by Denis Smith
During the Christmas holiday in 1922, while John Diefenbaker was at home in Saskatoon, a fire destroyed his Wakaw office along with several other buildings. In his memoirs he said of Wakaw that “for a while arson seemed the favourite local sport” and that he was twice burnt out by “fires set in buildings farther up the street. When the insurance companies finally stopped making cash settlements in fire claims and began to replace burnt-out buildings, arson somehow ceased to be an important item on the calendar of local crime.” But the setback was a minor one. For Diefenbaker, records were not vital to his practice, and within two weeks he had reopened in new offices without apparent harm.20
Now John Diefenbaker dominated legal business in Wakaw. A.E. Stewart departed early in 1923, and Stewart’s successor, Thomas Paterson, could not maintain the practice. The Prince Albert firm of Halliday and Davis opened a branch office in 1923, but they too failed locally – in part because Diefenbaker challenged the right of an articling student, Clifford Sifton Davis, to run the office in defiance of the rules of the Law Society. The Davis firm was run by Clifford’s brother, T.C. Davis, the mayor of Prince Albert and chief, by inheritance, of the Liberal Party organization in northern Saskatchewan. The episode, Diefenbaker recalled, “did not augur well for our future relations.”21 His triumph complete, Diefenbaker now planned to move on himself. He made Alexander Ehman his Wakaw partner, and on May 1, 1924, he went north to establish his practice in Prince Albert.22
JOHN DIEFENBAKER’S FATHER WAS A LIBERAL SUPPORTER OF SIR WILFRID LAURIER. He maintained that loyalty during the federal election of 1911, the first one to leave a marked impression on his politically ambitious son, although he doubted the wisdom of Laurier’s commitment to reciprocity with the United States. John remembered that his father was impressed by the defection of the western Liberal minister Clifford Sifton in opposition to reciprocity, but he was also suspicious that “the powerful Eastern financial interests” supporting Conservative leader Robert Borden’s campaign against reciprocity “were more concerned with selfish ends than with national welfare.”23 His father’s ambiguity held some of the seeds of John’s own political vision.
“The election,” said Diefenbaker, “had a profound influence on me, and perhaps more than anything else made me a Conservative. I attended all the meetings in Saskatoon.”24 Despite the strong desire for free trade in the west, John was impressed by Conservative warnings that reciprocity would lead to economic and political union with the United States. He was stirred by the Conservative brand of Canadian nationalism, with its still-heady mix of local and imperial sentiments. “The Tories,” he recalled, “had a marvellous campaign. They didn’t have any arguments but they raised the flag and we’d sing…‘We’re soldiers of the King.’ ‘Rule Britannia’ had its place in those programmes as we cleaved to our British heritage in defiance of American manifest destiny and Grit continentalism. The result was a tremendous revelation of Canadian determination to be Canadian. This impressed me greatly.”25
Borden triumphed and reciprocity was dead. But Saskatchewan remained Liberal. The next federal election, in December 1917, split the conventional mould when Borden’s Conservatives were joined by pro-conscription English-speaking Liberals across the country campaigning as Unionists against Laurier’s Liberal rump from Quebec. For the returned soldier, support for the Unionists was automatic and did not require a decisive choice between Liberals and Conservatives. Diefenbaker campaigned in Saskatoon for the Union candidate, even though he opposed the government’s Wartime Elections Act, which had removed the vote from those naturalized Canadians who had arrived from enemy nations any time after 1902. This piece of crass demagogy was anathema in the prairies and could only deepen the young man’s sense of alienation from the leadership of the Conservative Party. As a poll worker, he was also aware of the government’s manipulation of soldiers’ votes to assure that they were applied to constituencies where they were most needed.26 Diefenbaker took to the hustings during the campaign, but his timidity as a speaker kept his remarks short.27
Diefenbaker’s political attitudes were being formed, it seemed, through neither his brief wartime experience of the larger world nor any deep historical reflection, but through absorption of his father’s attitudes and his own direct experience of Saskatchewan life. He left no record of his views on the Russian revolution, the peace settlement of 1919, the creation of the League of Nations, the postwar eruption of radicalism in the Progressive movement, the Winnipeg General Strike, or the conservative reaction that was labelled “the Red scare.”
By 1921 John Diefenbaker’s political affiliation was not yet entirely clear. This was the year of the Progressive Party sweep against both the old parties in the west and Ontario; in Prince Albert constituency the sitting Unionist member, Andrew Knox, had gone over to the Progressives and was re-elected easily. Diefenbaker admired him and respected his political strength. In Wakaw the young lawyer apparently kept a low profile during the campaign. He suggests, however, that the Liberal Party approached him “to enlist me for party work and as a possible candidate” for both the provincial and the federal elections of 1921. The invitations were declined, but with sufficient ambiguity to prompt his election as secretary of the Wakaw Liberal Association one weekend in his absence. “I returned on the Tuesday from Saskatoon and was amazed to find the Liberal Association minute books and paraphernalia in my office. I immediately delivered them back to the local Liberal president, Mr. J.H. Flynn.”28 Four years later, in March 1925, the Wakaw Liberal Association discussed a motion to nominate him as Liberal candidate for the provincial constituency of Kinistino – a discussion that took place in the presence of his Wakaw law partner, Alexis Etienne Philion, “one of several who surely would have known if they were putting their man into the right pew but the wrong church.”29 But the motion was defeated. (Diefenbaker wrote of this incident as an “approach” to be the Liberal candidate, but dates it the year before, when he was still a resident of Wakaw, and does not mention the motion’s defeat.) These repeated Liberal soundings were flattering acknowledgment of his political ambition, his growing reputation, and perhaps of the skill with which Diefenbaker withheld commitment while awaiting the right opportunity. Were they also indications of his leanings? The record is not clear. In retrospect, he believed that the reigning Saskatchewan Liberals were eager to catch him: “There were suggestions … that came to me that if I would go over to the Liberal Party there was no position that would be denied me in the province … but I was never keen.”30 During the period in Wakaw, however, neither the Conservatives nor the Progressives made any overtures to the aspiring politician.
In Prince Albert, Mayor T.C. Davis was chosen as Liberal candidate for the June 1925 provincial election. Davis and others claimed that Diefenbaker was one of his supporters in that campaign.31 Davis won his seat in Prince Albert, as the Liberal Party again swept the province with its apparently invincible machine. Just three weeks later, on June 19, Diefenbaker finally revealed his Conservative colours by addressing a small organizing meeting for the federal Conservative campaign in Prince Albert; and on August 6, 1925, a nominating meeting declared him the party’s federal candidate by acclamation.32
In a province dominated both federally and provincially by the Liberal Party, the decision was Diefenbaker’s Rubicon. He seemed to be committing himself to political oblivion. “For me,” Diefenbaker wrote, “the election campaign was a test involving more than votes. I passed my thirtieth birthday during the contest. I had come of age politically, and my candidacy was a public declaration of my political faith.”33 From the start, his faith was a peculiarly personal one that did not wholly fit the party to which he now gave his permanent allegiance. He had decided to make his own way – slowly if necessary – without the patronage of the Liberal Party that had sought him, and within a party so lacking in local strength that it seemed open to his own shaping influence. Its very weakness would allow him his freedom and nurture his eccentricity.
/> The decision was not made alone. When John Diefenbaker moved to Prince Albert, he grew close to Sam Donaldson, the leading local Conservative. Donaldson, a wealthy former livery stable owner and land speculator, had been mayor of Prince Albert before the turn of the century, a member of the provincial legislature, and briefly (from 1915 to 1917) member of parliament for Prince Albert. He was a colourful character, wise in the political rough-and-tumble of Saskatchewan’s early days. He had engaged the Liberal Party in combat as it built its pervasive provincial machine, and he had won his first legislative election in 1905 only after a series of court cases and a decision of the legislature to overturn the official – and corrupted – result favouring the Liberal candidate. Diefenbaker saw “pluck and courage and character” in that story and in Donaldson’s political career; it was the kind of high-spirited knight errantry that struck romantic chords and recalled his own youthful heroes. As a defence counsel, Diefenbaker had already begun to shape himself in the same anti-establishment mould. In Saskatchewan politics, it was clear, to be anti-establishment was to be anti-Liberal. When Donaldson suggested that the young man should enter politics as a Conservative because Davis would always stand in his way as a Liberal, Diefenbaker saw the point. But he baulked at the suggestion that he might contest the provincial election in Prince Albert against Davis. A few weeks later, Donaldson made a more compelling offer of the federal candidacy and promised Diefenbaker that he would organize the nomination. The bait was taken.34
The election was called for October 29, 1925. There was little chance of a Conservative victory in Prince Albert, where the party had lost its deposit in 1921. But this was an occasion for the budding politician to establish his reputation and his federal party credentials and to practise his platform style. Diefenbaker faced the sitting Progressive member, Andrew Knox, and the Liberal, Charles McDonald. The Progressives were fading before Mackenzie King’s blandishments, and the Liberals were his real opponents. They managed to get under his skin when Davis mocked him as “a fallen-away Liberal.” Diefenbaker replied with an admission: “T.C. Davis seems to think that the fact I was once a Liberal is an offence. Well, as I get older I see the indiscretions of my youth. I’m not here to tell falsehoods. I was a Liberal, but I could not help but see the failures of the Liberal Government in carrying out their promises. He says I sought a Liberal nomination; that’s an unqualified falsehood. It is true that certain persons wanted me to accept nomination. But that I sought it, is false.”35
His Conservative faith was, from the beginning, a blend of conventional British Canadian loyalty and western recalcitrance. “I haven’t spent a lifetime with this party,” he reflected in 1969. “I chose it because of certain basic principles and those … were the empire relationship of the time, the monarchy and the preservation of an independent Canada. None of these things I thought the Liberal party could support.”36 He added to that general disposition two other elements: a distrust of the Ontario-centred policies of the Conservative leader, Arthur Meighen; and a personal response to the dilemmas of cultural assimilation that were especially acute in the racially diverse prairie provinces.
The candidate disagreed publicly with his leader on two matters of western concern: the inviolability of low Crow’s Nest Pass freight rates on the movement of prairie grain and the completion of the Hudson Bay Railway as an alternative outlet to the sea for grain exports. To Diefenbaker’s horror, Meighen warned voters that a Conservative government might alter the statutory Crow rates and persisted in his opposition to the railway. Diefenbaker, in response, promised a public meeting on October 7 that, if elected, he would resign his seat in two years if the railway was not then under construction.37 His opponents pointed out the disagreement with Meighen, but Diefenbaker held his ground. As he later wrote: “My position was difficult. It need not have been. But I chose to speak for myself.”38
From the time of the German war, if not before, John Diefenbaker had been sensitive about his name and ancestry, eager to assert his native-born Canadian status and his British loyalties. Canada was a country still uncertain of its own character, divided by distinct social rankings and widespread prejudices in which persons of British lineage were top of the heap. That was evident in the legislatures and cabinets outside Quebec, in business, in local councils, in the grain growers’ associations. Politicians and educators on the prairies puzzled over the problems of assimilation created by the vast immigration of the previous three decades, and in the communities there were dark gusts of exclusion and discrimination. They touched Diefenbaker personally. In the 1925 campaign he heard himself described, in the old wartime pejorative, as a “Hun.” He confronted the insult in his speech at the Orpheum Theatre in Prince Albert on October 7:
They call me a Hun! Probably the opposing candidates do not, but their minions most certainly do, and one of the leading Liberals has publicly apologized for this serious allegation. The only crimes they can pin upon me are those of youth and of German ancestry. Am I a German? My great-grandfather left Germany to seek liberty. My grandfather and my father were born in Canada. It is true, however, that my grandmother and my grandfather on my mother’s side spoke no English: being Scottish, they spoke Gaelic. If there is no hope for me to be Canadian, then who is there hope for?39
The claims about his grandparents stretched the truth for the sake of effect: his Diefenbaker grandfather was German-born and his Bannerman grandparents spoke English. But the candidate struck a theme that endured for his long political career. In his ideal Canada, there would be no distinctions of race or national origin, no hybrid collection of minorities, visible or invisible, but instead a “united nationality” of equals. His vision was expressed with feeling, and Diefenbaker saw no paradox in it. He simply took for granted that the emerging common nationality would absorb the dominant British heritage of values and institutions – and discard the rest. In western Canada that would become a potent dream.40
The young Conservative campaigned vigorously. “I carried my message to village and town throughout my constituency, to Domremy and Wakaw, to Rosthern, to Blaine Lake, Marcelin, Leask, and Shellbrook, to Briarlee, Wild Rose, and Honeymoon.”41 His courtroom reputation was growing and his platform style reflected the defence counsel’s persuasive skills. A Progressive supporter warned that he should not be underestimated: “He takes himself very seriously and you will all do well to take him the same way. He has any amount of ability and has distinguished himself in his profession by his hobby of taking tough cases. He can take an out and out rascal and describe him with such wonderful oratory that one may almost see a halo around the rogue’s head.”42
But in Saskatchewan the task was hopeless. The Conservative Party picked up seats elsewhere and returned the largest group to parliament, although it did not get a clear majority. In Saskatchewan, however, the party faced defeat across the board. Diefenbaker ran third behind McDonald and Knox in Prince Albert and lost his deposit. He blamed Arthur Meighen squarely for Conservative losses on the prairies; he was convinced that Meighen’s rigidity on freight rates and the Hudson Bay Railway had cost him a parliamentary majority.43
The candidate’s disappointment was mollified by the encouraging editorial judgment of the Liberal Prince Albert Herald: “There are many today ready to prophesy that the last has not yet been heard of him in the political life of this country.” In early December the constituency party held a banquet in Diefenbaker’s honour attended by 250 supporters in celebration of his fighting spirit. “No community can defeat such a man as J.G. Diefenbaker,” said the Reverend R.F. Macdougall in his toast to the guest; Diefenbaker responded that the occasion marked not defeat but rededication.44
Prime Minister King had lost not only his plurality but his own seat in North York. Yet he clung to power, delayed the opening of the House, and accepted Charles McDonald’s offer to resign his seat to allow for a by-election in Prince Albert. The local Conservatives did not nominate against him, although Diefenbaker says in his memoirs t
hat, on the suggestion of the national party office, he privately encouraged a Conservative to contest the seat as an independent.45 On February 2, 1926, King easily won election as the new member for Prince Albert. Almost immediately afterwards he persuaded Premier Charles Dunning of Saskatchewan to enter the federal cabinet, and Dunning was succeeded as premier by James G. Gardiner. Gardiner appointed his Prince Albert member, T.C. Davis, as minister of municipal affairs, and Davis also took charge of Prime Minister King’s constituency affairs. John Diefenbaker, having cast his lot with the Conservative Party, now found himself facing the formidable Gardiner-Davis-King organization in the riding of his choice.46
The Conservative newcomer was beginning to attract notice beyond his own province. In 1926 he accepted an invitation to address the convention of the British Columbia Conservative Party, where another young political devotee, the reporter Bruce Hutchison, found him a compelling presence on the platform. “He was tall, lean, almost skeletal, his bodily motions jerky and spasmodic, his face pinched and white, his pallor emphasized by metallic black curls and sunken, hypnotic eyes. But from this frail, wraithlike person, so deceptive in his look of physical infirmity, a voice of vehement power and rude health blared like a trombone.”47
