by Denis Smith
By this time it seemed clear to Mackenzie King and his party that the election could be fought on postwar issues. On April 12, after consultation with his cabinet, King announced that the general election would take place on June 11, 1945. After a brief interlude in San Francisco to bask in the glory of the founding conference of the United Nations, he returned to Canada in mid-May to open the Liberal campaign. For him this would be an election of “sharpened barbs carefully concealed by platitudes,” emphasizing his own long experience of government and the opposition’s inadequacy.27 The Liberals offered Canadians the attractive prospect of welfare, full employment, national unity, and international cooperation; the Conservatives, they claimed, offered racial division and Tory reaction. On the left, the CCF preached a more progressive message of reform and government activism, warning against a return of destitution under Conservative rule. Mackenzie King’s response to the CCF was to appeal for votes that would count towards a majority, to ensure “strong and stable government in Canada in these very critical years.”28
Conservative national advertising stressed the earnest character of John Bracken, “this Lincolnesque man - who has never known defeat at the polls.”29 Despite the formal platform of the party, which still reflected the progressive tone of the Port Hope conference, Bracken chose initially to conduct a negative campaign against the King government’s hesitations on the conscription issue. King’s policy, he charged, was “one of irresolute and feeble compromise” intended to satisfy a disloyal minority.30 The Conservatives, by contrast, would commit all conscripts to fight in the Japanese war. The party, which managed to nominate only thirty-one candidates in Quebec, had clearly abandoned all hope there, but it squandered support in English-speaking Canada with such bravado. There was no international pressure on Canada to shift its conscript forces to the Pacific, and no obvious target for Canadian military operations. As Canadians turned away from the tensions of war with relief, the Conservative campaign made no sense.
According to his habit, Diefenbaker conducted a highly personal campaign in his constituency of Lake Centre. He defied his party on troops for the Japanese war.31 He campaigned for the construction of a South Saskatchewan River dam, a perennial enticement offered to voters by Jimmy Gardiner at election times and lost in the mists thereafter. John’s brother, Elmer, was the reputed author of one of the Lake Centre slogans in that campaign: “It’ll be a dam site sooner if John is elected.”32 Despite the reassurances of his organizer that “you have nothing to worry about,” Diefenbaker could foresee the real possibility of defeat, and he campaigned at a frantic pace.33
In Ontario the federal campaign was accompanied by a provincial election, and on June 4 the Conservative government of George Drew won a powerful majority. While that gave the national Conservatives a brief tonic, its real effects on the national campaign were obscure. Mackenzie King rationalized the Liberal defeat as a victory for majority government, a check on CCF hopes, and a spur to Quebeckers to reject the dangerous federal Tories in that province. While he expected to lose seats to the Conservatives in their Ontario heartland, he predicted a solid Liberal majority in the country.34 In retrospect, Diefenbaker judged that “Drew, in beating back the CCF threat in Ontario, had exhausted the party’s resources at a time when they were most needed federally.”35 National opinion polls gave the Liberal Party a comfortable lead of 39 percent, to 29 percent for the Conservatives, 17 percent for the CCF, and 5 percent for the nationalist Bloc Populaire. Wide regional variations meant that the figures would not necessarily translate into House of Commons seats.36
The election result was a disappointment to both Liberals and Conservatives. The government’s majority was pared to the margin, with 125 seats, while the Conservatives elected 67, the CCF 28, Social Credit 13, and independents 11. In Quebec, King won 53 out of 65 ridings, but in Ontario his seats fell from 55 to 34, and in the West from 44 to 19. In Ontario the Conservatives were the beneficiaries, with a total of 48 seats - or more than two-thirds of their total membership in the House. In the west, the CCF were the victors - especially in Saskatchewan, where Jimmy Gardiner and John Diefenbaker were isolated survivors in a sea of eighteen socialists. The prime minister lost his seat in Prince Albert, and was elected in a summer by-election for the Ontario constituency of Glengarry.37
Bracken won his own contest in Neepawa, Manitoba, but the great hope that he could deliver the west to the Conservatives was unfulfilled. After 1945 the Conservative caucus was more, not less, dominated by its Ontario contingent, which now included twelve members from Toronto alone. They showed slight desire to give Bracken another chance. Diefenbaker wrote that “Bracken was now labelled a loser. The Liberal argument that Mr. Bracken did not have the knowledge of national affairs so necessary for one occupying the position of Leader was widely disseminated through the press, and was even widely accepted among Conservative party supporters.”38
For three years more, Bracken led the party in the House conscientiously but without inspiration, a drab leader with no clear sense of purpose, increasingly disspirited by the party’s drift. Drew’s Ontario supporters were now aggressively pursuing the succession on his behalf, and, without any broader constituency, Bracken lacked authority to put them down. His resistance was gradually worn away.
Meanwhile, the country entered an era of postwar readjustment and economic growth under Mackenzie King, while Canada established its reputation abroad under the internationalist leadership of Louis St Laurent and his activist aides at External Affairs. The King government, with the support of its enlarged and highly competent wartime civil service, began its planning for peacetime in the midst of war. Its chief objects were to avoid a postwar depression, to provide citizens with national minimum standards of welfare, to preserve tolerable relations between French- and English-speaking Canadians, and to take Canada’s place as a fully independent middle power on the international stage.
The Liberal cabinet was subtly transforming itself from a party government into something more all-embracing and permanent - an administration built on wide national consensus that included the open or tacit support of business and the senior civil service. In the public mind, the prospect of any alternative to a Liberal government grew dim. Certainly, in that atmosphere of postwar complacency at home and new strains abroad, Bracken’s Progressive Conservatives offered no real challenge. If they had a continuing role, it seemed limited to vigilant criticism in the House, meant to keep the governors honest.
Diefenbaker was not an opponent of Bracken’s continuing leadership, but neither was he a fervent advocate. He believed, with undoubted accuracy, that the Conservative Party had been governed too long for its own good as a private club. Like Bracken, he was not a natural ally of the Toronto power-brokers, and he had come to Ottawa with his suspicions of the party’s reactionary core well entrenched. More than that, by habit and instinct he was not a team player. He followed his own course in the House, sometimes in conflict with the caucus. His new colleague Donald Fleming - a peppery Toronto lawyer and former city councillor - soon noticed that Diefenbaker played shamelessly to the press gallery and could not be relied upon for regular and slogging work in committee. He had a reputation in caucus as “a prima donna and a loner” who resented being upstaged, bore mysterious grudges, and had frequent temper tantrums.39 He seemed to trust only those few acolytes who gave him complete and uncritical support. His manner provoked doubt or resentment among other members of caucus, who suspected his radical instincts and pressing ambition, were jealous of his flair for the limelight, or thought him untrustworthy and unpredictable. He sensed and perhaps exaggerated these doubts, but would not change his ways. He knew that he would have to make his way to the leadership he coveted by finding support beyond the traditional centres of power in the party.
Thus Diefenbaker understood and shared Bracken’s wish to create a new party around the old. But he saw also, after 1945, that Bracken himself had failed. Diefenbaker could not participate in To
ronto’s covert efforts to displace Bracken, because he knew that George Drew was the favoured successor. But equally, he saw in the succession his own chances too. He knew that Bracken would not last, and he believed that, when the time came, a convention would not necessarily deliver a foregone verdict as it had in 1942. The need to cut into the Liberal consensus by appealing to progressive sentiment in the west and elsewhere would remain, unless, by some miracle, the party could make a breakthrough in Quebec in alliance with the Union Nationale. But that would be a project for the right wing, not for Diefenbaker. By 1946 John Diefenbaker was unchallenged in caucus as the spokesman for progressive causes. With broader contacts, a stronger national reputation, and better organization than in 1942, he thought he might carry off the succession. And if not? Well, most of the time he knew he was in this game for life. He nurtured, and was sustained by, his old sense of destiny.
The lacklustre Conservative caucus was strengthened in 1945 by the addition of some promising new members, including Donald Fleming, the reformist Toronto businessman J.M. Macdonnell, the bright young British Columbia veteran E. Davie Fulton, the veteran officers George Pearkes and Cecil Merritt, and the Calgary oilman A.L. Smith. Fulton and Pearkes were already admirers of Diefenbaker, and he returned their faith with advice and guidance about the ways of the House.40
Diefenbaker was in sympathy with the broad lines of government policy, but he prodded at its weak spots as he sensed them: the maintenance of wartime regulation and secrecy, the inflated central bureaucracy, excessive government spending, and a worrying indifference to the rights of citizens. The issues he chose for emphasis broadened his own reputation as a champion of decency and individual rights as much as they gave benefit to his party.
With the end of the war, the Grand Alliance of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union had rapidly fallen apart in mutual distrust. One element in that collapse involved the defection of the cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa in September 1945, carrying with him information of extensive Soviet spy networks in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The King government handled this unwelcome intelligence like news of some loathsome infection in the family. It sought urgent advice from London and Washington, took unusual steps to prevent any publicity, and prepared for the possibility of quarantined treatment by passing a secret order-in-council under its wartime powers. For five months nothing was publicly known of the affair, and the order-in-council lay dormant. The prime minister cherished hopes that it might fade away entirely, thus avoiding any offence to Soviet feelings. In February 1946, however, news of the defection was leaked to the press in Washington, apparently by frustrated British and American security chiefs who wished to alarm their political bosses about the Soviet challenge.41
Mackenzie King was forced reluctantly to act. A royal commission consisting of two Supreme Court justices, Robert Taschereau and R.L. Kellock, began secret inquiries into Soviet spying under the 1945 order-in-council. On February 15, 1946, fourteen Canadians were detained for secret interrogation, without access to counsel, in a search for evidence that might justify the laying of criminal charges. Prime Minister King confided his political disquiet about these unusual measures to his diary: “I can see where a great cry will be raised, having had a Commission sit in secret, and men and women arrested and detained under an order in council passed really under War Measures powers. I will be held up to the world as the very opposite of a democrat. It is part of the inevitable.”42 King’s fatalism about “the inevitable” reflected a faith even stronger than Diefenbaker’s that his life was under direct management from on high. He saw himself now as God’s chief servant in maintaining freedom against the Soviet hordes.
In March 1946 the commission published three interim reports, leading to arrests and charges under the criminal code and the Official Secrets Act. When the House of Commons reconvened that month, the Gouzenko affair was on everyone’s mind. As King had expected, the case invited Diefenbaker’s indignation, and it formed the theme when he spoke in the throne speech debate on March 21.43 He saw in the case not just the germ of international communism, but a separate disease infecting the Canadian government.
Diefenbaker began with a note of sarcasm that brought interruptions from the Liberal benches: “I have no apologies to offer for the position I intend to take. I have no apology to make for not having received support from the communist party.” The Liberal Party, on the other hand, had received and accepted such support in the 1945 election. An imprudent Liberal remarked that “We are here, though … We are on this side,” to which Diefenbaker responded: “Oh yes. There is the policy; the end justifies the means.”
But this was only mischievous scene-setting. The main charge was that the use of emergency powers to detain and interrogate citizens was a violation of the historic rights of the subject, a violation that reflected the government’s habitual wartime disregard for liberty. It demonstrated the need for a Canadian declaration of rights.
I say, Mr. Speaker - and it is not doctrinaire or a technicality - to say that these orders in council sweep aside Magna Charta, habeas corpus and the bill of rights. Some say the people of Canada are not interested in that. Sir, I do not believe the minds of liberty-loving Canadians, however much they hate communism, have become so apathetic in six years of domination by a state in a period when the political doctrines of regimentation… have been in effect. I believe the time has come for a declaration of liberties to be made by this parliament. Magna Charta is part of our birthright. Habeas corpus, the bill of rights, the petition of right, all are part of our tradition. The United States has its own bill of rights, and I think out of the events of the last few years a responsibility falls upon parliament to assure that Canadians, as well as others in the empire and the people of the United States, should have established by their legislature a bill of rights under which freedom of religion, of speech, of association and of speech [sic], freedom from capricious arrest and freedom under the rule of the law, should be made part and parcel of the law of the country.44
The occasion was telling, and the government was ill at ease in its actions. It could only plead that the overriding needs of security, or reason of state, justified its deeds. A few days later Mackenzie King told the House with “immense relief that the secret order had been revoked.45 Of the eighteen persons eventually tried in Canada, only eight had convictions sustained. In the short run, public opinion supported the government’s actions. But John Diefenbaker - with only a few other members - had found a symbolic issue of conscience and an illustration of the corruptions of power now infecting the King government. The issue was genuine. It was a subject that suited his individualism, his sense of tradition, his sympathy for the voiceless, and his rhetorical genius.
In April and May 1946 he returned to it, in debate on the Canadian Citizenship Act, when Diefenbaker made clear the American inspiration for his views on citizenship and nationality. He noted that the provision of formal Canadian citizenship was supported by the official opposition, but embellished that support with arguments notably his own. The bill, he said, “achieves a lifelong dream of mine” that Canadians should enjoy “a new vista of their responsibilities and privileges as citizens.” He hoped that the bill would help “to encourage and develop in this country mutual trust and mutual tolerance … for Canada’s destiny and Canada’s future can and will never be achieved on the basis of racial prejudice.”46
His objective, beyond the legislation, was to see the creation of “an unhyphenated nation … the prophetic dreams of nationhood, the vision of Macdonald and Cartier, remain as yet to be completed … Canada must develop, now that we achieve this citizenship, unity out of diversity - a diversity based on non-homogeneous peoples of many religions, peoples of clashing economic differences based on distance, and jurisdictional differences as between federal and provincial authorities. The great challenge to our generation is to fuse these clashing differences.” This was the American myth
of the melting pot. He quoted his own words of 1944 in praise of the American example. “As I have said before, no one thinks of Mr. Roosevelt as a Dutch-American. No one thinks of General Eisenhower as a German-American. No one thinks of Mayor LaGuardia of New York as an Italian-American. They are great Americans.”47
For Diefenbaker, the citizenship bill inevitably raised two other issues: the need to eliminate records of ethnic origin from the Canadian census, and the need for a Canadian bill of rights as a declaration of traditional British rights in Canada. The logical links might seem tangled, but for Diefenbaker belief in common citizenship, common rights, and national unity was one whole, born of his prairie experience both personal and political. The identification of ethnic origins in the census offended him as a reflection of prejudices he had felt in his own life. A bill of rights would alert Canadians to the dangers of political intrusions on their liberties like those so recently demonstrated - intrusions that might often have a racial or a religious basis. Later in the debate he attacked the government’s efforts to deport Canadians of Japanese origin under a 1945 order-in-council.48
Diefenbaker’s amendment, to provide for a declaration of rights on the certificates of citizenship issued to new Canadians, was rejected by the government. But Paul Martin, in his reply on behalf of the cabinet, showed his prudent respect for the case made by the member for Lake Centre.49 He reminded Diefenbaker that Canada had adopted the British, not the American, system of government. Canada had no organic law, no revolutionary constitution to which a bill of rights could be attached. Instead the country was, in Tennyson’s words,
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent.50
If parliament desired such a change, it should be accomplished “on the basis of a bill by itself, when all aspects could be considered and all the implications noted, a bill which would be the result of mature and careful judgment,” rather than “a subsection of a section which prescribes conditions for the issue of certificates.”51 Martin was a match for Diefenbaker in parliamentary give-and-take, if not quite in populist instinct. Both the Globe and Mail and the Winnipeg Free Press took up Diefenbaker’s claims that Canadian rights were being steadily whittled away, and many members of the House showed interest in the idea of a Canadian bill of rights. A Globe editorial noted that “too few members of the House of Commons have interested themselves in the liberties of their constituents. There has, however, been one outstanding exception among them. He is Mr. John Diefenbaker, the Progressive Conservative member for Lake Centre. Mr. Diefenbaker has not only been a tenacious but a brilliant and rugged guardian of all civil liberties.”52
