was “Let Duplessis Continue” – and there was much less of the red-baiting and fascistic allegations back and forth. The federal government endured some embarrassment over misappropriation and extravagance at the army camp at Petawawa, Ontario, and St. Laurent referred it all to independent investigation, amid claims of officers’ horses being on the payroll and so forth. Montreal accountant George Currie, appointed to look into it, found a good deal to criticize but no sign of misconduct by anyone near any elected officials. St. Laurent received great credit from all sides when he personally mediated a settlement between railway management and employees in January 1953. He announced the arrangements to the House of Commons and typically did not refer to his own role, but both sides, at a news conference, spoke in the most respectful terms of his chairmanship of the discussions. St. Laurent was very effective, even if he was unexciting. And he had none of the foibles or absurdities of his predecessor, though neither was he remotely as motivated and tenacious and crafty a politician. Both were men for their times.
So was Maurice Duplessis. When he declined to accept the federal grants for universities, the Liberals instantly smelled political rewards and cited this as evidence of Duplessis’s neo-separatist constitutional Neanderthalism. Duplessis explained that he was taking the step because none of his previously stated objections had been met. He matched the federal grants and won the political argument with his own voters. He believed that the provinces had been exploited by the federal government in that the reward for their thriftiness in forgoing several concurrent direct tax fields had been to have the federal government invade the same fields and then redistribute crumbs while glorifying itself in its fiscal generosity. To his own voters, he said the federal government was like “a pickpocket who steals your watch, gives you back the chain, and calls it a gift.” Duplessis’s reasoning was in fact supported by most constitutional experts, including even future Quebec federal Liberal leader Pierre Trudeau. To his opponents, the university grants controversy was yet another proof of Duplessis’s mulish, misanthropic, and opportunistic anti-Canadianism. To him and his followers, the disagreement was rather an illustration of the jurisdictional greed, insensitivity, bad faith, and political and constitutional meddlesomeness of the federal Liberals. Neither was altogether mistaken nor altogether accurate, but a test was coming before the voters of Quebec.
The voters of Canada would be consulted first. Douglas Abbott’s pre-electoral budget reduced personal income taxes by $237 million and cut federal expenditures by $361 million, and Howe announced a twenty-cent per bushel increase in the price of wheat and improved sales prospects internationally.
St. Laurent went to Washington on May 7, 1953, for his first meeting with General Eisenhower as president. The new administration, the first Republican one in twenty years, after five terms of Roosevelt and Truman, had some protectionist leanings, but Eisenhower was on the record as favouring the St. Lawrence Seaway project. The two men had known each other very cordially for some years and were somewhat similar, as being slightly elderly for their positions, not career politicians, and very respected men of unquestioned integrity and high achievements prior to entering public life, world-historic achievements in Eisenhower’s case. Their conversations were upbeat and informal, and Eisenhower indicated that he would not be displeasing to Canada but needed time to work things out in his new position.
St. Laurent returned briefly before departing to the coronation of the new queen, very aptly on the great liner Queen Elizabeth, the world’s largest ship at 83,000 tons. St. Laurent and his wife arrived in London on May 26 and spent two weeks in the capital, and were very respectfully received by the royal family, Prime Minister Churchill, and other dignitaries. The Commonwealth prime ministers were prominently seated at the coronation in Westminster Abbey on June 2, beside the monarch. At a meeting in the Dorchester Hotel, St. Laurent, Smallwood, and senior civil servant Jack Pickersgill agreed that Pickersgill would seek election from Newfoundland and enter the cabinet at once. There was a brief Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference and St. Laurent reported on the new U.S. administration, though Churchill and Eisenhower had been close friends and collaborators in world-shaking events for ten years. Then he returned by airplane to Canada, leaving his family to travel by ship (Mme St. Laurent said she would not fly “until I have wings of my own”), and after a cabinet meeting on June 12 dissolved Parliament for elections on August 10. The Liberal slogan would be “Don’t Stop Canada’s Progress – Vote St. Laurent.”
St. Laurent ran on the fact and promise of “good government.” Drew had an energetic program of tax reductions, new fiscal arrangements with the provinces, a national health insurance plan, and an outright ban on communist activity and organizations. It ran the gamut from the moist fringes of the CCF almost to the pallid Canadian equivalent of the McCarthyite right. St. Laurent won general admiration for refusing to pander, declining to do more than continue to study the South Saskatchewan hydro project, and deferring an exchange of embassies with the Vatican and the adoption of a distinct Canadian flag. On election day, St. Laurent won the Liberals’ fifth consecutive term, and seventh of the last eight full terms, electing 169 MPs on 48.4 per cent of the vote, down from 191 MPs on 49.1 per cent of the vote in 1949. The Progressive Conservatives came in with 51 seats and 31 per cent of the vote, up from 41 MPs and 29.7 per cent; and for the CCF and Social Credit respectively, 23 MPs and 15 per cent (in 1949, 13 seats and 10 per cent), and 11 MPs and 5.4 per cent (in 1949, 13 seats and 4.1 per cent). It was good government and they were good times.
3. The St. Laurent–Duplessis Duel, 1953–1956
St. Laurent reinforced and somewhat rejuvenated his government in the months following his re-election. In addition to Jack Pickersgill’s arrival in the cabinet, Jean Lesage of Quebec City became the minister of natural resources, and Robert Winters, another able young minister, moved to public works. A few months later, three of St. Laurent’s most capable ministers told the prime minister of their desire to withdraw: finance minister Douglas Abbott wished to go to the Supreme Court and did so, replacing Chief Justice Thibaudeau Rinfret (though not as chief justice); defence minister Brooke Claxton wished a simpler and quieter life; and transport minister Lionel Chevrier wished to head up the St. Lawrence Seaway Commission, then being established, and St. Laurent agreed. They were all a serious and premature loss to the government. St. Laurent and Howe were older men. The prime minister did not try to prevail upon them to remain, as King would have done, but replaced them with Walter Harris at finance, Ralph Campney at defence, and George Marler, formerly acting leader of the Opposition in Quebec, at transport. Roch Pinard became secretary of state. They were all capable. Even after nearly twenty years of government, the federal Liberals still had profound ministerial reserves.
President Eisenhower paid St. Laurent and Massey a state visit in November 1953 and declared construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway to be “inevitable and certain,” and referred approvingly to the joint ministerial committee that had been set up to deal with trade and economic issues and to prevent those issues from becoming too contentious. St. Laurent stoked up what was emerging as almost the ideology of being a middle power, and praised American influence in the world, declaring the two countries to be the proof that “a great power and a lesser one can work in harmony without the smaller being submerged.” To someone born in 1882 (just two days after Franklin D. Roosevelt) n
ear the U.S.-Canada border, welcoming the American president in alliance and cordiality was an act that still contained a measure of relief and gratitude that the United States was no longer a physical threat to Canada. It was still a tense international atmosphere, though less so since the death of Stalin in March 1953 and his replacement by an uneasy grouping of his politburo survivors, who agreed quickly on the removal of Stalin’s long-time assistant, Alexander Poskrebyshev, and on the execution of his police minister, Lavrenti Beria, but not on much else after that, until a succession of purges (though bloodless ones) concentrated power in the hands of the succeeding Communist Party chairman, Nikita S. Khrushchev (only the third holder of that office, after Lenin and Stalin). The red scare was receding in the United States, and congressional forces led by future presidents Richard Nixon, the vice president, and Democratic Senate leader Lyndon Johnson organized the censure of witch-hunting and red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy.
In this atmosphere, there was general solidarity in Canada behind American leadership, which was clearly indispensable. Eisenhower arranged the ceasefire in Korea on July 27, 1953, and it has generally held since. The hysteria about a communist sweep in Europe had declined as Marshall Plan aid and the reconstruction activities of the Western European countries began to bootstrap those peoples back into prosperity and to exceed pre-war living standards, and as conditions stabilized around most of the perimeter of China. The pro-British faction was clearly winning the battle with the communists in Malaya, Japan was flourishing, and the only raw trouble spot was Indochina, where the French – unlike the British in Malaya, which had been promised its independence – were fighting a colonial war. The rule of thumb gradually emerged that where the nationalists and communists were on the same side, they could not be resisted, but where the nationalists were anti-communist, they could, with help, prevail. It was a Western World led by wise, distinguished, elderly men: Eisenhower, Churchill, West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, St. Laurent. There were profusions of bomb shelters in every American city and a good deal of attention to communist infiltration and Third World War scenarios in films and on television, but it was peace and prosperity in a traditional environment. Father Knows Best was a popular television program, misbehaving children were confidently but benignly spanked at home and school, and most people in North America went to church every week. It was self-assured and righteous order, and there was steady progress. The generation that had been frightened in the Great Depression and led to victory by great commanders in a just war now worked hard and optimistically and raised their families in a confident, Godly, patriotic capitalism, and the public mood was more upbeat than at any time since the 1920s and more sanely optimistic than at any time since before the lights went out in 1914 with the First World War. In these circumstances, Canadians were pleased to accept American leadership, enjoy the British connection, and celebrate the bountiful growth, domestic peace, and polite international recognition Canada had earned and was enjoying.