by Conrad Black
On June 20, 1956, he was decisively re-elected to an unprecedented, and since unequalled, fifth term as premier of Quebec, and won 73 out of 92 constituencies and 52 per cent of the vote to 45 per cent Liberal. He won more than 60 per cent of the French-speaking Québécois vote and almost all the constituencies, urban and rural, that did not have substantial numbers of non-French. It was a tremendous victory, though Duplessis, like St. Laurent, was tiring after a long career of meticulous micromanagement of almost everything in Quebec. He did not really believe in cabinet government and was known to everyone, friend and foe, in Quebec as Le Chef. Of his colleagues, only Paul Sauvé, son of R.B. Bennett’s postmaster general, as the minister of Youth, had any autonomy. This was the time to make permanent constitutional arrangements for taxing, spending, all jurisdictional frictions, and amendment. Both Duplessis and St. Laurent could deliver their jurisdictions, Quebec and the whole country, to an agreement. No such opportunity would come again in the intervening years, and this window, as the age and now slightly fatigued appearance of both men made clear, would not be open indefinitely.
4. The Pipeline Debate and the Suez and Hungarian Crises, 1956–1957
In the early 1950s, enthusiasm gradually grew for the transmission by pipeline of Alberta’s recently discovered natural gas to Central Canada. In 1951, Parliament granted a licence to Trans-Canada Pipelines, a subsidiary of an American company, to build such a pipeline entirely in Canada. A Canadian company, Western Pipe Lines, backed by Alberta premier Ernest Manning, sought authority to build a pipeline that would transmit natural gas to Regina and Winnipeg and then connect to U.S. gas distribution systems in Minnesota. The Consumers’ Gas Company of Toronto, assembled by a group of mainly Conservative financiers, sought distribution rights for Ontario. The Alberta government would not allow exports from Alberta until all the needs of that province were supplied, but in late 1953 it declared that an exportable surplus existed, and C.D. Howe, a great and visionary builder in all things, organized an amalgamation of the Trans-Canada and Western companies and concepts. In 1954 and 1955, necessary permits were obtained and an agreement for distribution in the United States was achieved. The total cost of the project was estimated to be $350 million, and its viability was still dependent on a permit from the U.S. Federal Power Commission. Canadian lenders and underwriters would not proceed until contracts were in place to assure the success of the project, and buyers would not contract until they were sure that the project would get off the ground. In January 1956, the company asked for a federal government guaranty of a loan of $275 million. Howe was in favour, but the finance minister, Walter Harris, on advice of officials, while agreeing on the project’s prospects, wanted the U.S. Federal Power Commission approval in hand and did not wish to guaranty at 4 per cent, as it could ultimately damage Canadian bond sales. Harris recommended an application to the Industrial Development Bank (IDB), a subsidiary of the Bank of Canada, which suggested that $105 million be raised by a sale of common stock and the remainder through the sale of first mortgage bonds. The IDB was prepared to buy $35 million of the stock as convertible debentures yielding 6 per cent, and for a fee would be prepared to buy further if necessary. They also demanded what amounted to control of the board of the company, which was not acceptable to the Gulf Oil Company of Canada – a subsidiary of the American company of the same name – which was supplying most of the natural gas from Alberta.
Trans-Canada had already ordered the steel required for the line when the negotiations collapsed. On March 8, 1956, Clinton Murchison, a renowned Texas oilman, and one of the principals in the Trans-Canada consortium, telephoned Howe and said that if the IDB would raise its investment to $70 million, he and his associates would guaranty all disbursements by the company with full repayment within five years. A stenographer took down the proposal and Howe gave it directly to St. Laurent, who declined, in deference to the views of government officials and what he considered the political risks of going so far out on a limb for foreign investors. The company announced that construction would not proceed because the government of Canada would not produce an arrangement to assist, at no risk to itself, the financing of the project on a basis that did not transfer control of the project and the company to government appointees. This was correct and was admirably fearless, and it smoked out Howe, who was disappointed at the recession of what he had conceived as his last great public/private sector project and doubly irritated that it was interpreted as a putsch by Harris against him in the battle for the heart and mind of St. Laurent. Eventually, in the summer of 1956, Howe came up with a plan by which the federal and Ontario governments would construct the most expensive and least profitable part of the pipeline, through Northern Ontario, and would sell it on to Trans-Canada Pipelines later at an unfixed price.
In the summer and autumn of 1955 there had been a prolonged and acrimonious debate over renewal of the Defence Production Act, and a tired St. Laurent was induced to say a few things that, added to some of Howe’s reflections, assisted the opposition agitation that, after twenty years in government, the St. Laurent–Howe Liberals were getting a little out of touch. St. Laurent referred to renewals three years later with the proviso “if we are still here in three years.” They were small but telltale signs. The prime minister’s elder son and law partner had had a coronary, which distressed his father and assisted in making him seem old. He was seventy-four in 1956. In fact, it was still hard to fault the government on its performance; the country was prosperous, respected in the world, and a relatively generous state where immigrants eagerly arrived every year in considerable numbers, and the federal-provincial scene had even, finally, been addressed in a somewhat imaginative way. The principal ministers were all demonstrably competent, so all that was left to the opposing political parties was to present St. Laurent as benign but geriatric, and the others, led by Howe and Gardiner, as arrogant and authoritarian. The pipeline debate was shaping up as a donnybrook, and the government would have to be careful to appear to be observing the parliamentary niceties.
Howe moved the incorporation of the Northern Ontario Pipe Line Crown Corporation on March 15, 1956. Premier Manning and Ontario’s Premier Frost strongly supported the measure, which was carefully designed to bring natural gas to Central and Eastern Canada at good prices in a way that the governments could assist while entirely recovering their investment promptly without impinging on return to private sector investors or raising prices to the consumers. The measure had been adopted unanimously by the Ontario Legislature, which approved investing $35 million, and was adopted almost unanimously in Alberta’s Legislature also. Though the majority of founding shareholders was American, the majority of shares overall would be held in Canada, and the majority of officers and directors were assured to be Canadian. Drew spoke immediately after Howe and accused the government of selling out the Canadian national interest to Americans and demanded that the deal be Canadianized, if need be, by public sector ownership with eventual privatization to Canadians. He stirred the Liberals with mordant comments about “vacuous faces opposite,” and was followed by M.J. Coldwell for the CCF, who was less provoking but called for straight public ownership. Social Credit, whose leading espouser was Premier Manning, supported the government. Calgary oilman Frank McMahon proposed an all-Canadian alternative to Howe, and although he marked his letter “personal and confidential,” he also gave it to the Opposition. Howe felt obliged to deny having received such an offer, and when Howe found out what had been done, McMahon’s offer was withdrawn. Howe persuaded the cabinet that to get the project started that summer and to deliver natural gas from Alberta to Eastern Canada on a timetable that would be effective for the financing arrangements, the debate would have to be conducted fairly expeditiously, and that it might be necessary to enforce closure of the debate. The most protracted and unruly debate in the history of the federal Parliament ensued, after Howe announced that the government would advance up to 90 per cent of the cost of constructing the pipeli
ne west of Winnipeg and would receive a pledge of all its assets in return and an option on the company’s shares, with full repayment, at 5 per cent interest, in less than a year.
The unparliamentary allegations and shenanigans were a disgrace. Drew, Diefenbaker, Toronto MP Donald Fleming, British Columbia MP Davie Fulton, Coldwell and his chief proceduralist, Stanley Knowles, and several other opposition MPs accused the government of heinous crimes, dictatorship, imposition of the guillotine, emulation of Hitler, degradation of Parliament, cowardice, and so forth, all to achieve what Fulton called a “treaty of surrender to the United States.” Howe introduced the prospect of closure on May 9, after stating, with some reason, that “it is obvious that some honourable members prefer to obstruct this motion rather than debate it.” Drew made some particularly tasteless remarks aspersing Howe as someone whose loyalty to Canada was suspect because he was born in the United States (though he had been a Canadian citizen since 1914). Howe gamely defended himself and his bill, but St. Laurent was rather passive as the stormy debate unfolded. Many sessions went well into the night, a few almost to daybreak. The Speaker of the House of Commons, Louis-René Beaudoin, almost suffered a nervous breakdown in the midst of the debate, ruling mistakenly and then invoking questionable prerogatives to reverse himself and guide the debate through to conclusion within a few hours of its target date of June 5. At one point, Fleming was expelled from the House for refusing to resume his chair, and Diefenbaker histrionically called out “Farewell John Hampden” (parliamentary dissident of Cromwellian times) as Fleming was led away and Hamilton Conservative MP Ellen Fairclough draped over Fleming’s desk a Union Jack that she had borrowed earlier in the day from House staff for what she claimed would be “a party.” There were daily scenes of astonishing indignity, at one point Drew and Coldwell shaking their fists at the Speaker as Drew denounced the proceedings as “a complete farce” and Coldwell as “an abomination, an outrageous thing.”18
As St. Laurent biographer Dale Thomson observed, “Although the government was certainly guilty of disrespect for Parliament in imposing a deadline before the pipeline debate had properly begun, and in applying the closure rule on various clauses of the bill before at least a minimum of debate had taken place on them,” the charges against the Speaker, and against the ministry for supposedly dictating to the Speaker, were not justified.19 On the proposed last day, President Achmad Sukarno of Indonesia, of all people, a corrupt, communist-tainted, buffoonish dictator, was in the gallery as part of a state visit, and observed some of the parliamentary juvenilism, undoubtedly confirming him in his disregard for democracy. The Liberals got their pipeline bill through, and it was a good and well-conceived bill, but they had suffered considerable loss of public esteem in the terrible unseemliness of the debate, though all parties except Social Credit had participated in the degradation of Parliament. Howe’s magnificent achievements as a great builder and manager of the country were temporarily tarnished with the charges of dictatorship, and St. Laurent appeared relatively ineffective and diffident through most of the stormy passage. It was a very unedifying episode, compounded by the tactical errors of the House leader, finance minister Harris, and the formerly highly regarded Speaker, Beaudoin, who had to be persuaded by the prime minister not to throw in the towel and resign after a further controversy about a private letter he sent to a journalist at the Montreal newspaper La Patrie. St. Laurent was back in top form when he returned from an uneventful Commonwealth Conference and closed out the session on July 11, saying that the Opposition had tried to usurp the position of the government and that it was their conduct that was unconstitutional: “It is not by accident that [my] party has been in office for twenty-one years and plans to continue in office for several years longer.”20
The autumn of 1956 was one of the most fraught of the entire Cold War, as crises blew up almost simultaneously in the Middle East and Central Europe. Eden had visited Eisenhower in January 1956 and was already very preoccupied with Britain’s position in the Middle East, because of oil and the Suez Canal (which Britain had controlled since the 1870s), and reminded Eisenhower of the 1950 Tripartite Declaration between their countries and France that effectively forbade arms sales into the region. This was nonsense, of course, as the Russians would supply the Arabs happily, and the French were supplying Israel and were heavily involved in dealing with a nasty guerrilla war in what was officially the French province of Algeria. Eden proposed that in the Middle East, Britain take the lead and that the United States should join the Baghdad Pact, which linked Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, which he wished to upgrade as a military alliance and use to block Russia’s way to the south, somewhat as an extension of NATO. In a final outburst of mad colonial egotism, the British imagined themselves to be dab hands at the complexities of the Middle East and fully capable of leading such an alliance, undaunted by the terrible mess they had made of the partitions of both Palestine and the old British Indian empire. Unfortunately, this delusional notion of their gift for managing Middle Eastern affairs was approximately matched by the equivalent American figment that the Muslims disliked the British and French more than they disliked the Americans, whom they would welcome as the original anti-colonial revolutionaries. It was one of the great fantasies of the American self-image, which started with Roosevelt’s nonsense that the Americans would be better received than the British when they invaded Morocco and Algeria in 1942, and that Stalin would take the Western message better from him and his officials than from Churchill and his. The Russians and the Arabs regarded the Americans and the British as interchangeable scoundrels and swindlers, and the Americans would have done themselves a favour by adopting the view of the British (apart from a few hopeless romantics like T.E. Lawrence and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt) that the Arabs were essentially a gang of nomads, pickpockets, and camel thieves. The problem was aggravated by Israeli hatred of Britain because of their not unfounded view that, in blocking Jewish emigration to Palestine, the British had inadvertently been partly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. The Canadians had a slightly different version of naïveté; they didn’t claim to know anything about the Arabs but thought that good old fair play would work and reproached both the British neo-colonialism and the American pretense to plain New World candour. Canada favoured good-faith negotiations, like those between Quebec and Ottawa, as if the Arabs really wanted an arrangement with the Israelis that would accept the legitimacy of that country and end their ability to distract the Arab masses with the red herring of Israel, which they portrayed as an insolent, domineering Jewish presence in their midst sustained, as the Arabs would have it, by the insidious philo-Semitism of the Americans. Everyone knew it was a politically unpromising area, but all the parties except Israel seemed to have excessive hopes about their ability to manage the Middle East.
Eisenhower recognized that the key was keeping Middle East oil flowing to Western Europe and was suitably wary of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s disposition to stir up the Arab masses and draw the Soviets into the region. He started to try to promote Saudi Arabia as an alternative to Egypt as a power in the Arab world, but the House of Saud was a feudal clan of oil-rich nomads and had no mass appeal among the Arabs. As Nasser became a Soviet arms recipient on a steadily larger scale, Eisenhower tried unwisely to bring him to heel by absurd and demeaning measures such as cancelling CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) aid to Egypt and threatening to withdraw financial support for the Aswan Dam, a humanitarian project designed to increase Egyptian agricultural and hydroelectric production. He did cancel the commitment to finance the dam on July 19. Britain had withdrawn its eighty-thousand-man army force from Egypt, leaving the Suez Canal a sitting duck for Nasser, but the British assumed that Nasser would not know how to operate it. Both the British and American governments should have realized that the Russians would be happy to build Nasser’s dam and help him operate t
he canal, and they were both making up their policy very erratically as they went along.
Nasser seized the Suez Canal on July 26 and took over its operations without difficulty. Eden was apoplectic and threatened military action, which Eisenhower considered an over-hasty recourse in pursuit of quasi-colonial objectives. He sent veteran diplomat Robert Murphy to London and Paris to warn the British and French not to encourage an Israeli involvement and to propose a conference of maritime nations. Eisenhower had irrational fears that the crisis might lead to a cessation of oil supplies to Western Europe, which was out of the question, as Iran, the Saudis, and the Gulf states would have nothing to do with such a thing, and the Arabs had no grievance against most Europeans. Eisenhower feared that oil and gasoline might have to be rationed in the United States to keep the lights on in London and Paris, and that the Panamanians might be spooked by the Egyptians. (Again, this was a fatuous concern, as the United States had created the country of Panama and purported to lease the Canal Zone permanently, and had a very adequate military force around the canal to squash any delusions of liberation by Panama.) As deft as Eisenhower had been with Germany and even Korea, and up to a point Indochina, he was rather inept with Egypt, though still a masterly statesman compared with the escapade in complete lunacy that Eden was cooking up. In a typical time-wasting, cooling-off move, the maritime conference of twenty-two countries that Dulles proposed as a Suez Canal Users’ Association meeting took place in August and produced an 18–4 vote for internationalization of the canal, and veteran Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies was delegated to try to sell this to Nasser. He attempted to do so on September 2, but the idea was nonsense: the “users” had no standing to say who would own the canal and Nasser would not hear of it. He would guaranty access to all countries (except Israel) and reasonable tolls, but that was all. Eisenhower told Eden to keep calm and that Nasser could be worn down and undermined over time, and Dulles was still giving lip service to having Nasser forced to “disgorge his theft.” But Eden was hyperactive and irrational and Eisenhower and Dulles were just dispensing bromides and palliatives. The British pilots on the canal abandoned their posts on September 14 and were immediately replaced, without difficulty, by Egyptians.
