Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  October 21, 1925 – January 6, 2005

  AT A GLANCE, the connections seem spurious between Louis Robichaud, the Acadian from New Brunswick, and Duff Roblin, the Loyalist from Manitoba. One was a Liberal, the other a Progressive Conservative; one a Roman Catholic francophone who spoke English from necessity, the other an anglophone Anglican who learned to speak French adequately. One was short and scrappy-looking, the other patrician and reserved. Yet what the two men shared was much more significant than the incidentals that separated them. Each dreamt of being premier from an early age and each was a pragmatic visionary who transformed his province into a modern social, political, and economic entity.

  Both were in power at roughly the same time — the expansionist 1960s, an era when federal monies were available to augment singular provincial initiatives. Both were premiers of “have-not” provinces, although Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, was the fourth-largest city in Canada and the biggest on the prairie. They also had significant populations of francophones, especially in New Brunswick, and First Nations, particularly in Manitoba. Each of these groups had historical grievances. Separately, in their very different political arenas, Roblin and Robichaud demonstrated what government can do when it is led by imaginative, progressive, and activist provincial premiers who understand the workings, the geography, the history, and the aspirations of their electorate. (There were other transformative premiers — Jean Lesage in Quebec and Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan — but their deaths are outside my time frame.)

  As Manitoba’s fourteenth premier, from 1958 to 1967, Roblin put the progressive into Progressive Conservative, a party that was almost moribund before he became leader. He overhauled the archaic education system, including a controversial but pragmatic “shared services” program between public and “separate,” or Catholic, schools that dampened a still smouldering constitutional crisis, the “Manitoba Schools Question,” that dated back to 1890. He reintroduced French-language teaching, expanded and integrated government services, upgraded highways, created provincial parks, revamped hospitals, instituted community colleges and expanded universities, amalgamated Winnipeg’s outlying municipalities into a single metropolitan area, and built the Red River Floodway — forever known as “Duff’s Ditch” — to curb the errant river from overflowing its banks during spring runoff.

  Half a continent away, Louis Robichaud, the twenty-fifth premier of New Brunswick, was also revamping provincial and municipal services with his pervasive and massive equal-opportunity program. “I brought democracy to New Brunswick,” he liked to say, with little exaggeration. A small-town lawyer who became provincial premier before he was thirty-five, Robichaud used his decade in power, from 1960 to 1970, to modernize Prohibition-era liquor laws, abolish the Hospital Premium Tax, pass an Official Languages Act, establish the francophone Université de Moncton, increase Acadian administrative influence, and encourage the mining and forest industries. He made New Brunswick Canada’s first and only officially bilingual province and turned a divided and backward society into a thriving bilingual and bicultural one. Business historian Joseph E. Martin says Robichaud left such a superior administrative legacy that for the next thirty or forty years New Brunswick was the best-managed province in Canada, regardless of premier or party.

  Both men were touted as potential prime ministers. Although Robichaud seemed spent after his dynamic decade in New Brunswick, Roblin had aspirations, however ambivalent, to succeed John Diefenbaker as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. A loyalist to the West, the party, and the Chief, Roblin played down ambition with decorum; he waited so long to declare himself that he lost delegates and organization to his primary rival, Robert Stanfield, the popular premier of Nova Scotia. Had he won the leadership in September 1967, could Roblin have defeated Liberal Pierre Trudeau or would he, like Stanfield, have led the party to three successive defeats? Nobody will ever know.

  CHARLES DUFFERIN ROBLIN was born in Winnipeg on June 17, 1917, one of four children of businessman Charles Dufferin and Sophie (née Murdoch) Roblin. The Roblins came from a mixture of Italian and Dutch stock who had settled in what is now New York State. When American rebels confronted his ancestor Elizabeth Roblin, demanding to know where her loyalties lay after the Declaration of Independence in 1776, she replied, in reference to George III, “My king yesterday. Why not my king today?”

  That attitude compelled the Roblins to move north in 1783, along with thousands of other displaced persons, to the Bay of Quinte in eastern Ontario. They built and operated Roblin’s Mill (which poet Al Purdy later immortalized). Three of Roblin’s Loyalist forebears were active in the political affairs of what is now Ontario. John Roblin sat in the Upper Canada Assembly from 1808–10, and two later Roblins — John P. and David — were in the Union Parliaments of the 1840s and ’50s.

  His grandfather Rodmond Palen Roblin moved to the roaring West in the 1870s and was premier of Manitoba from 1900 to 1915. He is best known for building the massive limestone Manitoba legislative building, exchanging barbs with suffragist Nellie McClung, and fending off scandals surrounding the cost overruns on the legislature and allegations that he had appropriated some of the building materials to erect his own showcase stone farmhouse near Carman, Manitoba.

  By contrast, his grandson was progressive, public-spirited, pragmatic, and slightly oddball. He loved to wear a kilt and to play the bagpipes as he wandered through the empty halls of the massive Manitoba Legislature, the keening sound reverberating off the stone walls. For him it was a way to alleviate stress, but it tended to alarm the cleaning staff and gave rise to his characterization as an eccentric.

  He had an undeserved reputation as a non-drinker, stemming from his early days on the hustings. “When I started beating the bushes for candidates,” he once told a journalist, “a typical morning would start with wine at the priest’s house, home-brew beer at the first farm, straight whisky in a town merchant’s office. I’d be tiddly by noon and dopey all afternoon. . . . I knew I’d never finish the course that way, so I assumed the role of a strict teetotaller.”

  As a child of privilege, Roblin was educated at St. John’s College School, an elite private institution. Family finances suffered during the Depression and he eventually went to Kelvin Technical High School for grades ten and eleven. There he became involved in the rough-and-tumble of student politics, serving as a conservative on the communist-dominated Winnipeg Youth Council.

  He dropped out of the University of Manitoba after a year and enrolled in a local business college before heading south to take courses at the business school of the University of Chicago. Eventually he moved back to Winnipeg to study for a diploma in agriculture at U of M. Equipped with this motley assortment of courses and qualifications, he made an appointment with the president of the university and proposed that he had fulfilled the requirements for a degree. The president begged to differ and quickly showed him the door.

  When the Second World War erupted in 1939, he enlisted in the Canadian Army as a private. Longing to become a pilot, he took private flying lessons; he achieved a transfer in the spring of 1940 to the fledgling Royal Canadian Air Force. His eyesight was poor, so he was shipped overseas in 1942 as a junior officer in a tactical and operations unit attached to the Royal Air Force. He landed in Normandy on June 30, 1944, and helped chase the retreating Axis forces all the way to Hamburg, Germany. By the time he was demobilized in 1946, his organizing skills in helping to plan the Normandy invasion had seen him promoted to the rank of wing commander, although he had never been behind the controls of a military plane.

  He returned to the Prairies and a job in a Roblin family business. Although Roblin later wrote in his memoirs, Speaking for Myself: Politics and Other Pursuits, that he had planned to be premier from childhood, he showed little interest in running for political office, preferring to complain instead about the coalition government formed by the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberal Progressive
s. When friends challenged him to quit whining and put his name on the ballot in the upcoming 1949 election, he ran successfully as an independent anti-coalition Progressive Conservative, winning a seat in the provincial legislature as the member for Winnipeg South. He was re-elected six times, played a major role in getting the Conservatives out of the coalition, which had ruled since the early 1920s, and became leader of the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party in 1954, defeating leader Errick Willis at a leadership convention.

  As a politician, Roblin not only knew his statutes and the inner workings of government departments, he also understood the electorate and the province. He believed in using government to serve the needs of the people which, ideologically, made him a Red Tory and positioned him further left on social issues than the premier of the day, Douglas Campbell, and his Liberal Progressives.

  Four years after becoming leader, Roblin led the Progressive Conservatives to a minority government on June 16, 1958, the day before his forty-first birthday. It was the first PC government in Manitoba since his grandfather’s defeat at the polls in 1915. Roblin augmented his electoral success three months later by marrying Mary MacKay, a journalist who had worked as a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press and produced children’s programs for the CBC. They subsequently had a son, Andrew, and a daughter, Jennifer.

  After winning a resounding majority in 1959, Roblin set about transforming Manitoba. Although he himself believed that education was his biggest priority and his most significant achievement, he is best known for building the controversial multi-million-dollar floodway to tame and divert the raging annual spring runoff from the Red River, which often threatened to drown low-lying parts of Winnipeg.

  Having hefted his share of sandbags in his youth, Roblin held his ground against local opposition and finally won the day when he succeeded in persuading the federal government to share the costs. “Duff’s Ditch” more than earned its keep during the “flood of the century” in 1997, when it was estimated that the floodway prevented billions of dollars in damage and incalculable disruption to hundreds of thousands of residents.

  Meanwhile, another pivotal leader was entering provincial politics in the Maritimes.

  LOUIS JOSEPH “P’TIT Louis” Robichaud was born on October 21, 1925, in the small lumbering and farming community of Saint-Antoine, New Brunswick. That same year, the government of Pierre Veniot, the first Acadian to become premier, was defeated at the ballot box.

  Robichaud was one of six sons and four daughters of sawmill operator, village postmaster, and Liberal organizer Amédée Robichaud and his wife, Eugénie “Annie” Robichaud (née Richard). Like his siblings, Robichaud went to a two-room schoolhouse where all the instruction was in English and history lessons adhered to the glorious achievements of the British Empire. The ignominious grand dérangement of 1755 — the expulsion of the Acadians from their homeland during the Seven Years’ War between the British and the French for control of what is now Canada — was barely covered in the curriculum. Looking back from adulthood, Robichaud believed that being forced to learn in English was another attempt to assimilate the Acadians.

  As a boy, his great interests were sports, politics, and woodworking: the walls of his bedroom were covered with sports pictures in frames that he had made. Decades later, his Senate office in Ottawa was filled with tables and wooden sculptures that indicated the hours he had spent at the lathe, the saw, and the sander.

  Destined for the priesthood, Robichaud entered a seminary in Bathurst at fourteen but had a change of heart and vocation three years later. By then resolved on a political career, he attended Collège Sacré-Coeur (now part of the Université de Moncton), graduating in 1947 with a bachelor of arts degree. After the ceremony, he handed prophetic notes to his classmates signed Louis J. Robichaud, Premier of New Brunswick.

  He studied economics and political science for a year at Laval University (a petri dish for the Quiet Revolution, which would transform Quebec after the death of Premier Maurice Duplessis in 1959) before heading back to New Brunswick to article for three years with a law firm in Bathurst. He hung out his shingle — which he had made himself on his lathe — in 1952 in Richibucto, a small town on the coast about an hour north of Saint-Antoine, and a well-considered choice for building a law practice and securing the Liberal nomination in the upcoming elections. The year before, he had married Lorraine Savoie, a teacher he’d met through friends in Bathurst. They eventually had four children.

  He was elected handily for the first time in 1952, although the Liberals, including party leader John McNair, were defeated. The party needed to rebuild, and the dynamic and energetic rookie was keen to assist. Within four years he was financial critic in the legislature, within six he had won the leadership of the party, and within eight he had become premier, when his Liberals defeated the Conservative government of Hugh John Flemming by winning 31 of the 52 seats on June 27, 1960 — less than a week after Jean Lesage won his upset victory in neighbouring Quebec and began implementing the framework for the Quiet Revolution.

  During his ten years as premier, Robichaud gained national stature by turning New Brunswick into a socio-political laboratory, hoping to create a climate that would keep young people from seeking career opportunities in other parts of the country. At the time, the significantly francophone and Roman Catholic province was a rural backwater fraught with poverty and illiteracy, especially in the French-speaking north. There were more than 1,100 taxing authorities throughout the province. Even cows and chickens were taxed, and at widely differing rates. There were 422 school districts, each with its own educational standards and pay scale for teachers. Social welfare systems, based on eighteenth-century poor laws, varied so much that a single mother in Chatham might receive $45 a month while a mother in nearby Neguac got only $7.

  On January 1, 1967, Robichaud, who had campaigned to abolish a “discriminatory” premium tax on hospital services, introduced sweeping reform legislation. The program involved a massive shift of public services from local governments to the province, which took over services to the people while municipalities kept control of services to property. Thirty-four school districts replaced 422 feuding, ill-equipped bodies, centralized taxation assessments were instituted, and the government took control of essential services.

  Municipal tax concessions to industry were wiped out, incurring the wrath of New Brunswick billionaire K. C. Irving. His newspapers campaigned against the reforms, coining the phrase “robbing Peter to pay Pierre”: a reference to the more prosperous English-speaking areas having to share their wealth with the mostly French-speaking poorer areas. The reforms required 131 bills and two years of sometimes bitter debate before they were passed into law. The rich-versus-poor and English-versus-French rancour, fanned by the Irving newspapers, led to such alarming threats against the premier and his family that armed guards were employed to protect them.

  Besides the economic reforms, Robichaud also introduced fundamental language and educational changes, taking special pride in founding the French-language Université de Moncton in June 1963, adopting a provincial flag in 1965, and declaring New Brunswick a bilingual province in 1969. “Language rights are more than legal rights,” he said in 1969 when he introduced the legislation. “They are precious cultural rights, going deep into the revered past and touching the historic traditions of all our people.”

  Both Robichaud and Roblin were touted as federal leaders. While he was still premier, Robichaud was regarded in some Liberal circles as the “little Laurier,” a reference not only to his small stature but to his outsize reputation as a successor to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, one of the legends of the Liberal Party. Many thought of him as heir apparent to Prime Minister Lester Pearson. Indeed, Pearson had offered him a choice of portfolios if he would run for the federal Liberals, but Robichaud wasn’t interested in leaving New Brunswick just as his equal-opportunity program was netting results.

  After Pierre T
rudeau became Liberal prime minister in 1968, Robichaud hoped for an appointment to the judiciary to offer him a graceful way to step down as premier after a frenetic decade of political change. When it didn’t materialize, he reluctantly called a provincial election for October 26, 1970. The timing was disastrous, not least because of the terrorist actions of two independent cells of the Front de libération du Québec in the midst of the campaign: the kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross and the abduction and murder of Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte. Even though Robichaud quickly endorsed Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act, the electorate wasn’t about to give a mandate to a francophone premier in those seemingly treacherous days. Robichaud’s Liberals lost to Richard Hatfield’s Progressive Conservatives, 32 seats to 26.

  Robichaud seemed exhausted. Years later he acknowledged that he hadn’t campaigned hard enough. “I didn’t fight the way I had fought previous elections,” he told the Globe and Mail in 1992. “I had reached my ambitions when I was too young and I was fed up. When I was fed up, people [my age, forty-five] were just starting in politics.”

  Trudeau offered him an ambassadorship, which he declined because his son Jean-Claude had serious kidney disease and had to be close to a dialysis unit (Jean-Claude died of kidney failure in 1976, and Robichaud’s wife, Lorraine, in 1980.) Instead he accepted an appointment as chair of the International Joint Commission in 1971 and a Senate seat in 1973. He was not yet fifty.

  UNLIKE ROBICHAUD, ROBLIN tippy-toed into federal politics while he was still premier of Manitoba. Proficiently bilingual, a believer in “many cultures, two languages, One Nation,” and Diefenbaker’s preferred successor, he belatedly became a candidate when Diefenbaker, having refused to step down quietly, forced a publicly humiliating leadership contest at a party convention in September 1967.

  Politicos still argue about Roblin’s candidacy. Did he let his loyalty to Diefenbaker, whose electoral sweep in 1958 had bolstered Roblin’s own success at the polls in Manitoba the following year, make him wait too long to enter the fray? Some say he was all set to declare on July 25, 1967, but was pre-empted by the political fallout and media scramble following Charles de Gaulle’s reckless exhortation “Vive le Québec libre” to roaring séparatiste crowds from a balcony at City Hall in Montreal the day before.