by Denis Smith
Meanwhile, discussions continued in Ottawa and Regina about the CCF candidate in Lake Centre. “I have some encouragement … that there is a possibility of the CCF candidate being withdrawn,” E.E. Perley wrote to Diefenbaker on June 23, “and I want to advise you to be very careful in the first few speeches you make not to attack Fansher personally or go after him too strong … Keep this in the strictest confidence and await developments.” On July 20 Arthur Kendall reported that Fansher was unlikely to withdraw, but offered no serious threat because he had “neither organization, nor finances, nor hopes of securing them … I honestly believe you can win this Seat in a three cornered fight.” By that time Diefenbaker had decided not only that the party should avoid any arrangements with the CCF, but that “the chances are better for our candidates in this Province when there are three or four opposing candidates in the field.” That was a dictate of realism in Lake Centre, where he expected five contestants.15
In late August, as the European situation moved towards war, John and Edna made a ten-day trip to Ottawa – where Diefenbaker met Robert Manion and John Robb, the party’s dominion organizer – and then on to Quebec City, where they holidayed briefly. Diefenbaker returned to Prince Albert expressing confidence in the party’s prospects, but all expectations were suspended with the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of war in early September. Faced with that calamity, Canadian politicians temporarily put their partisan ambitions aside. In Ottawa there was press speculation about a coalition government, while the Conservative Party postponed its election planning and closed its national offices. The moratorium was both an expression of national solidarity and a political necessity, since party fundraising dried up with the declaration of war.16 Mackenzie King promised another session of parliament before an election, and the country settled uneasily into an autumn of phoney war and partial mobilization. Manion, in his delicate effort to build party strength in both English-speaking Canada and Quebec, gave his party’s support to the King government in its declaration of war and its commitment not to conscript Canadians for overseas service. But his electoral hopes in Quebec were shattered when Premier Duplessis unexpectedly dissolved the legislature for an October campaign directed against the centralizing effects of a federal Liberal war effort. King’s Liberal ministers from Quebec campaigned for Duplessis’s defeat on patriotic grounds, and the Conservative Party found itself voiceless. Faced with his own pro-British party outside Quebec, Manion could not possibly endorse the nationalist and isolationist premier. Duplessis was overwhelmingly defeated by the Quebec Liberal Party under Adélard Godbout.17
Duplessis’s opportunist misstep – and a defiant challenge from Premier Hepburn of Ontario, who had joined with the provincial Conservatives to denounce the weakness of Ottawa’s war effort – now tempted King into his own act of opportunism. When parliament reconvened on January 25, 1940, the opposition parties expected a regular session that would permit debate on Canadian policy in the war. Instead, the prime minister announced that the House had been abruptly dissolved for a general election on March 26. King hoped to consolidate his power before the expected outbreak of European fighting in late spring. In surprise and frustration, MPs returned to Union Station and the trains homeward, to face a brutal winter campaign. Mackenzie King had caught the opposition disorganized and unprepared, at a moment when appeals to patriotism meant support for the party in power.
When parliament was dissolved, John Diefenbaker was about to leave Prince Albert by train for Ottawa, anticipating his first appearance before the Supreme Court of Canada in early February.18 For ten days the candidate was caught in limbo for the court case, unable to recommence his campaign when it mattered most.
When he did reach home in February, he was plunged at once into another murder trial, as court-appointed counsel for the defence of Isobel Emele. The case was a bit of rare good fortune for the politician – and he knew it. Diefenbaker defended a woman accused of murdering her pro-Nazi tyrant of a husband, and he used on her behalf all the appeals to sympathy, decency, and patriotism he could muster in the early months of war against Germany. “I … put on trial the influence of the German-American Bund in Saskatchewan politics,” Diefenbaker conceded frankly in his memoirs.19 As in 1914, the family name was a potential source of embarrassment, but this time there was political risk for the candidate as well. The trial offered an unexpected chance to display his own loyalty to Canada despite his German name and ancestry. To Diefenbaker’s relief, news reports of the case made him an anti-Nazi defender of the helpless.20
Isobel Emele had married Henry Emele in the mid-1920s. She was an Ulsterwoman and a proud British imperialist; he was a German-American admirer of Adolf Hitler. In the early years of their marriage Emele was twice convicted of assaulting his wife, and since 1931 the couple and their four children had lived in discord on their farm north of Prince Albert. On September 18, 1939, Isobel, distraught and half-dressed, confronted an off-duty RCMP officer near her home with the claim that her husband had shot himself. The officer found Emele lying wounded outside the house, with no sign of a weapon nearby. Before he died on the way to hospital, Emele told the constable: “She gave me the works.” His wife denied the claim: “He is out of his mind. He does not know what he is saying.” Isobel repeated later to the investigating officer that her husband had gone mad and killed himself.
The police kept her overnight at the farm, took her to Prince Albert the next day to identify her husband’s body, removed her children, and then detained her for another day at the farm under supervision – all without access to a lawyer. On the third day she confessed that, in a rage at Emele’s antagonism, she had shot him through a hole in the kitchen door with a .30 calibre Remington rifle. She produced the gun, and the police found that the hole in the door was smudged with carbon and matched the height of the wound in her husband’s chest. Only then, after being charged with murder, was she able to talk with Diefenbaker’s articling student Russell Brownridge.
She told Brownridge her story. Henry Emele had bullied and abused her for years, withheld money, and flaunted his pro-Nazi sentiments as an organizer for the Bund. When Germany invaded Poland he grew more boastfully arrogant: “Hitler will run this country and you’ll learn to like it,” he insisted. After the shooting she had been held incommunicado by the RCMP for two days until the confession. When Diefenbaker read her statement, he smiled and said to Brownridge, “I shouldn’t have much trouble crying our way out of this.”21
Following the preliminary hearing, the case was set for trial in the Court of King’s Bench in Prince Albert on February 13, 1940. Diefenbaker and his partner John Cuelenaere did not call the defendant, but instead built their case in cross-examination. They carefully revealed Emele’s sentiments and his bullying. They challenged the admissibility of his wife’s confessions, on the ground that they had been extracted under “a subtle third degree,” and of the dying man’s words as hearsay. And they suggested a careless police investigation at the location. The judge accepted Diefenbaker’s arguments and refused to allow the confessions or Emele’s reported words to go into the record.
Diefenbaker rose for his summing up at 5 pm on Saturday, February 17, and turned to the jury. “Fully alert, his voice charged with dedicated purpose, it was his eyes that commanded the attention of the six listening men as they fixed each one in turn.”22 Diefenbaker picked up the Remington from the exhibit table, turned the barrel to his chest, and showed how Emele might have shot himself. “The length of the arms is what counts,” he insisted. “And there is no evidence before this court as to the length of that man’s arms.” Nor were there fingerprints to link Mrs Emele to the weapon. The onus of proof, he reminded the jury, was with the crown. “They have not proved one thing that can tie the accused up with the death of her husband.” The evidence about the direction of the bullet, he insisted, was inconsistent; Isobel Emele could not have shot him through the door as the prosecution claimed. And she had just prepared and cooked
a noonday dinner for two. “That,” Diefenbaker declared, “does not look like premeditated murder to me.”
The judge added two further reasons for doubt in his own charge to the jury and sent them out early in the evening to consider the verdict. They were back in a short time with a verdict of not guilty. The courtroom erupted in applause.
Isobel Emele was free and John Diefenbaker was launched in triumph into his election campaign. He recounts the sequel in his memoirs. “The outcome of the trial was considered harmful to the Liberal Party in the election. Strong representations were made and the Crown appealed, I suspect for the wrong reasons. The Court of Appeal ruled that the second alleged confession should have been admitted as evidence by the trial judge; my client’s acquittal was set aside and a new trial ordered. I defended her a second time in June 1940, with both confessions in evidence, and the jury brought in a verdict of acquittal. Years later, she sent me one hundred dollars to buy a watch.”23
WHEN THE ELECTION WAS CALLED AT THE END OF JANUARY, THE CONSERVATIVE leader, Robert Manion, had asked for a wartime coalition government and announced that his party would campaign as the National Government party. Diefenbaker wired Manion: “Your statement regarding National Government has general appeal and was a master stroke.”24 But Mackenzie King had the advantage of wartime incumbency and campaigned confidently for a renewed Liberal mandate. Both the Liberals and the CCF undercut Manion’s call for a coalition government by announcing that they would not serve in it; and within the Conservative Party the idea offered the pretext for secret but inconclusive discussions about Manion’s own removal.25 The Conservative Party remained disorganized and underfinanced throughout, but this time Diefenbaker was well prepared. His Lake Centre organization sprang back to life, and the candidate set out on a chilly odyssey in late February and March. Edna often accompanied him, opening paths for the candidate with her easy warmth. On the platform his skills needed no guidance. In five weeks he packed in fifty-seven meetings, as well as a fifteen-minute radio broadcast once a week. He had little outside help, aside from one speech at Lumsden by the maverick Conservative H.H. Stevens, who had returned to the fold after his disastrous 1935 campaign as leader of his own Reconstruction Party.26
The thumbnail biography prepared for distribution to the press by Russell Brownridge described Diefenbaker as
probably the most colourful figure in Saskatchewan seeking election … Possessed of a brilliant intellect and an unusual capacity for hard work … With a gift for lucid and forceful expression, he presents a striking personality both in Court and on the platform … Veteran of many political battles, and always against great odds, he launches into each new effort with the courage and confidence of one who believes wholeheartedly in the justice of his cause … He sailed for France in 1916 a Lieutenant in the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles. While on active service he was wounded and spent several months in the hospital … Though a Baptist in belief, he supports numerous religious and charitable organizations.27
Diefenbaker had decided on his political strengths: he was “a striking personality” with a reputation for battle “against great odds”; he was a champion of justice and a patriot. Those were the characteristics that moved his audiences, the qualities that would make – or break – his career in politics. They were the stuff of legend. He hoped they would finally carry him upwards.
With the national party’s limp and self-effacing appeal for a national coalition, Diefenbaker was able, in effect, to make up his own platform. He called for a legislated floor price for wheat to satisfy prairie farmers. He revived the old charges that Liberals were spreading fear among immigrants that a Manion government would deprive them of their naturalized status as Canadians. He accused the King government of “a marked tendency towards dictatorship.” He attacked the pacifism of CCF leader J.S. Woodsworth. And in his closing broadcast he accused his Liberal opponent of “a deliberate lie” in claiming that he, Diefenbaker, had been a First World War conscript. He was a volunteer. “Johnston’s statement,” Diefenbaker said with a certain sweep, “reflects on everyone who enlisted in the twenty months preceding conscription.” This claim of youthful patriotism, he was later convinced, brought him “quite a number of votes.”28 There was no harm in emphasizing his own loyalty in two world wars and displaying his talent for righteous indignation.
On election night, during a spring blizzard, John and Edna were at home in Prince Albert with their close friends Lome and Mabel Connell and Diefenbaker’s partner Jack Cuelenaere. The national results, reported on CBC radio, were depressing. Manion himself was defeated, and the Conservative Party returned just forty members – exactly as in 1935. King’s Liberals elected 181 members, for a gain of eight seats. On the prairies, the Liberals elected thirty-one and the Conservatives only three. But John Diefenbaker was in, by a slim margin of 280 votes. He discovered his victory only after radio reporting had closed down for the night, when Jack Cuelenaere called Liberal headquarters in Regina for their latest count. Diefenbaker joined Ernest Perley as the second Saskatchewan Conservative in the new parliament, an MP at last.29
From Victoria, where his parents had been wintering with Elmer, Mary Diefenbaker wrote to express a mother’s pride – and to offer a bit of homely advice. She saw the world from the point of view of an honest and unprivileged outsider, acknowledged her son’s ambition, and urged her values on him.
The Battle is over and the victory won, and I bet you feel pretty proud of your self. Well I feel that way myself, so do we all! you put up a good fight and you must be very tired. I can see by your letter that the aim of your ambition is to fill Kings chair, well I think you will get there some day, if you work hard enough. There is a lot of hard work ahead, for there has to be some changes in this old world of ours. The rich have to live on less and the poor have more than they have to day, and I hope you will be one of them that will work for those changes, what ever they may be. and I want you to be honest and upright in all you do, and dont try and get rich on other peoples money, you will find that it pays in the end, to be honorable and just at all times. I dont want to preach to you. but I mean all I say, and I think you will do just what I want you to do.30
In a letter written the same day, John’s father also looked ahead: “As to leadership … I am exceedingly well pleased that you have got on to a foundation … where you can no longer be prevented to show what you can do … Edna’s natural ability to be bright and polite should add materially in the advancement of your future political successes.”31
SPRING ARRIVED ON THE CANADIAN PRAIRIES AS THE BUOYANT COUPLE PREPARED TO depart for Ottawa and John’s first session of parliament. Their personal fortunes had been revived in electoral victory, but this was otherwise a time of profound and deepening anxiety. The phoney war of winter gave way, on May 10, to the German invasion of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, a vast blitzkrieg aimed at the heart of France by a flanking attack around the defences of the Maginot Line. The same day Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister of Britain in a wartime coalition government. That night the Diefenbakers boarded the train for Ottawa, and by their arrival on May 13 German armies had crossed the River Meuse and entered France. Soon Panzer divisions were sweeping towards the Channel ports in a daring effort to encircle large parts of the French and British armies. Remnants of the French forces were retreating south in disarray, and in Paris official documents were being burned in ministry courtyards. On May 20 German tanks reached the mouth of the Somme and cut off the allied armies to the north. From May 27 to June 4 England’s little ships and sailboats took off 337,000 soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk, two-thirds of them British and one-third French.32 These momentous events overshadowed preparations for the opening of the nineteenth Canadian parliament.
When John Diefenbaker sat down for breakfast in the CNR dining car on May 11, he was joined accidentally at the table by another freshman member of parliament, the Liberal James Sinclair from Vancouver. Soon Edna, “a viv
acious, attractive redhead,” came to breakfast as well. She announced to Sinclair that her husband was a new Conservative MP whose acquaintance would be helpful “because he is going to be prime minister.” Sinclair asked: “Didn’t your husband run quite often?” “Five times,” she replied. “Just like Robert the Bruce! The spider, up and down, up and down. But my husband will help you.” Sinclair doubted that, “because I am a Liberal MP.” The conversation broke up in laughter.33
Sinclair was an immediate friend. Edna’s charm, he remembered, helped him to decide that he should no longer postpone his own wedding. After breakfast John returned to his compartment to read, while Sinclair and Edna carried on their conversation in the parlour car. “I was very attracted to her personality. I remember she had deep dark red hair and great blue eyes. We were sitting side by side talking and John came in. He said he worked so hard, that was why he had stayed back there alone. We got quite a relationship going. Four or five times a day she would remind John he was going to be prime minister.”34
As the Diefenbakers travelled back and forth between Ottawa and Prince Albert over the next five years, this pattern of easy acquaintanceship in the dining and observation cars was maintained. Edna usually made the relaxed initial contacts, always preparing the way admiringly for her husband. “During these encounters,” wrote Simma Holt, “John was humorous and friendly and people never forgot him; they talked about those train meetings years later. In the parlour car the routine would continue in the same manner. Edna had set the stage; now John took over. They both enjoyed this teamwork and knew they were good at it. They were proud of each other and of the way they worked together so effectively.” On the trains, in the early 1940s, the couple showed the same open affection for each other that had been so evident in Prince Albert ten years before.35
