Prompted by the progressive activists who were his main advisers, Pearson let loose a torrent of new forces and pressures. By setting in train a series of fundamental social changes but failing to explain them or to channel them into some rational sequence of priorities, Pearson missed the political advantages that might have accrued to him and eventually lost control of the society he was trying to govern. Actually, Pearson was my favourite politician, not because of his diplomatic skills, his honesty or his many accomplishments, but because his cabinet leaked like the Titanic. I had broken so many of his government’s secrets in my Ottawa columns that he began one 1966 cabinet meeting by forbidding any of his ministers ever to speak to me again. One of them, possessed by more wit and nerve than the others, responded with a straight face that since I was probably hiding under the cabinet table, it might improve my temper if I was given a chair. Even Pearson burst out laughing when two ministers surreptitiously looked under the table to see if I was really there.
PEARSON’S MAIN POLICY PREOCCUPATION was his attempt to sponsor some kind of accommodation between Quebec and the rest of the country, a task to which he brought more sympathy and comprehension than any previous politician on the federal scene. Only the unfolding of history can pronounce the final verdict on Pearson’s efforts to meet the potentially explosive aspirations of French Canada, but certainly it was on this crucial issue that he expended the most concern. Always the nimble- footed diplomat trying to find some political base to stand on, Pearson never really had any root constituency of his own. His views reflected the aspirations of no particular region or group, except perhaps the narrow horizons of the Ottawa Establishment. This alienation included even Pearson’s own riding of Algoma East, for although he won re-election with easy majorities, he was not of it. It seemed perfectly natural to call John Diefenbaker “The Man from Prince Albert,” but it would have been patently absurd to label Lester Pearson “The Man from Algoma East.”
Diplomats live in an artificial cocoon of ritualistic exchanges, into which real people and their mundane problems seldom intrude. “His External Affairs experience, his years abroad, and his association with Mackenzie King combined in quite a consistent way to put Pearson out of touch with the realities of Canada,” wrote
Professor Denis Smith of Trent University. “Some of his views were intelligent and tolerant and compassionate but they were often views held in a vacuum, hardly related to the real passions and complexities of the Canadian character, either English or French.”
Although he loved the idea of Canada, Pearson remained something of a foreigner in his own country, a man without permanent roots who had lived in eighteen different houses on two continents during his period of public service. Having spent the wrong years in the faith, he came to the nation’s highest political office too late in life to feel that vital rapport with the average citizen that nourishes successful politicians. As a result, the image of him imprinted on the public mind remained confused and vague.
The fact that the many blurred pictures the public had of Pearson as PM sometimes didn’t even add up to the simple act of recognition was amusingly illustrated by a minor incident that occurred at the time of the royal visit to Prince Edward Island in the fall of 1964. Pearson and his entourage, including Jim Coutts, his appointments secretary, were quartered overnight at the official residence of the province’s lieutenant-governor in Charlottetown. When a phone call for Coutts came from Ottawa, a local waiter, brought in to act as a manservant for the occasion, put down the phone, went upstairs and interrupted Pearson, demanding: “Are you Mr. Coutts?” When he heard the emphatically negative reply, the man, still unaware that he was addressing the prime minister, persisted: “Well, look, fella, you’ve got to help me find him. This is important.” The anecdote may have reflected as much on the lack of formality among Charlottetown waiters as on the vagueness of Pearson’s public image, but it was not an incident that could conceivably have happened to John Diefenbaker, Louis St-Laurent or even Mackenzie King.
Lester Pearson was probably the first man to serve as prime minister of Canada whose public and private personalities were one and the same. Unlike most of his thirteen predecessors, he wasn’t noticeably enlarged by his arrival at the peak of Canada’s political system. Pearson inspired familiarity without the undercurrent of mystery and excitement that people yearn for in their leaders. The office of prime minister demands of its occupant some special quality, a dimension of unrealized potential, to maintain a distance between himself and the people. Pearson’s personality was fatal to any sense of awe. At the core of his performance, which produced astonishing results but very little majesty, was the fact that, during his time in power, he behaved as if he would rather be himself than a memorable prime minister. His tragedy was that he could not be both.
—1968
Walter Gordon: The Troubled Canadian
THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL member of the Liberal ministry—both at the beginning of the Pearson period, when his abilities were grossly inflated, and at the end, when they were cruelly debased—was that eccentric pursuer of lost dreams and gallant advocate of unlikely causes, Walter Lockhart Gordon.
It was Gordon’s influence on federal government policy between 1963 and 1968 that marked the real difference between the St-Laurent and Pearson brands of Liberalism. Even his enemies were willing to admit that his role in revitalizing the Liberal party after its defeats in the late fifties was crucial; certainly, the influence he had on Lester Pearson in the early years of his administration was hard to overestimate. As the key left-wing member of a mildly reformist government, he stood for policies that made his less committed colleagues feel vaguely guilty, and despite the steady decline of his prestige after the disaster of his first budget, Gordon managed to maintain the moral leadership of the Pearson administration almost to the conclusion of its tenure. In fact, for most of the decade from 1958 to 1968, Gordon was so inextricably linked with Pearson that it was difficult to discuss one without the other. It was as though the two men absorbed from each other the initiative and strength they lacked separately.
At the beginning, their mutual dependence was based on a common lack of political experience and a friendship of more than twenty-five years’ duration. They had met first in January 1935, when Pearson was serving as secretary of the Inquiry into Price Spreads and Mass Buying and Gordon was brought in to do a research study for the inquiry. At the time Gordon was twenty-nine, a partner in his family’s Toronto accountancy firm by birth and training (if not by temperament), a charter member of Toronto’s powerful financial establishment. The son of Harry Gordon, who had commanded a Canadian unit at Vimy Ridge, he had been educated at Upper Canada College and the Royal Military College.
He could easily have spent his life in the languid pursuits of the very rich, but an intrusive social conscience, which was activated by the discussions he had with farmers when he toured the Depression-ravaged Prairies during the winter of 1935, led to his involvement in public affairs. He soon became a roving ambassador of efficiency, moving from one public sector reform to the next with imperturbable ease and widely admired results.
Gordon came to Ottawa in 1939 to serve as a dollar-a-year man to help establish the Foreign Exchange Control Board and stayed on to become special assistant to the deputy minister of finance. He played a key role in negotiating the 1942 dominion- provincial tax agreement and was a co-author on the first wartime budget. When Walter Harris, in his 1955 budget speech, suggested that a major royal commission be set up to inquire into the nation’s economic future, Pearson recommended Walter Gordon for the chairmanship. The project had been bitterly opposed by C.D. Howe, who regarded any inquiry into the Canadian economy as an investigation of C.D. Howe.
In the fall of 1957, when Pearson still had grave doubts about whether or not he should contest the Liberal leadership, he turned to Gordon for advice. His friend not only urged him to run, but also became his campaign manager for the 1958 leadership convention. Not
quite three months later, when an election was called, Pearson suffered the most shattering electoral defeat a Canadian Liberal leader ever faced (down to forty-eight seats) and Gordon, feeling partly responsible, turned his energies to the rebuilding of the moribund party machine. “Walter was the real architect of our party’s renaissance,” Keith Davey, the Liberals’ national organizer brought in by Gordon, said afterwards. “He was the man who made all the tough decisions.”
IN 1961 GORDON PUBLISHED Troubled Canada, in which he outlined the essence of the Liberal platforms for the 1962 and 1963 elections. In the first campaign, he moved into active politics by contesting and winning the Davenport seat in downtown Toronto.
Pearson and Gordon grew ever closer in this period not only because they were brothers-in-arms, but also because Gordon was Pearson’s kind of guy—civilized, not essentially political, a man one could talk to. His very closeness to the leader left him open to charges of Machiavellian intent and scarcely endeared him to old-line Liberal politicians either before or after the victory of 1963. They may have reluctantly accepted him as a political organizer, but they never approved his policies, particularly the economic nationalism that was his most urgent concern. When he got into trouble, as he did so spectacularly so often, many long-time Liberals were secretly glad, or at least openly amused. Walter Gordon co-opted the Liberal party without ever convincing it.
He never did conquer the Canadian people, in part because the kind of man he seemed to be tended to obscure the kind of man hewas. Witty, intelligent, contemporary and humanitarian, he looked merely overprivileged, the very model of an upper- middle-class WASP in pin-striped suit and regimental tie. He also suffered from the rich man’s disease: a painful case of gout. To most people he seemed to be a dilettante, forever playing at politics, a crackpot millionaire with mischievous aims and obscure resources. It was true that he liked good food, vintage wines, paintings, antiques, travel and the company of his peers. He could be warm and amusing with close friends but remained an intensely private person, who abhorred the little arts of popularity that are the touchstones of politics in Western democracies. His language was that of his class—cool, reasonable, passionless. He could never transform himself from an ideologue into a revolutionary, and in the conduct of his nationalistic crusades, he remained a Garibaldi without a horse. Even his books, with their revolutionary implications for Canadian society, read like dry texts on beekeeping.
The emotions that move most politicians to spend their waking hours mouthing platitudes had no place in his makeup. “If you have too highly developed a sense of the ridiculous,” he once told me, “you can’t get through daily political life in Ottawa without laughing, and that’s not allowed.” In a town where ministers seldom made even minor observations without first taking a tour d’horizon of all the rumours they’d heard in the previous twenty- four hours, Gordon stood out as a man incapable of diversionary small talk. He made lists of what he wanted to discuss with the people in his appointment book and expected them to do the same. A typical opening move was to lay the appropriate power-point list in front of himself and ask his visitor, “Who’ll go first?” The traits that isolated him most from his fellow politicians were his decisiveness (“I think in straight lines”) and his willingness to delegate power to people he trusted.
WHENEVER HE APPEARED in public, Gordon diluted his impact by invariably assuming one of two facial expressions: mild boredom or intense boredom. Though his manner was rooted more in shyness than in arrogance, his offhand behaviour left a feeling of aloofness and failed to impress most of the visitors to his office. He never even tried to give the appearance of appreciating the advice constantly poured onto his desk by lobbies of angry, often frantic, businessmen.
A skeptical man with a highly developed sense of individual responsibility and accountability, he abhorred pretence of any kind. As minister of finance, he often had to fly to Washington, but he would invariably have his assistants phone ahead to request that no official representative of the Canadian Embassy meet his plane. He especially enjoyed such freedom when there was another minister on the incoming plane and he could watch the flunkies bowing to, say, Paul Martin, while he would climb off the aircraft, zippered overnight case in hand, unattended and carefree. His dislike for empty formalities was also apparent in his refusal to allow his aides to insert into his budget speeches the two or three perfunctory French sentences that English- speaking finance ministers normally mangle. He did not speak French and considered it an insult to French Canadians to pretend that he could take a run at it.
He was indifferent to the procedural rituals of the House of Commons and was always getting it wrong. In May of 1963, as he walked down a parliamentary corridor with Pat Carney, then business columnist for the Vancouver Sun, he pointed to the Commons chamber and confided: “I find this terribly time consuming.” During one debate on federal-provincial relations, when he began by staunchly defending the government’s record, he was interrupted by Michael Starr of the Conservatives, who shouted: “Cut out the politics, Walter!” Gordon disarmed Starr by replying: “Well, I had to have some sort of introduction …”
Gordon always expected the worst from his encounters with the public and was seldom disappointed. During a visit to England on July 1, 1964, he addressed the London Canada Club to mark the ninety-seventh anniversary of Confederation. The flag debate was just beginning in Canada at the time, with Lester Pearson still committed to his original three-colour, three-maple-leaf design. But Gordon, who had little patience with symbols, had forgotten the colours and kept referring to the new Canadian flag as being “red, white and gold.” Every time he made the mistake and said “gold,” a few voices in the audience would shout back, “Blue.” Gordon thought they were yelling “boo,” and the fifth time he was interrupted, he smiled sadly to himself and said, “I was afraid of that.”
His friendship was hard to win, but once gained it was enduring, even in the most trying of circumstances, and his unheralded kindnesses to friends in good times and in bad were legend. His personal popularity with the progressive elements in the parliamentary caucus was always high. He was the only minister who tried to encourage and bring along new cabinet talent (particularly Ben Benson, Larry Pennell and Joe Greene) and was always forthcoming in his dealings with backbenchers.
Gordon had felt a warm sense of rapport with Guy Favreau because they were both dedicated amateurs in politics and knew the feeling of having to wipe egg off their faces. On November 26, 1964, in the bear pit of the debate over the Rivard scandal, Gordon was the only minister who came to Favreau’s defence in the strongest possible terms. “I can only say,” he told the Commons, “that if a man like my honourable colleague, the minister of justice, were ever forced to resign for the kind of political reasons suggested, I for one would not be happy to remain in this House.” (What no one knew at the time was that a few hours before the debate, Gordon had received word that his son, John, a student at Ridley College in St. Catharines, had been struck in the eye by a flying puck and that his sight might not be saved.) The weather had grounded all planes that afternoon, so Liz Gordon set off for St. Catharines by bus. But her husband, who wanted to accompany her, stayed behind to defend his friend Guy Favreau. The boy recovered, and Favreau was never even told of the accident.
WALTER GORDON’S MAIN PROBLEM as a politician was his impatience. He could never wait until public opinion crystallized or until the full implications of a complex political issue were clear. He preferred to put forward alternatives to be tested in the crucible of actual experience. “My inclination is to ask, ‘Why not?’ if I hear what sounds like a good suggestion.”
His work habits were acquired during the twenty-five years he spent as the moving spirit of Woods, Gordon and Company, Canada’s best-known firm of management consultants. It may be significant that he practised a profession in which a man earns his living by recommending alternative solutions to corporate problems, with the understanding that the clie
nt will reject those ideas that prove impractical. He was never satisfied with things as they were and liked to experiment. “Neither governments nor individuals,” he maintained, “should ever be satisfied with conditions as they are. They should strive continually to improve things and to give a lead in the introduction of reforms. It is well to remember that all changes and all reforms are likely to provoke opposition to begin with. Perhaps unfortunately, that is a natural reaction of human beings to anything that is new. But once people become used to some new measure, especially in the sphere of social security, they will complain even more loudly if it is discontinued.”
In contradiction to the classic economists of the past, Gordon didn’t recognize the free marketplace as the most appropriate mechanism for allocating national assets. He believed instead that the central government should be charged with a vital role in deciding how Canadian resources ought most fairly to be exploited. In effect, he did not consider successful businessmen as necessarily possessing the best brains or being the best company. He saw them as a faction to be placated, not a force to be followed. Because he was personally rich, Gordon was not afraid of tackling established power blocs. Politics to him was an end in itself only insofar as it could translate human necessities and moral obligations into legislative accomplishments.
Heroes Page 9