Rogue Tory

by Denis Smith

  Under Goodman’s sure touch, the convention planning committee worked in astonishing harmony for five months, satisfying the pro-Diefenbaker faction with its even-handedness. The spirit of cooperation was undoubtedly aided by the general assumption that Diefenbaker – although he had made no commitment – would not himself be a candidate. But with Diefenbaker there was always ambiguity. When the convention committee met in Victoria in June, it faced potential deadlock over the issue of the leader’s place on the program and the closing time for nominations. The Chief wished to address delegates on the opening night of the convention. Goodman was willing – as long as Diefenbaker himself was not a candidate for the leadership; so he planned that nominations should close that afternoon. Diefenbaker protested that he had a right to address the convention as leader without revealing whether or not he would be a candidate for his own succession. Under threat from the pro-Diefenbaker members of the committee that they would resign at once if his request were rejected – and that Diefenbaker, too, would instantly vacate the leadership – Goodman and the committee made a partial concession. Above all, they were concerned to restore the party’s public reputation for fairness and unity after the discords of the previous years. Diefenbaker would go onto the opening night program whether or not he was a candidate, but nominations would still close before he spoke. For two months Diefenbaker grumbled and threatened in private, until Goodman, after consultation, gave way just two weeks before the convention. Nominations would not close until the morning after Diefenbaker’s address. He would be allowed to keep both country and party in suspense until the last possible moment. It was not clear whether this was, for Diefenbaker, a small private war of personal dignity or part of some larger tactical campaign for advantage. Perhaps he did not know himself.5

  Through the genial summer of centennial year and Expo 67, the Conservative Party prepared, in relaxed mood, for its convention of renewal. Davie Fulton and George Hees had been declared candidates, running hard, since February. Michael Starr, Wallace McCutcheon, and Alvin Hamilton soon joined the field. In June Donald Fleming came in: “running backwards,” as James Johnston put it, apparently prodded out of retirement by Diefenbaker’s encouragement. The three Tory premiers, John Robarts, Duff Roblin, and Robert Stanfield, seemed to be out of the race. Dalton Camp remained an enigma: He showed some preference for Stanfield or Roblin, but did not rule himself out, and kept a shadow organization at the ready. Diefenbaker talked privately with Stanfield about what might have become an endorsement, but that apparently came to nothing because the Chief expressed doubts about the Nova Scotia premier’s stance on the “two nations.” After a landslide provincial electoral victory in May, Stanfield became the focus of increased speculation throughout June. Roblin and Camp played coy until mid-July, when Stanfield entered the race and Camp chose to support his old Maritime compatriot. Two weeks later Roblin, after months of indecision, announced his candidacy as well. With their reputations unsullied by the prolonged civil wars of the federal party, the two premiers quickly came to the front in the race for delegate support. Diefenbaker himself made no preparations for a campaign, although two young enthusiasts, Keith Martin and Bill Hatton, created a skeletal Youth for Dief organization to show their affection for him at the convention. But if Diefenbaker wished to find a challenge in the contest, he could find it in the presence of his nemesis Dalton Camp as chief strategist and speechwriter for Robert Stanfield.6

  Diefenbaker preferred silence on the leadership contest, as his friends provided him with daily accounts of the latest gossip. A series of events during the summer – all of them welcomed and encouraged by the Chief – contributed to the growing Diefenbaker legend. On July 21 he attended the dedication of Diefenbaker Lake, the vast reservoir created on the South Saskatchewan River above Saskatoon by completion of the Gardiner Dam – the two names now twinned forever on the landscape as they had been in political combat over thirty years. In Regina in August, the leader dedicated the old family homestead building, which had been moved by Ross Thatcher’s provincial Liberal government to a new site at Wascana Centre on the grounds of the provincial legislature. Saskatoon gave his name to a city park. And just before the leadership convention, RCA Victor released a long-play recording of Diefenbaker in reminiscence, reading his “I am a Canadian” pledge from his Bill of Rights speech, chuckling and telling anecdotes about his heroes John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Winston Churchill, and R.B. Bennett. The advance order, RCA reported, was the largest in Canadian history.7

  Goodman, Régimbal, and Camp, hoping to supplement the leadership contest with some policy discussion that would restore the party’s credit among the thinking classes, planned a policy conference to precede the convention. It took place at Montmorency Falls, Quebec, at the beginning of August, under the chairmanship of the Ontario minister of education, William Davis. The conference, Goodman felt, was “almost a resounding success.” Just two weeks after Charles de Gaulle made his triumphal progress between Quebec City and Montreal along the chemin du roy and startled Canadians with his cry from the balcony of Montreal City Hall, “Vive le Québec … Vive le Québec libre!” the Conservative meeting threw the party into the maelstrom.

  The conference [Goodman explained] accepted the concept of deux nations not in the sense of two political states, but as a recognition of the country’s two founding peoples: an English community and French community with distinct cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It was an effort to show Quebec that the Progressive Conservative Party was sympathetic to its legitimate aspirations to maintain the existence of Canada’s French culture. Unfortunately, these ideas are difficult to express, but easy to distort. The accusation was made by some of the delegates at Montmorency, led by Dick Bell in a spirited debate with Marcel Faribault, that we were advocating two sovereign states, or separate political status for Quebec. This was the beginning of an issue that was to be shrewdly manipulated by Pierre Trudeau and the Liberals to defeat the Tories in 1968.8

  Before Pierre Trudeau seized upon it, “two nations” was an alarm signal for John Diefenbaker. He denounced the party’s use of the phrase at a press conference on September 1. “When you talk about special status and Two Nations, that proposition will place all Canadians who are of other racial origins than English and French in a secondary position. All through my life, one of the things I’ve tried to do is to bring about in this nation citizenship not dependent on race or colour, blood counts or origin.”9 Two days before the formal opening of the convention, Goodman’s policy committee endorsed the Montmorency resolution for recommendation to the convention.

  BECAUSE HE COULD NEVER BRING HIMSELF TO OFFER HIS RESIGNATION FROM THE leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party, Diefenbaker brought turmoil to his party and disenchantment to his country. For years he filled the air with vague and reckless talk of conspiracies, dark networks of enemies who were working to dismantle Canada or destroy its independence – first in league with Washington, then in league with Quebec, always in league with the Liberal Party. He made the paranoid style dominant in Canadian politics as it had not been since the days of William Aberhart and Mitchell Hepburn; and by the time of the 1966 annual meeting of the party, he found the very conception-point of conspiracy in the mind of Dalton Camp.

  For Diefenbaker, Camp remained thereafter the fount of evil – and the source of the Chief’s own justification. The campaign to destroy John Diefenbaker – which reached its dramatic climax in Camp’s orchestration of the 1966 defeat – was, after all, the campaign to destroy Diefenbaker’s Canada. Personal and national destiny had become one. In the twilight of his life, Diefenbaker had unexpectedly claimed a destiny he had glimpsed in his youth and then lost for decades. After 1957, when the nation responded to his beguiling call, he had found it again. “One Canada” from sea to sea, Macdonald’s and Cartier’s political nation, was to be fulfilled a century later at the hands of their authentic heir. It must not be destroyed, by Pearson, by Kennedy, by Camp, by
anyone. Of course Diefenbaker could not abandon his destiny; of course he could not abandon his leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. What was at stake was not a personal career but a nation. So far had hubris taken him.

  As the party conflicts and the election campaigns revealed, Diefenbaker had many followers in his mission. Some, like Arthur Maloney, were by 1967 followers out of decent loyalty. Some, in the caucus, were followers who knew their political lives depended on the Chief’s presence. Some were admirers – worshippers even – who had been inspired by Diefenbaker in 1958 and had kept the faith. Some – westerners, maritimers, those marginalized by region, race, national origin – were followers because he was one of them. Some were new loyalists won by the persistence and courage of this man under siege. Some were followers because – despite or apart from policy – they found something unbearably smug and arrogant in the Liberal Party, or because they resented its complacency. Some were followers because they possessed the darker prejudices Diefenbaker’s words and silences called forth. Some shared his bitterness. By 1967 it was difficult for Canadians – Conservatives or not – to remain indifferent to the man. The followers who remained with him had made an emphatic choice, as had those who departed to another party or another faction. At the leadership convention John Diefenbaker would draw attention, perhaps for the last time, to the strengths he had added to the party and the divisions he had created within it.

  OLIVE AND JOHN ARRIVED AT THE ROYAL YORK HOTEL ON THE DAY BEFORE THE convention, to be greeted by a crowd of several hundred reporters and spectators, including “eight middle-aged to elderly women with Diefenbaker placards in a kick-line. One of the women held a rose between her teeth.” Close by, James Johnston was confronted by another band of “little old ladies supporting Mr. Diefenbaker,” who mistook him for Dalton Camp and threatened him with physical violence. Diefenbaker – once settled into the vice-regal suite – began to receive a stream of candidates, each of them seeking credit in reconciliation with the old Chief. Eventually all but McCutcheon and Fulton made calls on the leader. He lectured them on the evils of a “two nations” policy – and said nothing definite about his own intentions. On Thursday morning, September 7, the Toronto Star reported that he had told Duff Roblin he would walk out of the convention if it endorsed the idea of “two nations.” The organizers made their final preparations for the televised opening and Diefenbaker’s address at Maple Leaf Gardens – and crossed their fingers about what he might say. No one knew whether he would announce his own candidacy.10

  Maple Leaf Gardens was decked out in blue banners and portraits of all the Conservative leaders since Confederation when Eddie Goodman opened proceedings with his greeting, “Good evening, sports fans,” on Thursday evening.11 Goodman and John Robarts welcomed the audience; and then, to the chairman’s surprise, there was a flurry at the other end of the arena. “The doors at the back of the Gardens suddenly swung open, and behind a swirl of pipers John and Olive Diefenbaker marched in … It was too late for officialdom to stop the display. Goodman was one of the few who seemed to appreciate the irony of it all, and a grin sneaked across his face. He had tried hard to keep Diefenbaker from speaking on the convention’s opening night. But he had lost, and now the old Chief had arrived with his army of pipers, and on national television too.”12 This was the work of the Youth for Dief delegates, whom Diefenbaker had embraced in delicious good humour. Once the hall had settled, Goodman introduced two keynote speakers, Alberta’s promising new Tory leader, Peter Lougheed, and the French-speaking co-chairman, Roger Régimbal. But they were only a sideshow. The crowds awaited the Chief. Anticipating the occasion, the Globe and Mail asked the drama teacher and producer Eli Rill to describe it through professional eyes. His report was headed: “Is Dief Another Barrymore?” “He came on stage with what they revere in the acting profession, the thing they called simply presence – the air of holding an audience’s attention just by being there. And, as any performer does, he made it clear that he could rise above his material, his script – even when he had written the script himself. What he was saying was of less value than how he said it.”

  The supporting cast “faded into the background after the star appeared … But what chance did they have – they were up against the shades of Garrick and Booth and Barrymore.” The doubters soon “fell victim to the magnetism, the projection, the charisma (as the U.S. political mind-benders are calling it now) of Diefenbaker playing front and centre.” Diefenbaker accepted a presentation painting, and stepped to the podium.

  He started low-key, a shade solemn, not to make too sudden a shift from a gift-laden lady’s recital of the history of an obscure painter in water colors. His words, he said, would be inadequate. But he was Mark Antony over Caesar’s body, re-shaping a mixed collection of emotions and attitudes into a unified, loud-voiced People’s Party, “for all Canadians” – and conceivably all for Diefenbaker. With jabbing, emphasizing, accusing finger and head-thrusts that gave no hint of galloping old age, he built towards a passion suitable for defending the Monarchy.

  He quoted Scripture, touched lightly on his party’s support of manly sports, invoked the unpolitical name of Bobby Hull. Then he continued his overt wooing of French Canada – low and vibrant at first, then building to a reverberant punch line – “I shall never agree to second-class citizenship for 6,000,000 people!”13

  He plunged on, the spellbinder stilling the applause-mad audience time and again, holding them in check, playing them like a lyre, his tune a nostalgic paean of East York, Don Mills, all of Canada. When a rhetorical question drew an unexpected answer from the gods, he jumped on it like a tiger, used it to tease still another accent for his thesis. Now he crouched in defiance of the charge that he was growing old. Now, with fist clenched like any melodramatic ham, he turned the jaded gesture into significance.

  His jowls quivered, as he repudiated the disaster-bound course of the Liberal government.

  Now he switched to schoolmaster tones and quoted poetry supporting the One Nation policy. Speaking of devotion and dedication to fighting for those things “I have fought for all my life,” he intoned the great line, “I am still here!”

  We listened, and listened, but he did not finish the drama – a drama that has been longer than the Oresteia and Hardy’s The Dynasts combined. He left us longing for the final curtain – a cliff-hanger if ever there was one. The rest was silence, though Hamlet was not dead. Or was he? Was Lear dead – or was he still raging on the heath, conducting the winds and hurricanes as though they were the Ottawa Symphony?

  And Mr. Diefenbaker spoke, from time to time, in French. Nobody would mistake him for Mounet Sully reciting Racine or Corneille. His accent, quite simply, is agonizing, sometimes reducing the words to gibberish. But by God, we listen, doubly riveted – by the rolling waves of sound, and by the suspense of wondering whether it will mean anything.14

  The speech was a dramatic triumph for the old stager, but it left the national audience puzzled. It had expected a farewell. Next morning a banner headline in the Victoria Daily Colonist read: “He wouldn’t say yes/ He wouldn’t say no.”15 As the nomination lists for the leadership contest were about to close at 10 am, John Diefenbaker issued a brief statement:

  Last evening I stated I could not consider being a candidate for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada if this Party Convention accepts the TWO NATION concept as approved of by the Sub-Committee and by the Policy Committee.

  I remain unchanged and unswerving in my opposition to that concept.

  The TWO NATION Policy is not to come before the Convention until Saturday morning and as nominations close at ten o’clock this morning my name is being placed in nomination.16

  He had no chance of re-election. But he would keep his party in turmoil to the end – and he would go down fighting.

  The same morning the Globe and Mail called the “two nations” resolution “a landmark of clarity.” The words that offended Diefenb
aker read: “That Canada is and should be a federal state; that Canada is composed of the original inhabitants of this land and the two founding peoples (deux nations) with historic rights, who have been and continue to be joined by people from many lands; that the Constitution should be such as to permit and encourage the full and harmonious growth and development in equality of all Canadians.” The Globe commented: “The Canadian who can find in it the seeds of our national disruption, the Canadian who can come away from it convinced that it was concocted with diabolical cunning, is quite a fellow. In fact, he is the fellow that John Diefenbaker is seeking to join him in his cockeyed campaign to have the words deux nations expunged from the record before the convention ends. And, of course, the old chief is finding support. His stock has never been higher – out in Social Credit country. Telegrams have been pouring in – from the Nineteenth Century.”17

  Eddie Goodman knew that Diefenbaker’s nomination spelled trouble: not because he might win, but because he was provoking division at the very moment when the party hoped to regain popularity with a fresh image of unity and reconciliation. Soon after the Chief’s nomination, Gordon Churchill called to ask for a meeting with Goodman and Davis. “Benny,” Churchill said to Goodman, “I want you to know that when Bill Davis puts his report to the plenary session Dief and his supporters are going to vigorously oppose the deux nations resolution.” Churchill, accompanied by the Chief’s friend Joel Aldred, met with Goodman and Davis that afternoon to argue that the resolution would open the way to special status for Quebec. Goodman and Davis could not persuade them that this was a misconception. In frustration, Goodman told them that he had “no intention of letting you fellows destroy this convention and the party.” He would ask Davis simply to table the policy report without comment or debate, and move on. There would be no vote to adopt or reject it. Churchill, whom Goodman accepted as “a man of good, if often mistaken, intentions,” agreed.