by Conrad Black
CHAPTER 8
St. Laurent and Duplessis, Canada as a Middle Power, and Quebec in Pursuit of Autonomy, 1949–1966
1. Louis S. St. Laurent: Canada’s Distinguished Uncle, 1949–1950
After thirty years in which the unfathomable Mackenzie King had faced a procession of Conservative leaders who never achieved great popularity or a lengthy incumbency, Louis Stephen St. Laurent was received with much enthusiasm. While he was not flamboyant, he was distinguished, straightforward, decisive, equable, had a large and attractive family, a French Canadian who was half Irish, spoke English without a trace of a French accent, had only entered public life as a duty and continued in it on the same basis, and had no motive except to serve the overarching national interest. In his person, he was conciliatory without being for a moment weak or insipid. He was a figure of moral authority, but of an avuncular and professional kind, not in the overbearing, domineering way of Arthur Meighen or R.B. Bennett; there was not at the outset of his career as prime minister, nor at any time afterward, anything substantial that any serious person could say against him. He was particularly friendly with C.D. Howe, who had grown into a unique status almost of a general manager of the Canadian economy, and with Lester Pearson, who had been his understudy in external affairs and whom he, with King, had promoted, and both expected to be the next Liberal leader.
George Drew had become the Progressive Conservative leader on October 2, 1948, and there was some concern that he could make inroads with the Liberals in Ontario, but his former status as an arch-conscriptionist and opponent of family allowances as a shabby payoff to Quebec could, Liberal strategists felt, backfire even in English Canada opposite such a moderate and reputable representative of French Canada as the new prime minister. St. Laurent had made a good impression substituting for King at the Commonwealth Conference in London, as he spoke strongly for solidarity in defence and European political cooperation and a North Atlantic defence community. He also became friendly with the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and upheld the right of India to be a republic yet remain in the Commonwealth, and for the right of all member countries to choose whomever they wished as their chiefs of state. The British monarch became so by virtue of a British dynastic process and those countries of primarily British origin could logically share that monarch with the United Kingdom. St. Laurent and others felt that there was no reason to purport to require all Commonwealth countries to do so, as long as the British sovereign was recognized also as the head of the Commonwealth, if not the chief of state of each member state of the Commonwealth. At this remove, this seems a footling distinction in an organization of uncertain importance, but as the Commonwealth then consisted of Britain and the so-called White Dominions, and India was a very important but new country starting out in the world and rethinking its British connection almost 200 years after the time of Clive of India and 150 years after Warren Hastings, it was an important subject on which St. Laurent spoke clearly and effectively. He appeared, as his biographer Dale Thomson put it, to have the “rather unusual combination of Gallic warmth and Anglo-Saxon reserve, of idealism and common sense,”1 and was a good deal clearer and more forthright than Mackenzie King, whose elliptical formulations had been familiar at these meetings for nearly thirty years and were not missed (though he himself was not underestimated for his qualities). At his first cabinet session as prime minister, St. Laurent took a cigarette out of his silver case and fitted it into his cigarette holder. Most of the ministers were smokers who had abstained in deference to King’s disapproval of tobacco and were relieved to be able to indulge themselves.2
The first parliamentary session of the new prime minister opened on January 26, 1949. St. Laurent and Drew, facing each other, were a more stylish and vigorous duo than had been King, looking his seventy-four years, and the infirm John Bracken (who did not have a terminal illness as King had feared and lived on, out of politics, until 1969, when he died aged eighty-five). King beamed happily on proceedings from the end of the Treasury Bench rather than from one of the party leaders’ chairs he had occupied since 1919. The Throne Speech was a commendable pre-electoral basket. It included ratification of membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the terms of Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation; the St. Lawrence Seaway, at last to admit ocean-going ships to the Great Lakes; a trans-Canada highway; the extension of family allowances; and a royal commission on the arts and letters and science (the Massey Commission).
St. Laurent made a brief visit to President Truman on February 11 to seek his support in the St. Lawrence Seaway project, and Truman promised to do what he could. St. Laurent proposed broadening NATO into economic areas, but Truman was almost exclusively focused on the military alliance. In speaking in favour of adherence to NATO, St. Laurent said the democracies must be armed with overwhelming deterrent force, but not only military force. “It must be economic; it must be moral.”3 Parliament ratified NATO on March 28 with minimal debate and only two dissenting votes (from isolationist Quebec independents). St. Laurent welcomed Newfoundland to the country by radio on March 31, telling that province it was joining “a good country” where Newfoundland’s distinctive personality would be welcomed and not threatened.4 It was on a tour to the West in the spring of 1949 that St. Laurent jocularly said in Saskatchewan, where Tommy Douglas and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) formed the government, that socialists were “Liberals in a hurry.” This was an aside that would lead to controversy.
The House was dissolved for new elections on June 25. The campaign was strenuous physically, but quite jovial; the Conservatives, having little to criticize in the government’s record, accused it of being arrogant, centralizing, and socialistic. Efforts were made to sell Drew as a provincial autonomist in Quebec, and Douglas Abbott, the finance minister, had cut taxes following the electoral disaster sustained by the Liberals in that province. It was another smashing Liberal victory, with 191 MPs and 49.2 per cent of the popular vote (up from 117 MPs and 39.8 per cent in 1945) to 41 MPs and 29.7 per cent of the vote for the Progressive Conservatives (an increase of 2.1 per cent but a loss of 24 MPs). The CCF were down to 13 MPs on 13.4 per cent of the vote (from 28 MPs and 15.3 per cent), and Social Credit was down to 10 MPs and 2.3 per cent of the vote (from 13 MPs and 4.1 per cent). St. Laurent and Drew, as well as the CCF and Social Credit leaders, M.J. Coldwell and Solon Low, were all re-elected personally.
Given the proportions of the government’s election victory, George Drew did the gracious thing and did not move for a vote of no confidence following the Throne Speech. Debate arose over the issue of abolishing appeals from the Supreme Court of Canada to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Duplessis in particular, while unenthused by appeals to England, would prefer that appeals went almost anywhere but to a court entirely appointed by the federal government, given the likelihood of jurisdictional disputes. St. Laurent moved for matters of strictly federal jurisdiction to be appealed no farther than the Supreme Court of Canada, but there was an absence of an early consensus on what to do when the provinces were involved. At every opportunity, Duplessis went through his well-worn refrain about the British North America Act being a “pact” between the founding provinces that created the federal government and retained certain parental rights. St. Laurent even wheeled out the standard and, other than in the most tense instances, somewhat hackneyed rallying cry of the French nationalists from the days of Papineau to the present, that patriation of the process of constitutional amendment would make Canadians “masters in our own house.” Criminal appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had been abolished in 1931 with the Statute of Westminster, but civil appeals were finally abolished in 1949. A number of the committee decisions had been very odd and had limited federal authority excessively, and it was generally recognized that British jurists were too far removed from the issues they would be judging and that any such process had become an affront to Canadian sovereignty.
India’s Pr
ime Minister Nehru came to Ottawa from Washington in the autumn of 1949, and addressed Parliament on October 24. He had been anti-American ever since he had found American boys at Britain’s exclusive Harrow School too aggressive, and American equivocation over the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan, and its insistence on the evils of communism, irritated him. (Successive American presidents of both parties, for their part, publicly disliked Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who was later also prime minister of India.) St. Laurent and Pearson were more impressed than was justified with Nehru and his ostentatious faith in non-aligned foreign policy (as between the American and Soviet blocs), and with his espousal of socialism in domestic policy. Most non-alignment was just hypocrisy, and Indian socialism led to oceanic dysfunction and corruption and impenetrable economic stagnation.
By this time, it was well-known, and in some cases had been publicly stated by St. Laurent, that he favoured dropping “Dominion” from Canadian statutes, having a Canadian governor general, exchanging ambassadors with the Vatican, recognizing the new Communist regime in China (as Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai had won the Chinese civil war in October 1949, and Chiang Kai-shek decamped to Taiwan, where the U.S. Seventh Fleet protected him). But St. Laurent was also averse to fragmentation of opinion, and his experience during the Second World War with Canada’s fissiparous political tendencies made him cautious about putting any pressure on the still-precarious fault lines of Canadian cultural and religious divisions. St. Laurent called a Federal-Provincial Conference for discussion of a formula for amending the British North America Act in Canada. It was an amicable session, and Duplessis referred courteously to St. Laurent personally but accused the federal government of “playing hide and seek” by not making specific proposals. St. Laurent was a former head of the Canadian Bar, as Duplessis was of the Bar of Quebec, and they had known each other well professionally for many years and always signed their letters to each other, no matter how trenchant their jurisdictional disagreements, “Salutations confraternelles” in professional fellowship. The whole amending and appeals question was referred to a committee of attorneys general for later discussion.
Pearson returned from a Commonwealth foreign ministers’ meeting in Colombo, Ceylon, later in January 1950 suffused with a desire to participate in what was called the Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia, and also for recognition of the Communist regime in China. Chester Ronning, an old Asia hand of the foreign service, son of Lutheran missionaries born in China, and former leader of the CCF in Alberta (where he was steamrollered by Social Credit), was chosen to open the diplomatic mission to the Maoist government. He had fairly predictably upbeat views of East Asian communism, but when St. Laurent learned that neither the British, nor even the Indians, had found the Chinese very receptive, St. Laurent decided to go slow, and Ronning went on a diplomatic posting to Norway instead, though he later had extended tours in East Asia.
Eventually, the parliamentary session got round to considering an official residence for the prime minister, and St. Laurent typically insisted that the occupant pay five thousand dollars annually as rent. This was so Canadian and modest that Parliament eventually balked, and the subject could only be debated whenever St. Laurent was out of Ottawa, as he refused to take any part in such discussions.
These very domestic, almost bucolic, matters were interrupted by the outbreak of war in the Korean Peninsula, as North Korea attacked and invaded the South across the thirty-eighth parallel on June 25. The demarcation between North and South Korea had been decreed by two middle officers in the Pentagon one night in the summer of 1945, one of them then Colonel Dean Rusk, a future secretary of state. The South had two-thirds of Korea’s population and a rather larger area than the North. The demarcation was required to advise Japanese armed forces in Korea (a country Japan had occupied since 1895) whether to surrender to Soviet or to American authorities in Korea, as it was not going to be possible to exclude Stalin from Korea at the end of the war as he had been excluded from Japan and Western Europe. (The U.S.S.R. had a short border with North Korea.) It was recounted in Chapter 7 how Mackenzie King had remonstrated with St. Laurent and Pearson and declined to sit on the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea. He had objected to the partition of Korea, but he had no idea of the political realities there and did recognize South Korea as an independent country when it was established under American auspices. St. Laurent and Pearson immediately began calling for an international police force, but this was fatuous in the circumstances, as North Korea had attacked with an army of over ten divisions and the only possible source of successful resistance was the United States.
It was at first assumed that the Soviet Union was behind the attack, out of anger at having been kept out of Japan, and that it was exploiting the omission by Dean Acheson, General Marshall’s successor as secretary of state, of South Korea as a territory within the American defence perimeter in a speech Acheson gave to the National Press Club in Washington on January 12, 1950. Truman remembered the weakness of the West over Axis aggression in Manchuria and Ethiopia in the 1930s, when he had been a senator, and he said, of the collective security system, “In this first big test, we just can’t let them down.” Eisenhower, who was setting up the NATO military command in Paris, said, “We’ll have a dozen Koreas if we don’t take a firm stand.” St. Laurent and Pearson hurled themselves into the battle for a United Nations fig leaf to cover what was clearly going to be a U.S. operation if what Pearson plainly labelled in Parliament on June 26 “an act of unprovoked aggression” by North Korea was not to succeed. By blind luck and a matter of minutes, this at least was accomplished. The UN Security Council condemned North Korean aggression, taking advantage of a Soviet boycott over retention of the Chinese chair by the Chinese Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek, and the abstention of Yugoslavia, whose communist leader, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, had broken with Stalin. The U.S. government let allied governments know on June 27 that the United States would provide military support to the South, and Pearson lobbied the Americans to do so within a UN framework, no matter how transparent a cover it was. There was nothing wrong with this particularly, except that it was based on Pearson and St. Laurent’s conviction that this would somehow diminish the possibilities of a general war in the theatre with China and the Soviet Union. Pearson also asked the Truman administration not to speak of a worldwide communist strategy. The military governor of Japan and American commander in East Asia, General Douglas MacArthur, went to South Korea and began air and sea intervention in support of the South as soon as Truman made his announcement at midday on June 27, and the Security Council, with the Soviets still absent on their ill-considered boycott, asked for American intervention in South Korea, which was already afoot. Pearson correctly told the House on June 28 that while the U.S. intervention was unilaterally undertaken, it was entirely in accord with the United Nations Charter and was retroactively approved by the Security Council. This may have made the lives of St. Laurent and Pearson and a few other people in other governments easier, but it had no impact on the decision of the issue, which would now be a straight test of military muscle and command ability. MacArthur moved four divisions from Japan to South Korea and was appointed United Nations commander in Korea. On the last day of the parliamentary session, June 30, St. Laurent, having confidentially briefed the other party leaders, Drew, Coldwell, and Low, and secured their support, dispatched some destroyers to Korean waters and announced that Canada would participate in the United Nations police action to defeat aggression. There was no dissent in the House.
Pearson and St. Laurent still were flustered that a very strenuous American response could bring in China, as if it were not involved already, and as if a defensive action could be conducted successfully if governed by fear of offending the Chinese Communists. The North Koreans were well-equipped with Soviet T-34 tanks and they outnumbered the South Koreans, even reinforced by four American divisions, by three to one. In the monsoon se
ason, with teeming rains and temperatures steadily above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, MacArthur and his officers conducted a tenacious rear-guard action and gave up only one hundred miles in July as they made an orderly retreat toward Pusan at the southern end of the Korean Peninsula, and Truman poured in six more American divisions and reinforced Pusan. The Americans exploited their great air superiority, though the heavy cloud and intense precipitation mitigated it. MacArthur’s local commander, General Walton Walker, ordered his forces to “stand or die” at Pusan, and promised there would be no retreat and no surrender: “No Dunkirk and no Bataan.” MacArthur spent August preparing his counterstroke.
In Canada, St. Laurent’s difficulties were compounded by the country’s first ever nation-wide railway strike. St. Laurent and the transport minister, Lionel Chevrier, did their best to avoid and then stop the strike, but when mediation failed and the strike began, St. Laurent summoned Parliament and after six days a compulsory back-to-work law was adopted and the strikers obeyed it. St. Laurent and Chevrier handled the emergency capably and with what most of public opinion considered a good balance of concern for the parties and assertion of the national interest. The settlement was reasonably generous for the employees but quite affordable for the companies, who would pass on the increased cost to the public as the economy continued to unwind from ten years of depression and six years of wartime controls.
General MacArthur launched one of the great strategic strokes of modern warfare on September 15 with an amphibious landing in the middle of the Korean Peninsula at Inchon, near the South Korean capital of Seoul. MacArthur had to land his men in a one-hour window at high tide straight onto the seawall, as there were no beaches and thirty-foot tides. In sixty-five minutes, he disembarked 70,000 men from 262 ships while Walker broke out of Pusan. Seoul was recaptured in ten days and the peninsula cut in two and the thirty-eighth parallel restored. Almost the entire North Korean army of nearly 200,000 men was captured or killed or broken up and scattered within two weeks. Rarely in the history of war had there been such a quick turn in so large a combat. For good measure, Truman fired the erratic Defence secretary, Louis A. Johnson, and brought back from retirement one more time as his replacement General George Marshall. With Marshall in the Pentagon, Eisenhower in command of NATO in Paris, and MacArthur of the UN in Seoul and Tokyo, the U.S. was deploying military commanders of the very highest calibre. It is little wonder that a war mentality arose. But this was preventive action. The United States had followed Roosevelt’s exhortation to “be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement.”*
