Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  A middle power on good terms with the ideologically compatible great powers was a good way station on the national trail, but it was not the destination. Canada was completely overshadowed by the United States, and Quebec was uneasy about being less than sovereign in a country where it was a minority and, while certainly not mistreated, naturally felt somewhat restricted in what it could aspire to achieve. In the idyll of the relatively secure 1950s, there was a certain false complacency, and as time passed, the gentlemanly competence of Louis St. Laurent was bound to fall somewhat behind the Zeitgeist – that, as many rightly feared, could lead to impetuosity and wrong turnings as it evolved.

  So serene was the re-elected government that St. Laurent biographer Dale Thomson described the prime minister’s decision to go on a tour to Europe and South and East Asia in early 1954 as “sensational.”9 It was thought an ambitious undertaking and an unprecedented showing of the Canadian flag, almost a Canadian equivalent of President Theodore Roosevelt painting the U.S. naval fleet white and sending it round the world forty-seven years before. In keeping with what the Canadian external affairs ministry and all the industrious acolytes of O.D. Skelton, led by Lester B. Pearson, considered to be something of a Canadian mission, St. Laurent thought he would have a go at reconciling the American-led, anti-communist West with Canada’s Commonwealth associate India and its Third World neutralism. Nehru was the undisputed leader of India (Gandhi having been assassinated in 1948) and carved out a role of detached censoriousness toward the West, though he was something of an anglophile because of his schooling and professional formation in England. Churchill, who had despised and imprisoned him, with the jaunty eloquence of upper class British flattery, now called the beaming Nehru “the light of Asia.” Nehru conceived of the United States as an overbearing and unsubtle country (a perception many Canadians could understand, even if they were less aggrieved by it), and he considered communism a legitimate doctrine for generalization of wealth rather than a belligerent and subversive assault on human freedom and respectable intellectual and cultural traditions. Nehru and St. Laurent had got on well when they met at Commonwealth conferences, and Nehru urged St. Laurent to return his visit to Canada of 1949.

  In Commonwealth matters, St. Laurent had been a champion of the role of world-bridge, as opposed to the last watch of the old British notion of united action under British leadership, and on this basis he was happy to go to India and to add stops on the way and beyond. It seemed to the hopeful Canadians that a ripe subject for interpretation to the uncomprehending, such as Nehru, was the new American administration, some of whose members, especially John Foster Dulles, now secretary of state, appeared very avid Cold Warriors. The Republicans had accused Roosevelt and Truman of being soft on the “commies” and this worried many less accustomed than Canadians are to the excesses of American political oratory. There was a degree of self-delusion in this, as Eisenhower was a much more cunning operator than was generally appreciated. With his “more bang for the buck” emphasis on nuclear weapons, and the Republican Party’s bunk about the “liberation” and “roll-back” in Europe, Eisenhower quickly ended the Korean War, sent Nixon, who had already shown considerable aptitude for foreign policy, to tell Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea, not to reactivate recent conflicts with the communists, and to urge Japan’s Emperor Hirohito to rearm, just a decade after Nixon had earned battle stars at Guadalcanal and Bougainville. And Eisenhower unveiled an imaginative plan for the internationalization and demilitarization of atomic science. He was the smiling, golfing, avuncular president of whom the nation said “I like Ike,” and he was also the five-star general who had won every battle and been victorious in every theatre, successfully conducted the greatest military operation in world history, and received the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in the West. And he had coordinated policy with military coalition partners perhaps more satisfactorily than anyone ever, liberated the western Nazi death camps and had them photographed to ensure that the world was not taken in by Holocaust deniers, governed West Germany well, set up NATO very effectively, and had a good start as president. The fancied Canadian role of middleman between Eisenhower and Nehru was chimerical, but neither discreditably motivated nor a bad ambition in itself.

  Louis St. Laurent departed Ottawa on his world tour on February 4, 1954, and began in London with a pleasant luncheon with Winston Churchill, who gave him a travel advisory for the elderly statesman: as it was bound to be exhausting, don’t walk when it was possible to ride, don’t stand when it was possible to sit, don’t sit when it was possible to lie down, and never miss an opportunity to visit a washroom, as you never know when the next opportunity will occur.10 St. Laurent went on to Paris and Bonn, where he had excellent discussions with Chancellor Adenauer and celebrated the complete reconstruction of German-Canadian relations. Adenauer, who was born in 1875 (a few months after Churchill, but eight years before his Canadian visitor and fifteen years before Eisenhower) and was known in Germany as Der Alte (the Old Man), had performed probably the greatest single act of statesmanship in the postwar world in rejecting Stalin’s offer of German reunification in exchange for German neutrality between the Soviet and American blocs, and carrying West German opinion with him. He said that Germany had lacked allies since Bismarck’s time, that it had them now, and would keep them and gain reunification with them. It was an epochal decision, and Canada, though still in the second rank, was at the front of the second rank of Western nations and was part of the great geopolitical equation in her own right. St. Laurent went on to Rome, where an indisposition prevented a reception by Pope Pius XII, but he was received in the pope’s name by a future successor, pro-secretary of state, Giovanni Battista Cardinal Montini, later Pope Paul VI.

  St. Laurent continued on to Karachi, Pakistan, and was welcomed by Prime Minister Muhammad Ali Bogra, a former high commissioner in Ottawa. He visited universities and went up the Khyber Pass; it was a fine goodwill visit, and he diplomatically dodged all questions about the Kashmir dispute with India and the armament of Pakistan by the United States, which was clearly designed to deter the Soviet Union but which Nehru was interpreting as a hostile act toward his country. Throughout this part of the visit, he trotted out an ingratiating refrain about how much the West owed the East and how Canada’s $25 million annual contribution to the Colombo Plan was a mere down payment on retiring that indebtedness. India was the real target of the journey, and St. Laurent was very cordially received by Nehru and addressed a joint session of the Indian Parliament on February 23, a distinct honour for Canada and its leader. He pulled no punches in his defence of the United States and strongly debunked his host’s theory that NATO was a manifestation of American “neo-imperialism”; it was, St. Laurent said in his address, an entirely defensive alliance completely compatible with the United Nations Charter, as well as the nucleus of greater Western unity in the higher interests of the whole world. He said, “As we see it, the readiness of the United States to assume the responsibilities of a major power has been of very great benefit to the free world. We who live alongside that great and dynamic nation know from our own long experience that the United States is the most unselfish country ever to play this role and that it has no other ambition than to live and let others live in mutually helpful intercourse.… Does anyone really believe that the United States could bring about aggressive or provocative collective action by the countries associated with it?”11 It was an important statement much reported in the world, and gratefully so in the United States. At a state dinner tendered to St. Laurent, Nehru praised him as one who had made the “deep impress … of a man of high integrity, of high purpose, and of high endeavour.” That this was true was attested to by the fact that Nehru – who was well-travelled in the sanctimony of India’s long pursuit of independence and disliked contradiction more even than most heads of government – spoke as he did of his guest despite St. Laurent’s unequivocal contradiction of several of his cherished foreign
policy attitudes. Prodded by aggressive press questions, St. Laurent dismissed the suggestion, often made by Nehru, that U.S. arms sales to Pakistan were a provocation of India, and finally closed the discussion by saying, “You are free to criticize the United States government. I am not going to do so.”12 He was much closer to Nehru on the subject of relations with China and said that eventually recognition would have to be extended to whomever actually governed that country. This led to a good deal of intercontinental toing and froing as the American and other governments wondered if St. Laurent was contemplating recognition. He made it clear that he was not proposing recognition of Mao’s regime at once. For the first few days, while the pleasantries were amply observed in public, the two prime ministers did not have a frank exchange, causing one Canadian diplomat to say that “these two men haven’t got anything to say to each other after all.”13 But after their daughters pushed them, they did have a more free-wheeling discussion after the Canadian party visited the Taj Mahal. There was no dramatic agreement, but at least there was greater mutual comprehension. The fact was that Nehru was a Harrow and Cambridge snob at the head not only of “the ancient and exotic culture and allure of the Subcontinent” but also of what Gandhi called “the 100,000 dung-heaps of India.” Nehru attempted to lay claim to a moral superiority that transcended the poverty and dysfunctionalism of his country. And the West, especially the British and their closest affiliates, so badly wanted an independent India to succeed that they overlooked a good deal of hypocrisy and humbug from Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, when she became the leader of India. (Between them, they led the Indian government for thirty-two of its first thirty-seven years, from 1947 to 1964, 1966 to 1977, and 1980 to 1984.) They were the authors of economic stagnation that made the condition of India’s hundreds of millions of terribly poor even more desperate, and a delusional foreign policy based on the friendship of China until it humbled and defeated India and on Soviet benignity and the moral and practical equivalence of the Soviet Union and the West until the U.S.S.R. disintegrated.

  St. Laurent went on to Ceylon, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, where St. Laurent visited the troops. He had done the same in West Germany, but South Korea was still a war zone, the first St. Laurent had seen. There was a temperature variance of 80 degrees Fahrenheit between Indonesia and Korea, which may have contributed to the seventy-two-year-old leader’s dysentery, which descended upon him later in Japan. Conscientious in all things, he concealed his condition, compounded by a sleepless night, and had a ceremonious carriage ride to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and a conversation with Emperor Hirohito, followed by a meeting with Japan’s distinguished (Roman Catholic) premier, Shigeru Yoshida, a protégé of MacArthur, and another of the world’s eminent senior statesmen (he was seventy-six). St. Laurent visited with the crews of three Canadian destroyers in Tokyo Bay, spoke to the Japan-Canada Society, and returned to Ottawa via Honolulu and San Francisco, arriving on the evening of March 9 and bestowing on Jeanne, his wife of forty-six years, not just a prolonged kiss but a floral lei he had brought with him from Hawaii. He was welcomed back with great enthusiasm, and George Drew was among those who came to the airport to greet him. The next day, the Speaker of the House, Louis-René Beaudoin, said that the heavy applause of the legislators indicated “the genuine sentiments of admiration and affection felt in all parts of the House for the prime minister.”14 Drew again was among the leading greeters, and his most severe allegation against his official adversary now was that the government was promoting “socialism with a silk hat,” a charge the accused good-naturedly accepted. It was in some ways the height of his time as leader of the country. He had made a good impression everywhere and carried the senior official presence of Canada to places it had never been before. The domestic media followed him and reported on the dignity of his person and purpose and the high regard in which he was evidently held wherever he went. But he was exhausted, and slightly gutted by tropical ailments, and never regained the stamina he had shown in making this ambitious tour.

  The prime minister returned to find that Maurice Duplessis had finally gone to war fiscally. Ottawa had conducted what Duplessis called “the war of the separate ententes” by negotiating new tax-rental arrangements with the other nine provinces. Quebec was now isolated, and ten years after Duplessis’s return to office in 1944, no positive advances had been made in any of the fiscal policy directions he had been urging ever since then. There had been no federal allowance for the concurrent provincial right to levy direct taxes; the federal government levied the tax as heavily as anyone thought the traffic should bear, leaving only a deduction of 5 per cent of the federal tax for the province – that is, a tax of about 2 per cent. There had been absolutely no progress in ten years of discussions about defining taxing powers, simplifying collection methods, or reducing taxes in general. Duplessis determined to force the issue – by double taxation. Quebec would legislate a provincial income tax, and if the federal government did not credit it against federal income tax, Quebec’s voters could determine which government was responsible for their escalated tax rate. Duplessis, who knew the people a good deal better than any Quebec Liberal, federal or provincial, was confident that the present 95–5 division of taxes could be shown to be unjust and that the federal government had availed itself of temporary national emergencies to perpetuate a state of fiscal hegemony by a scheme of bribes, alarms, and what Duplessis called “temporarily permanent arrangements.”

  Through the summer, a verbal war stoked up between the sides in what promised to be the greatest heavyweight constitutional bout the country had seen, at least since the fracases about separate schools. Duplessis accused the federal government of trying to reduce Quebec to a “trusteeship … an auxiliary government,” appropriate for “drunks, imbeciles, and people incapable of looking after themselves.” But Quebec, he said, was “dependent on no one.” St. Laurent replied, in an impromptu address on the Cunard liner Saxonia in Montreal harbour in September, that only “behind the Iron Curtain and in Quebec” was there a lack of “enthusiasm” at the “growth and development of Canada,” because it “means the increasing influence of the federal government.” Two weeks later, in opening the new Liberal headquarters in Quebec (the Reform Club; the Union Nationale’s was the Renaissance Club), he astounded his listeners by holding forth for two hours. St. Laurent avowed his faith that Providence sent Montcalm and Wolfe “to create a situation where the descendants of the two great races would find themselves together on this northern part of the American continent.” This was fine, but less easily digestible was his assertion that “Quebec is a province like the others.” He pointedly distinguished between “true provincial autonomy and autonomy as a blind to prevent discussion of provincial affairs.”15 And he ridiculed any suggestion that French-language or Roman Catholic schools could be endangered if they were maintained by federal rather than provincial funding. This was an assertion that was historically vulnerable, and it was political dynamite. Duplessis knew this political combat zone intimately. St. Laurent complained about Quebec not participating in the Trans-Canada Highway, and urged it upon the Quebec government, even though, he sarcastically allowed, the bids to pave the road would have to go to tender, and not just be determined in a cooked deal between the contractor and the Union Nationale. While he was at it, he accused Duplessis, in effect, of being a know-nothing and a supporter of ignorance for his abstention from the federal plan of assistance to universities. This was all a bit thick, as Duplessis had completed a highway in complete conformity with federal standards, at the province’s expense, between the Trans-Canada terminal points on Quebec’s borders with Ontario and New Brunswick, and the universities had been paid by the provincial government while the federal grants accumulated, which were, when St. Laurent’s successor came to office, dispersed with only the slightest modification of the federal grant terms to the province’s universities, which thus benefited from double payment, as Duplessis had promised. St. Lau
rent’s attack on Duplessis’s patronage system was also cheeky, given that the taxpayers didn’t suffer any loss from it and the Liberals were hardly immune to the charge of doling out official business to their friends.