by Denis Smith
When Davis presented the report to the convention on Saturday for tabling, only one delegate – Diefenbaker’s spirited advocate Charlotte Whitton – demanded the right to speak. Goodman ordered her microphone turned off, and for a few moments she mouthed silent imprecations until the audience began to boo. “I made a point of order,” Goodman remembered, “stopped the discussion, Whitton screamed ‘Fascist’ and the crisis was averted.”18
After a dull round of nominating speeches and addresses from all the candidates – including Diefenbaker – on Friday evening, delegates trooped to the floor for the balloting on Saturday afternoon. Goodman’s importation of American voting machines, intended to speed up the balloting, caused interminable confusion instead. Lines of delegates snaked slowly forward for the first ballot as the temperature in the Gardens rose to steamy heights. Diefenbaker boasted to reporters from a box seat about the disputed policy resolution: “They didn’t dare bring that before the convention … They had it all arranged. It was going to be done well. It was going to be put through, and everyone was going to look happy … Principles must never be subverted in the hope of political gain.”19 He sat for a while with the ex-leader John Bracken. The Toronto Stars Dominique Clift told Jim Johnston: “I’ve got a theory why he’s doing it. You anglais are funny. You are all masochists. Dief knows what they did to John Bracken, and now they are doing it to him. He wants Bracken there beside him so everybody can see what’s gone on before.” He was joined in his box during the day by his brother, Elmer; his step-daughter, Carolyn Weir, and her son John; and by Helen Brunt, Joel Aldred, and the Paul Lafontaines. Others moved in and out during the voting.20
Finally, the first ballot results were announced. With more than 2200 votes cast, Robert Stanfield was in the lead with 519. Duff Roblin and Davie Fulton were second and third, with 349 and 343 votes. George Hees was next, with 295. Diefenbaker followed in fifth place, with 271 votes. He looked pained and “sank a little deeper into his chair, his tremor more intense.” He took a short walk with Olive, returned to his seat, and huddled in conversation with Gordon Churchill. He did not withdraw. On the second ballot, as Stanfield and Roblin both gained votes, Diefenbaker remained in fifth place with a reduced count of 172. This time, “he went for another walk, then holed up with his advisers, and without Mrs. Diefenbaker, in a small room guarded by police. The rumor spread quickly through the halls that he was writing his resignation, and would announce it when he emerged.” Instead he returned to his seat and voted for a third time. That ballot left Stanfield and Roblin in their steady climb, with Stanfield in the lead. Diefenbaker – still in fifth place – fell to 114. Olive had earlier donned dark glasses, and now “the first few trickles of tears” ran down below them. The Diefenbakers, Walker, Churchill, and Johnston rose to leave with a police escort, a few voices calling after them, “Don’t go, John.” Half a block from Maple Leaf Gardens, Johnston left the limousine to return to the arena with Diefenbaker’s scrawled note of withdrawal from the race.21
It had been a hard day. At the Royal York an aide told reporters that Diefenbaker would not appear again that evening. But less than two hours later, as voting began on the fifth and final ballot – between Stanfield and Roblin – the Diefenbakers took their seats again at the Gardens. When Stanfield’s victory was declared, the Diefenbakers applauded and walked together to the podium. Eddie Goodman introduced the Chief as “the greatest Canadian of the century.” Diefenbaker offered his congratulations to Stanfield, pleaded for loyalty to the new leader, and echoed R.B. Bennett’s retirement statement from 1938: “Don’t, as the fires of controversy rage around your leader, add gasoline to the flames.” In parting he left two more barbed reminders to those who followed.
My course has come to an end. I have fought your battles, and you have given that loyalty that led us to victory more often than the party has ever had since the days of Sir John A. Macdonald.
In my retiring, I have nothing to withdraw in my desire to see Canada, my country and your country, one nation.
But it was, even so, a gracious departure. “A little of the bitterness showed through,” wrote George Bain, “and the short farewell just missed nobility. But it took great courage just to stand there and deliver it at all, for it had been an awful day for him.” As he left the arena and returned to his hotel suite – the burdens relinquished – he had time for conversations with clusters of admirers who would not easily let him pass.22
JOHN DIEFENBAKER WAS NO LONGER LEADER OF HIS PARTY, AND DESPITE HIS PUBLIC concession, he was bitter. His resentment was focused on his successor, Robert Stanfield – who had commented lightly as he began his acceptance speech, “Personally, I’m determined to get along with that fellow Camp.”23 When Diefenbaker and Stanfield met privately at the Royal York Hotel two days later, Diefenbaker began by telling him he was “deeply concerned” by those words. Stanfield responded that he had been under strain, and that after Diefenbaker’s withdrawal he had heard that the Chief had advised his supporters to vote for Roblin. Diefenbaker did not deny the story. Next Diefenbaker expressed concern that when the reporter Gordon Sinclair had asked Stanfield: “Are you going to kick him out of Stornoway at once?” Stanfield had answered: “Well, Stornoway is the home of the Leader of the Opposition.” Stanfield apologized for having made a thoughtless reply, and insisted he would not rush the Diefenbakers out of the house. Diefenbaker challenged Stanfield about new arrangements for his office and staff, and received what he thought was a “noncommittal” reply. In a long memo after the meeting, Diefenbaker described it – perhaps generously – as “cool and reserved,” although he noted that Stanfield “did indicate that he was firmly attached to me.”24 An hour later, in a telephone conversation with Gordon Churchill, Diefenbaker said: “He came to see me a little while ago. It is obvious that he does not want me in the House and it is also obvious that I get out of my office at once although he did not say so. It was also obvious that I should get out of the house.”25
Diefenbaker’s bile rose as he talked further with his supporters during the day. To one friend he reflected that the remark about Camp was “a deliberate slap. I don’t know whether I should have gone back there at the end or not.” He commented to Churchill about George Bain’s commentary: “You will have to get the ‘Globe & Mail.’ It said my speech at the end was quite remarkable. It just stopped short of nobility. Now what kind of bastardy is that.” Next day Diefenbaker wrote: “The press have slain me and now they have mutilated me.”26
But there were unusual efforts to show him kindness. On his seventy-second birthday on September 18, as he was moving out of the leader’s parliamentary offices, the staff gave him a birthday party at the home of his assistant Tom Van Dusen. Diefenbaker told stories to the four youngest Van Dusen children, sang several verses of “an interminable western ballad,” and stayed until late in the evening. Two nights later, the parliamentary press gallery entertained him at an unusual retirement dinner, where he told them that he would never speak in the House again. The vow lasted until late in November.27
Diefenbaker and Olive made a brief visit to Saskatchewan, where his Prince Albert supporters put on a “Carry on, John” rally that attracted fifteen hundred locals. The mayor presented Diefenbaker with a mounted northern lake trout weighing fifty pounds and labelled “You’ve tackled many big ones, Keep Going.” Despite the crowds and the affection, the Chief was unresponsive, still bitter and irritable. He left Prince Albert to attend similar events in Regina and Moose Jaw.28 Diefenbaker returned to Ottawa and his new corner office in the Centre Block, looking out to the northwest across the Ottawa River to the Gatineau Hills beyond Hull. There he hung his giant bluefish and his print of the naval battle from the war of 1812, trophies of his encounters with John Kennedy. Later – when it became clear that Robert Stanfield had decided to keep Dalton Camp at a distance as a signal of reconciliation with the Diefenbaker loyalists – the Chief placed prominently in his outer office a Telegram cartoon of Camp slinking sil
ently away from Ottawa. The national archivist agreed to take Diefenbaker’s papers and records in temporary storage, while two padlocked filing cabinets of his confidential papers remained close by him in his office. He talked of writing his memoirs. During the autumn the Diefenbakers bought their own home in Rockcliffe Park and transformed the basement recreation room into a miniature historical museum decorated with Macdonaldiana, gifts from his foreign visits, Indian headdresses, and the brilliant gowns marking his many honorary doctorates.
The stream of public events flowed on without him. The old man appeared regularly in the House for the daily Question Period and then withdrew, taking no part in his own party’s deliberations in caucus. He had his friends and loyalists still, but hardly felt himself a member of the party that had repudiated him. In November the Ontario premier John Robarts hosted his Confederation of Tomorrow conference of the provinces, and unknowingly began a twenty-five-year cycle of constitutional negotiations. Stanfield won a by-election to parliament in the same month – but Diefenbaker refused to escort the leader as he took his seat in the chamber, and instead stayed away from the House that afternoon. On December 15 Mike Pearson announced his own decision to retire from politics.
When the new leader of the Liberal Party, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, dissolved the House in April 1968 for a June general election, Diefenbaker belatedly accepted nomination in Prince Albert, where his re-election was a certainty. He remained barely on speaking terms with Stanfield. Diefenbaker and Trudeau – both dissidents by nature, both scrappers, both favourites of the media – established an immediate relationship of wary mutual respect. Trudeau endorsed Diefenbaker’s commitment to one nation, and the Chief found perverse comfort in a Prince Albert campaign that was as personal and devoid of association with his national party as in the old days. He wished for Stanfield’s failure. But throughout the west the Conservative Party needed the Chief’s candidacy – however cool he might be to the new leadership and its policies.
For six weeks during the campaign the Diefenbakers occupied a suite in the Flamingo Motel in Prince Albert – where John, during Olive’s absences, exchanged mildly racy jokes with his cronies about Gerda Munsinger and her two ministerial friends, and Olive soothed his frequent fits of distemper. His loyal Prince Albert associates Dick Spencer, Max Carment, Ed Topping, Glen Green, and Art Pearson organized the campaign in a newly enlarged constituency, and found busywork for the sixteen-year-old Youth for Dief refugee Sean O’Sullivan, whom Diefenbaker had unaccountably imported from Hamilton for the duration of the campaign. In Spencer’s eyes, O’Sullivan provided the Chief with adoration, and spoke the words of pain about his rejection that Diefenbaker himself could not express. For the local campaign workers, O’Sullivan’s most useful function was to persuade a contemptuous Chief of the value of promotional “bumperschtickers.” As usual, Elmer was present for the duration, “getting on Dief’s nerves,” O’Sullivan remembered, “and driving Olive crazy … Dief gave Elmer money and Elmer’s task during the campaign was to buy King Edward cigars and pass them out on the Indian reserves on behalf of his brother.”29
Diefenbaker campaigned slowly in his riding, chatting at lunch counters, attending baseball games, casually visiting voters’ homes to drink too much tea and coffee. In his speeches he relentlessly attacked “two nations,” even though no party was committed to the doctrine he imagined, but he gradually added lines that challenged Trudeau’s unspecified policies. As the campaign neared its conclusion, Stanfield sought Diefenbaker’s support at a rally in Saskatoon, an appearance that might somehow distinguish Diefenbaker’s commitment to one Canada from that of Trudeau and the Liberals. Diefenbaker refused, and instead devised an awkward meeting at Saskatoon airport and a joint tour of the Western Development Museum – where they argued over “two nations.” That evening Stanfield told his audience impatiently that he had never been an advocate of “two nations” or “special status” for Quebec. “My impression of the encounter,” Diefenbaker’s constituency president, Dick Spencer, wrote about the meeting with Stanfield, “was that it was a mean-spirited affair on Dief’s part, embarrassing and dangerous to his legend. I knew in my heart that Dief and Mrs. D. couldn’t help themselves, such was the anger and the hurt the very mention of Stanfield’s name could summon. But how much more sensible and honourable a course it would have been to excuse themselves from the Saskatoon rendezvous and stay home with us. It was time for the campaign of 1968 to draw to a close.” Only in two last-minute visits to rallies in Manitoba did Diefenbaker overcome his resentments and offer overt support for the leadership of his successor.30
Across the nation, the wave of adolescent Trudeaumania swept away opposition. On election night, the Chief revelled in Stanfield’s humiliation.
In the Maritime provinces the party made gains, but in Quebec and Ontario it met disaster, and in the west it lost twenty seats. Diefenbaker gloated as his enemies Dalton Camp, Wallace McCutcheon, Marcel Faribault, Jean Wadds, Richard Bell, and Duff Roblin went down in their constituencies. The party won a total of seventy-two seats, twenty-five fewer than the Chief had delivered in 1965. But Diefenbaker won his own seat by 8600 votes over his NDP challenger. “The Conservative Party,” he said on national television, “has suffered a calamitous disaster.” The old man’s eyes that evening “were more than twinkling, they were dancing. It was triumph. And Olive felt imperial. What a night for the two of them!”31 The Diefenbakers returned to Ottawa reinvigorated by the party’s failure.
JUSTIFIED AND WITHOUT OBLIGATION TO HIS PARTY, DIEFENBAKER RANGED FREE IN the new House of Commons, sometimes accepting the party line, sometimes ignoring it with impunity. Behind him he had a loyal claque of old Diefenbaker loyalists. Stanfield’s caucus had even less representation from the cities of the nation, from the educated and the affluent, than Diefenbaker’s after 1965. Stanfield’s advocate Heath Macquarrie thought that the new leader had “a dozen to twenty supporters in caucus, plus the Nova Scotians – less than thirty altogether.”32 He would be forced once more to seek reconciliation with his opponents in the party; and he did so, gradually and patiently. He consulted Diefenbaker from time to time and – despite frequent provocations – always treated him with courtesy and respect. Diefenbaker was reluctant to admit it.
Towards the Chief’s supporters in caucus Stanfield offered a similar display of confidence. Often they did not return it, regarding his tolerance as a sign of fatal weakness. The differences were revealed most dramatically in debate on Trudeau’s official languages bill in early 1969. The legislation established French and English as equal languages in federal departments and agencies; proposed the creation of “bilingual districts” where federal services would be available in both languages; and created a new office of language commissioner responsible to parliament. The measure was as profound an assertion of Canadian values as Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights had been. But given the confusing debate on “two nations” that had preceded it, and the battle that was under way in Quebec over independence, the measure was controversial and easily distorted in English-speaking Canada. In the west, polls showed opposition as high as 70 percent. Robert Stanfield declared his support in principle, but many of Diefenbaker’s loyalists in caucus, under the strident leadership of the Albertan Jack Horner, announced their more passionate opposition. In May 1969 Diefenbaker joined the opponents in a mean House of Commons speech describing the proposed language commissioner as a “commissar,” a “dictator.” He dared Tory MPs to reject the advice of their leader and oppose the bill. On second reading, seventeen Conservatives, including Diefenbaker, voted against the bill and fourteen abstained. Stanfield carried only forty of his members with him. The next day, in caucus, the leader angrily denounced the rebels for forcing a recorded vote. “Their stupidity,” he said, “was exceeded only by their malice. There are some things in a political party one simply does not do to one’s colleagues.” He supported the bill because he sought the survival of a nationwide party, and he would counten
ance no further disobedience. The revolt collapsed under this show of firmness: the party united on all its proposals for amendments, and on third reading the bill passed on a voice vote. Diefenbaker’s claque might be a nuisance and an embarrassment, but the challenge to Stanfield’s leadership was hollow.33
There was one more brazen act in the summer of 1970, when Horner called a meeting of prairie Tory MPs for Saskatoon in August. Ostensibly the meeting would discuss agricultural policy; the real theme was Stanfield’s leadership. Diefenbaker and more than a dozen of his colleagues attended, dodging reporters and acting suitably conspiratorial. “Stanfield,” reported Anthony Westell in the Toronto Star, “had to spend the next week, when he should be undermining the government, hushing and shushing his own people, cooling off the row.” A few days later, in a visit to Alberta, he declared Horner and his group “very stupid” for holding the meeting behind his back.34 Diefenbaker was no longer a prime instigator of mischief, but he was loath to discourage anything that made life difficult for his Tory foes. In September he called reporters to his office to tell them he would not attend his party’s caucus when it discussed the Saskatoon meeting and the issue of unity because the meeting had not been secret. “A closed meeting,” he insisted, “is not a secret meeting.” He added gratuitously that Dalton Camp was again trying to dominate the party. “Psychologists,” he told them, “have long since determined that nothing is more disturbing for the human mind than for a person to have his victim still around after an assassination.”35
