by Denis Smith
Given Diefenbaker’s 1958 majority and his mastery of the House of Commons, the accusation of critics that he ran a “one-man government” was bound to arise. Blair Fraser of Maclean’s devoted a column to the subject in March 1959 and carefully qualified his judgment. He had no doubt that Diefenbaker was “a towering figure” who dominated his cabinet, but that did not mean imposing his will on them. Rather - as the cabinet record confirms - he gave them unlimited opportunity to express their opinions, provoking their frequent annoyance at his delays. He dominated by monopolizing ministers’ time in endless meetings - often on Saturdays and Sundays - and by hectoring them about attendance. He seemed to need consensus.7 The astute political insider Roy Faibish commented about the work of cabinet committees he attended:
If there wasn’t a consensus and he didn’t think the person holding out was a fool, to the exasperation of those of us who knew we were on the right course and wanted to get on with it, he would roll it over, bring it up another time, try to bring him around, almost like a lawyer trying to bring a jury around so you’ve got all the twelve heads nodding. In the end he usually decided, but he took so long that he was accused, properly, of procrastination.
Parallel with the accusation that he was a one-man government was the charge that he was indecisive. He wasn’t indecisive. He took a long time making up his mind because he had difficulty being arbitrary.8
Someone else might call that indecision. The hesitation reflected Diefenbaker’s effort to avoid personal blame for political errors. “If something went wrong,” George Hees recalled, “he didn’t want to be the person that had made the wrong decision. If a thing went right he took the credit for it, but he never took the blame if it went wrong.” So he set his ministers off arguing to eventual consensus - or to exhaustion.9 Diefenbaker would range slowly down the cabinet agenda, seeking opinions around the table, jotting notes on responses, rarely offering his own views, and postponing any outcome in the absence of consensus.10 His desire to escape blame was more than a political instinct: It was something more personal, even anti-political, an absence in his political makeup. Eventually that absence crippled him. For now, it was a source only of murmurings in cabinet and among idle back-benchers.
The prime minister was not an active policy-maker. He came to power with a few general objectives, no timetable, and no strategy. Above all, his instincts were tuned to his daily portion of adulation - and to the next general election. He did not normally intrude on the legislative programs of his ministers, or on the administration of their departments. His interest, in cabinet, was to weigh the political consequences of measures - and if they seemed risky, to move with the utmost caution. Otherwise, he was happy to give ministers their heads.11
Diefenbaker had no patience with discussion of long-term policy in cabinet: immediate issues and immediate public attitudes were his concern. “Occasionally we did make an attempt,” Davie Fulton recalled, “but … the prime minister would be quite insistent … you were engaged in things that were going to erupt. So we would sort of let things go … finally we just simply accepted what the prime minister seemed to want.” If ministers persisted, Diefenbaker implied that they had hidden motives. “Your motive might be your own cause, or to undermine him; that began to be apparent in cabinet. There was tension in cabinet, and disappointment in cabinet, and frustration in cabinet.”12
The secretary of cabinet, Robert Bryce, managed the agenda and the staff budget. Diefenbaker depended on that one, firm source of order in an office that was otherwise disjointed and undisciplined. Although Bryce was the permanent civil servant responsible for the work of the Privy Council Office, there was not yet any clearly organized prime minister’s office. It was emerging gradually, through effusion from the Privy Council Office. Diefenbaker had insisted on a small staff, with a budget no larger than that of the St Laurent office (about $50,000, not including his own salary). After Derek Bedson left to join Duff Roblin in the summer of 1958, Allister Grosart complained to Diefenbaker that the office had no focal point. But the prime minister would not make up his mind on a successor. Finally, as “about the sixteenth choice,” Grosart suggested hiring a young Conservative lawyer from Vancouver, Gowan Guest. Although Grosart told Guest that Diefenbaker had no idea what Guest would do - and Diefenbaker confirmed it in his own telephone conversations - Guest agreed to join the office as the prime minister’s private secretary in August. He set out for Ottawa in his Ford convertible, on the prime minister’s helpful advice to “go across Montana.” When he arrived in Ottawa and inquired further about his duties, Diefenbaker told him: “I expect you to figure that out.” He told Guest that he had no idea what anyone in the office did, aside from his personal secretaries. So Guest tried to take charge of “the process affecting Diefenbaker”: his correspondence, his visitors, his briefing materials. Guest had some success in clarifying the duties of the office staff, but none in imposing order on Diefenbaker himself. He soon learned that the Chief’s habit was to let things flow around him as he responded to crises and immediate enticements. Anyone within range, at any time, might be called upon for “stuff” for speeches; anyone was a suitable audience for the prime minister’s latest belly laugh. “Stuff” did not mean a draft speech. It meant “sound cadences, ideas, bits and pieces,” usually gathered from several sources and assembled in an untidy bundle. Diefenbaker told Guest that the content of his speeches was unimportant.13
Almost a year after joining the prime minister, Guest confronted Diefenbaker with a three-page memo on office organization, neatly assessing “The Problem,” “The History,” “The Solution,” and “The Personnel.” “The basic problem,” he wrote, “is lack of executive direction.” Guest proposed either that the whole operation should be reabsorbed by the Privy Council Office or that a “responsible head” should be named to run the prime minister’s office. He favoured the latter, and suggested his own interim appointment as “Executive Assistant to the Prime Minister … personally accountable … for any and every failure in the office, and for the overall provision of any and every service required by the Prime Minister.” The effort failed: Guest got the title, but not the responsibility. Diefenbaker would not delegate his authority to a chief of staff.14
By the autumn of 1960 Guest had lost his early enthusiasm for the job and returned to his law firm in Vancouver. Despite the confusion generated by the Chief, Guest left him with genuine affection. He told Diefenbaker that he was thankful “for a friendship, an experience and an opportunity the like of which no other young Canadian has ever been privileged to have.”15 Meanwhile Merril Menzies, the brilliant idea man of 1957 and 1958 who had languished for more than a year as a casual adviser in the prime minister’s office, resigned in frustration to take a civil service appointment. He had vainly sought to convince Diefenbaker of the need for long-term economic planning from a Conservative perspective. The Chief could not see the point.16
DIEFENBAKER CONTINUED TO CULTIVATE HIS FRIENDSHIPS WITH THE PRESS, BUT relations changed - at first subtly, then more crudely. In 1957 and 1958 those ties had paid political dividends, and he expected the advantages to continue. He offered privileged access, scoops, enticing hints, and trial balloons to Peter Dempson of the Telegram, Richard Jackson of the Ottawa Journal, Patrick Nicholson of Thomson Newspapers, James Oastler of the Montreal Star, Charles Lynch of Southam, and more favourites.17 To others he gave occasional benefits, such as places on the prime ministerial aircraft. In return, he wanted respect and loyalty. First came respect, for him and for the office of prime minister. He was no longer “John.” In the press scrum that Diefenbaker attracted in the corridors of the East Block, reporters yelled questions at him and thrust microphones into his face. If they called him “John,” they could expect an invitation into his office and a personal rebuke. “What happened?” reporters asked Jean Leblanc of Canadian Press on one of these occasions. “He gave me hell for calling him John. He said he’s prime minister and he should be called prime minister.�
�18
Then came the expectation of loyalty. Diefenbaker saw it as the decent balancing of favours. When Charles King of Southam Press accompanied him to Vancouver in September 1958 for an honorary degree ceremony at the University of British Columbia and then on to a fishing expedition in the Yukon, the prime minister took for granted a friendly report. Instead, King wrote that the other degree recipients, Mike Pearson and M.J. Coldwell, had received louder applause than Diefenbaker (to his “consternation”), and that the excursion to the Yukon had cost $10,000 in public funds for one small trout. When Diefenbaker read the stories on the return trip, he exploded at King’s discourtesy.19 If old buddies turned objective or critical, Diefenbaker saw them as traitors. The Montreal Star’s James Oastler told Peter Newman:
After John became prime minister, he expected that his past friendship with reporters would prevent them from criticizing his performance. He felt … that you’re either wholeheartedly for him, or you’re against him. He refuses to understand that good newspapermen - even those who were his cronies - can’t let personal feelings interfere with their objectivity. Because he can’t comprehend the motives of correspondents who write critically about his administration, he interprets their comments as personal insults. At the same time, the reporters who had been his friends also feel betrayed, because he no longer shares his confidences with them. Of course he can’t. No prime minister can. The office necessarily formalizes human relationships.20
But Diefenbaker did, for a time, make mischievous use of his closest confidants, Richard Jackson and Peter Dempson, to test the winds on appointments and policies - forgetting his hints and claiming innocence when public reactions to their speculations were hostile.21 As the government faced more and more contentious problems, the relationship soured. Journalists sensed the prime minister’s devices and began, in Nicholson’s words, “to seek out rather than to shun opportunities to criticize Diefenbaker’s administration and to present him in an unfavourable light.”22 One after another, Diefenbaker came to distrust his old intimates in the gallery and to cast them among his permanent foes. In his greatest furies of betrayal, there would be angry calls to friendly publishers or editors to register the latest black marks against their hacks. Occasionally that led to firings or reassignments.23
In Toronto, Diefenbaker counted on the editorial support of both the Telegram and the Globe and Mail. The editor of the Globe, Oakley Dalgleish, provided Diefenbaker with good offices in his dealings with the premier, Leslie Frost, and influential advocacy in the business community. The Telegram offered more populist access to urban voters, and Diefenbaker made sure that his links with the publisher, John Bassett, flourished. As so often with Diefenbaker’s close political friendships, this one had a personal side as well. Bassett and Diefenbaker carried on regular correspondence and visited one another along with their wives. “I became devoted to him and I felt he had the same feelings for me and looked on me almost as a son,” Bassett recalled.24 The prime minister valued Bassett’s advice on policy, which was appealingly laced with flattery. After Diefenbaker’s first attendance at the NATO Council in December 1957, Bassett told him that he was “a man touched with true greatness and of international stature.”25 After the 1958 election Bassett wrote, “You have revolutionized Canadian politics in the best sense, and … through your personality you have put public affairs back in the public realm.”26 In March 1959 he praised Diefenbaker’s kindness and humanity.
I was more touched than I can tell you that you would come to the airport to meet me and then again later in the day you were not too busy to carry on a long telephone conversation with a worried painter who was afraid that he was going to lose his job. I was once more impressed by your very deep and real concern for other people. I think it is this faculty, which you are also able to impart to others, that you really do care about them that lies at the base of your great political success. How unusual it is to see one who is unchanged by such a triumph as has been yours, and because you are unchanged I am sure your triumph is but the beginning.27
Bassett’s “ardent support” was reflected in the Telegram by steady editorial praise and endlessly favourable reporting and photographic coverage of the prime minister.28 In 1960 Diefenbaker responded by inviting Bassett to become Canadian ambassador to the United States. Bassett gracefully declined after an evening in New York with Lord Beaverbrook, who advised him that “the idea is preposterous.” “You would be exchanging a seat of power,” Beaverbrook thundered, “for the life of a messenger boy … A flunkey! If you want to go into politics yourself, actively, there is only one way. You must be an elected representative. You must stand for Parliament, if that is what you want. If you accept this job you will do yourself and your friend and sponsor an equally bad turn. Diefenbaker will be criticised for conferring a political favour. You will be a political liability … It would do you ill and do him ill.”29 Bassett took Beaverbrook’s advice and became a candidate in 1962.
The press could be cosseted and openly criticized, if it could not be controlled. Dealing with the CBC was more perplexing. As the Conservative Party had promised, legislation created the Board of Broadcast Governors in 1958, removing the CBC’s general regulatory role. Under the BBG, commercial television stations unaffiliated with the CBC - including Bassett’s CFTO - were soon licensed as its competitors.30 The managerial adjustment resulting from the CBC’s rapid growth and changing status had proven difficult, and in December 1958 a bitter producers’ strike began in Montreal over union recognition. The conflict dragged on for three months, through picket-line violence, a strikers’ “march on Ottawa,” disputes between Minister of Revenue George Nowlan and Léon Balcer over the strike’s legality, accusations from the striking French-speaking producers of an English-speaking conspiracy against them, and various failures of mediation that led, eventually, to recognition of the union and a settlement in March. In the midst of battle the new president of the CBC, Alphonse Ouimet, collapsed with a heart attack. Nowlan (who reported to parliament for the CBC) learned quickly from the complex affair and adjusted his approaches, but Diefenbaker and other English-speaking ministers remained baffled and insensitive. The conflict hardened the nationalist views of Quebec producers like René Lévesque, and heightened the growing alienation of the two language communities. For Diefenbaker it was nothing more than an unfortunate labour-management dispute.31
Meanwhile, political commentary on CBC radio and television remained a nuisance to the government and annoyingly beyond its reach, since all parties accepted the formal independence of CBC programming. For Diefenbaker’s taste, and that of many Conservative MPs, CBC political broadcasts too often purveyed Liberal or socialist propaganda that undermined support for the government. The prime minister did not hide his distaste from colleagues and reporters, but could not give direction to CBC management without being accused of impropriety or censorship. By April 1959 ministers were expressing their concern in cabinet that too much CBC commentary was “unjustifiably and unnecessarily critical of the government.”32 Friendly journalists like Patrick Nicholson reflected the prime minister’s judgments in their columns, and there is no doubt that the acting CBC president, Ernest Bushnell, was aware of displeasure in the prime minister’s circle. One Sunday in March while John Bassett was lunching with the Diefenbakers at 24 Sussex Drive, for example, they listened to what Bassett called a “vitriolic attack” on the prime minister by the reporter Michael Barkway on CBC radio. Bassett telephoned Bushnell in Diefenbaker’s presence to tell him that Barkway’s comments had been “vicious … unbalanced and indefensible, “while Diefenbaker sat enjoying the tirade. “Imagine that,” Bassett remembered the Chief’s comment. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to talk to those fellows like that, Olive?”33
A major source of Conservative annoyance was the early morning program, “Preview Commentary.” In mid-June Bushnell ordered the program cancelled, leaving the impression with the Toronto producers that the decision had been made under pressure
from the government. The word in the CBC was that “heads would roll” unless the program disappeared. The supervisor of talks and public affairs, Frank Peers, and thirty-four national producers thereupon resigned. The Commons was in uproar. Nowlan insisted, as he always had done, that “I have made no representations to the CBC, directly or indirectly, at any time or at any place, with respect to any program of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.”34 Within days the CBC board of governors overruled Bushnell and ordered reinstatement of the program. Most of the producers returned. A subsequent parliamentary inquiry was unable to find any proof of political interference, although Nowlan freely admitted that he had let Bushnell know that he thought the CBC “was very loosely run” and should avoid controversy. Evidence was given that Bushnell had spoken to Ouimet of “this megalomaniac Diefenbaker.” Although Nowlan and Diefenbaker were more careful after this episode to avoid any hint of direct interference, other ministers wished differently. For journalists, the lesson of the affair seemed to be that reporting about this government demanded constant vigilance. The gap was widening inexorably.35
THE CRISIS THAT PROMPTED MICHAEL BARKWAY’S CONDEMNATION OF THE Diefenbaker government in March 1959 was provincial in origin, another glancing blow that helped to wear away the sheen of the 1958 victory. In January the International Woodworkers of America had struck the Grand Falls, Newfoundland, mill of the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Corporation in the first serious bid to improve working conditions for the province’s loggers. The company employed scab labour to keep the logging camps operating, the strikers set up roadblocks, and the company called for RCMP escorts for their trucks. (The RCMP served under contract as the provincial police force.) But the blockade succeeded, and the mill’s lumber supplies ran down. The company faced defeat. It was supported by a sycophantic local press and some of the province’s religious leaders, who warned against surrender to a foreign union aiming to dominate the province. Within a few weeks, writes Joey Smallwood’s biographer Harold Horwood, “an atmosphere of hysteria began to build, a kind of public madness that had not been seen in Newfoundland since the days of the religious riots more than half a century earlier.”36
