by Conrad Black
Louis S. St. Laurent had undoubtedly been a very successful, competent, and distinguished prime minister, surpassed in achievement only by Macdonald, Laurier, and King, all of whom were professional politicians who served much longer in that office. In St. Laurent’s nearly nine years in office, the country received efficient, imaginative, scandal-free government, made immense economic progress, and achieved unprecedented feats of diplomatic success and important progress in federal-provincial relations. In his person and by his nature, St. Laurent understood how Canada functioned and must be governed. In their way, he and Pearson had taken the 180-year-old Canadian challenge of maintaining the goodwill of the British and Americans, which for more than a century had been a matter of life and death to the concept of Canada, to a new level of constructive association appropriate to an established country, if still not a large factor in world affairs. The country wanted a change, but few could have imagined that better government would result. The great Liberal era that began in the depression of 1935 ended on June 17, 1957.
After receiving a visit from Lester B. Pearson and the newly re-elected Lionel Chevrier at his summer home at St. Patrick, Quebec (only a few hundred yards from the summer home of John A. Macdonald), St. Laurent announced his retirement as Liberal leader on September 4. Parliament opened on October 11, and in the Throne Speech, read in person by the queen, the new government promised all the measures that St. Laurent and Harris had declined to undertake from frugality and aversion to political opportunism: the South Saskatchewan power project and some other regional initiatives bundled together as a National Development Plan; cash advances on farm-stored grain; and the larger old-age pension that even Harris had decided in mid-campaign should be accorded. In August 1957, Diefenbaker signed the North American Air Defense Agreement (NORAD), which committed the United States to the defence of Canada but also foresaw the establishment of some American service personnel in Canada. Canadians had not enjoyed having Americans in Canada building the Alaska Highway during the war, and were not enthused about having American bases in the country, but it was a small price to pay to have the level of security that only the complete guaranty of the United States could provide.
The Liberal convention was held from January 14 to 16, 1958, in the Ottawa Coliseum, and while it was not as transparent a fix as St. Laurent’s elevation by the departing Mackenzie King ten years before, Pearson was the clear favourite over Paul Martin, particularly as he had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his services during the Suez Crisis. He won the convention with 1,074 votes to 305 for Martin. Jean Lesage delivered most of the Quebec delegates to the Protestant Pearson over the half-French, Roman Catholic Martin.
On the advice of Jack Pickersgill, the witty and clever jack-in-the-box who had served King and St. Laurent and now looked (physically) like a young Hermann Göring, Pearson, on succeeding St. Laurent as Liberal leader, gave a fighting speech in his opening gambit as leader of the parliamentary Opposition and instead of moving for a vote of no confidence said that an election would not be in the national interest and that Diefenbaker should simply resign and advise the governor general to invite Pearson to form a government. This was in keeping with the Liberal notion of entitlement to office and their assumption that the public would have thought better of the change to the Conservatives by now. Diefenbaker delivered a savage reply full of well-turned sarcasm and dissolved Parliament for an election on March 31. The new government had looked perfectly adequate in its few months in office, and Pearson had had a very rocky start. The government had spread some money around, and it was going to be practically impossible to deny Diefenbaker a fair try at governing. As Pickersgill said, “We are the party of government; the Conservatives are like the mumps, you get them once in your life.”34 Pearson had a difficult campaign, and the country was infatuated with his opponent; he hoped at best to retain one hundred MPs, and was assuming retention of a majority of Quebec’s seventy-five MPs.
Maurice Duplessis had other ideas. He had waited nearly twenty years for revenge on the Liberals for their intervention against him in 1939, the one real defeat of his entire career, and with St. Laurent going, now was the time. Quebec didn’t know Pearson, and the Liberals were in the most parlous condition they had endured in the history of the party. Edward Blake at least had had the Mowat government in Ontario to help him in the 1880s. The Liberals had not faced a serious challenge in Quebec from the Conservatives since Macdonald’s time. Duplessis personally selected fifty of Quebec’s federal constituencies for a major organizational effort and authorized $15,000 for each of them, the startling total of $750,000 coming from the well-heeled Union Nationale Caisse Electorale. As the fund was secret, the Liberals had no real idea what was happening, though they could not fail to detect the Union Nationale organizers and activists busy in the province for the first time in a federal election. Even in 1930, the Liberals had won forty seats to twenty-four Conservative in Quebec, and while Bourassa had clipped some votes from Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in 1911 the Liberals had carried the great majority of Quebec MPs. Duplessis’s principal organizers, Joseph-Damase Bégin, Édouard Masson, and Daniel Johnson (a future premier and widely referred to as the son Duplessis never had), fanned out across the province. Duplessis chose some of the candidates, including Yvon Tassé in Quebec East, the constituency being vacated by St. Laurent, which had been held continuously for eighty years, through twenty-six consecutive general elections and by-elections, by Laurier, Lapointe, and St. Laurent. The former prime minister had won the district by seventeen thousand votes in 1957, and his successor to run in the riding this year was his former aide Maurice Lamontagne. Duplessis awakened Tassé at home late one evening by telephone and convinced him that it was not a prank only when Tassé saw Duplessis’s well-known car, a very large Cadillac limousine with his flag on the fender and licence plate number 1, at his front door that the premier had sent to collect him. Tassé was an architect of schools, and he was in no position to decline the premier’s draft to this candidacy and dutifully went to his nominating meeting.
This was the last election in which Duplessis took a direct part and was in some respects the most gratifying of all: the Progressive Conservatives carried all fifty of the constituencies Duplessis had targeted, including Tassé’s victory over Lamontagne and the defeat of St. Laurent’s son Jean-Paul in Témiscouata. (It was too late for their fathers, but this win, and Hugues Lapointe’s defeat the year before, afforded Duplessis some of the pleasures of vengeance.) Even George Marler, the former acting leader of the provincial Opposition, who survived Duplessis’s tremendous landslide in 1948, went down in the Liberal stronghold of Westmount; Marler could not escape the premier anywhere. Duplessis had now settled the oldest and most painful scores of his long career with his Liberal adversaries.
In his memoirs, Diefenbaker completely avoids reference to the assistance of the Union Nationale in either the 1957 or 1958 election, apart from saying that Johnson personally was helpful. He would have the reader believe that he alone was the author of his success in Quebec, and it may be that he never knew the proportions of Duplessis’s assistance. In the other provinces, it was unambiguously his victory, and in the country it was a mighty sweep from coast to coast and unmistakeably a vote for Diefenbaker. He would have had a safe majority without one Quebec member of Parliament. He took 53.7 per cent of the total vote (up from 38.5 per cent in 1957 and 30.7 in 1953) and the party won an unheard of 208 seats, up from 111 at dissolution. The Liberals dropped to only 48 MPs, down from 104 at dissolution, and their share of the popular vote fell from 40.5 per cent to 33.4. The CCF only declined in percentage of voters from 10.6 to 9.5, but it lost 17 of its 25 MPs; and Social Credit, which had had 19 MPs, was wiped out, losing more than 70 per cent of its votes, descending from 6.6 per cent of the countrywide total to just 2 per cent.
John George Diefenbaker (1895–1979) was as different to his predecessor as it was conceivable for someone elevated to the same office to be. Whe
re Louis St. Laurent had been uninterested in politics other than as an informed citizen until being called upon when he was almost sixty in wartime by the prime minister, never lost an election personally, never wished to hold the office just for the sake of having it, and accepted a very narrow and ambiguous defeat with timeless Roman Catholic resignation tinged by slight moroseness, John Diefenbaker lost five elections at all three levels of government before being elected to Parliament at age forty-five, only eighteen months younger than King was when he became prime minister, was twice badly defeated running for party leader, and, once at the head of his party, clung to it with demonic tenacity, pulling the house down around him. That he felt an outsider is understandable; he was from rural Saskatchewan and did not attend such famous universities as King and Pearson did, nor join such exalted law firms as St. Laurent. German names were not vote-winners during and after Canada’s wars with Germany, and he was, at the best of times, an idiosyncratic public speaker. He was a slightly unusual-looking man, with prominent teeth and jowls, an extensive topknot of matted, half-curly hair, and flashing eyes. He had a jerky, abrupt delivery when speaking, but had perfect timing, great wit, a fine ear for the absurd and the incongruous, and a possessed quality, earnest and even fanatical, that commanded attention and, among an irreducible group of followers, adherence. He was absolutely sincere and admirable in his championship of all underdogs – the poor, the disadvantaged, the accused, the infirm, the outcast – and his attitude to non-whites and religious minorities was as distinguished as King’s was contemptible. (There was nothing wrong with St. Laurent or Pearson on these matters, but they had not suffered any such indignities themselves and were not especially preoccupied with it, apart from St. Laurent’s natural concern for the status of French Canadians.) John Diefenbaker was an astonishing phenomenon: he caught the Liberals just before the governing party was going to change leaders and engage in generational renovation, caught the moment and enough of the public fancy, and reversed decades of unkind personal adversity and emerged as the supreme one-time electoral champion of Canadian history.
Some sensed that it would be a disaster; Canadians who weren’t Liberals – from Conservative Quebec nationalists like Duplessis to Western populists tempted by Social Credit to Old Tories grumbling in Canadian Legion branches across Canada and in their clubs and offices on and near Bay Street in Toronto – all got on board but were never likely to stay on board. It had, from the start to the end, a great deal of drama, and Diefenbaker, being the demiurge he was, having torqued up to this moment for more than fifty years (he formed the determination to be prime minister at age six), stretched the drama out to the end of his days, at eighty-four years, thirteen consecutive personal general election victories and forty years in Parliament. It was decade after decade of unrelieved contentiousness, conducted with a singular combination of egalitarian fervour, unaffected if often implausible righteousness, great originality, and more than a trace of irrationalism. It had drama, but not always high drama: tragedy, comedy, farce, vaudeville, and a bit of a magic show. No one knew what they were getting with John Diefenbaker, and few who voted for him got what they expected.
The Diefenbaker government produced a plan to build roads into the North and make the region and its resources more accessible. It was a somewhat visionary idea that was a good long-term measure for developing the vast area, though it did not produce an early population increase. He was also concerned about the sale of natural resources and large parts of the economy generally, to Americans, and about excessive concentration of trade with the United States, and he revived the old notion from earlier times of Commonwealth free trade. In October 1958, Diefenbaker embarked on an even more ambitious world tour than had St. Laurent four years before. He started with Dag Hammarskjöld in New York and went on to meet with Britain’s prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and then to Paris for an extensive discussion with Charles de Gaulle, who had returned at last, the indispensable man to extract France from the morass in Algeria. He was still in the Hôtel Matignon, the prime minister’s residence, as the last premier of the Fourth Republic. He was composing the new constitution, which he would shortly put to a vote, in which he would heal the monarchic/republican schism that had rent France for 170 years by creating an elective monarchy and calling it a republic, and in which he would be elected president. De Gaulle was promoting a triumvirate of principal NATO states: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. His point was that everything was being integrated into an American command structure and NATO was becoming less an alliance than an agency of American foreign and defence policy, and he wanted to ensure that France could not be drawn into war without knowing anything of the causes, nor be the launching place for nuclear weapons over which it had no control. Diefenbaker could normally be counted on to be in some sympathy with these views, but once again, as with King during the war, an opportunity was lost to make common cause with the most formidable of the world’s statesmen, now that Roosevelt and Churchill had passed from the scene. They discussed trade matters, and de Gaulle replied to Diefenbaker’s concerns about European Economic Community (EEC) protectionism with knowledgeable questions as to why Diefenbaker was promoting Commonwealth protectionism. Diefenbaker claims35 that de Gaulle told him he need not be concerned about Britain joining the EEC, because they would not get in. “Ils ne passeront pas” (as Diefenbaker remarked, a quote from Marshal Pétain at Verdun). He asked de Gaulle if he could tell Macmillan that, de Gaulle agreed, and Macmillan said Diefenbaker must have misunderstood the general. This is all a bit far-fetched, and only four years later did de Gaulle veto British entry. De Gaulle invited Diefenbaker to take the salute at Verdun on Remembrance Day, which Diefenbaker did, as de Gaulle, who was wounded and captured there, did not wish to attend himself. It was a high honour for Canada and its leader, and though their relations were not as intimate as Diefenbaker claims, they seem to have had a cordial and rather loquacious exchange. De Gaulle gives a significantly different summary of his relations with Diefenbaker in his memoirs, ignoring this visit, focusing on his own trip to Ottawa two years later, and concentrating on the divisions between Quebec and the English-speaking parts of the country. (Diefenbaker blames de Gaulle’s provocative conduct in his 1967 visit to Canada on Pearson, and the whole spirit of his memoirs is vindictive, rancorous, and a constant strain on credulity, but they are an interesting insight into his teeming personality.)
Both de Gaulle and West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, whom Diefenbaker soon visited, told Diefenbaker of their desire to achieve a rapprochement between their countries. Adenauer joked that he, Diefenbaker, and Eisenhower could excite suspicion on ethnic grounds, and the two agreed with each other and not with de Gaulle on the overarching importance of America’s leadership of NATO. Diefenbaker had an informative visit in Brussels with General Lauris Norstad, the NATO commander, and then with the Italian government, which was unenthused by de Gaulle’s triumvirate idea, and with Pope John XXIII. He went on to Pakistan and India after the now customary Canadian visit to the Khyber Pass. Nehru wanted Diefenbaker’s impressions of the new Pakistani leader, Marshal Ayub Khan, and was, as always, deeply skeptical about almost everything in the West, especially the conditionality of American aid to India. Diefenbaker continued to Ceylon, Malaya, Singapore, Jakarta, Australia, and New Zealand.
C.D. Howe had been aware that the projected next-generation Canadian fighter plane, the Avro Arrow, could be a giant white elephant, and on March 20, 1959, Diefenbaker announced that the entire project was being shut down. A.V. Roe Canada was the third largest industrial concern in the country, with more than thirty thousand employees working directly on this project or in feeder occupations, including almost all the more sophisticated aerospace engineers and technicians in Canada, and the company had already provided Canada a good fighter with the CF-100. There was great competition among countries – and in the case of the United States within its aerospace industry – to put the next-generation supersoni
c fighter into production, and there were certainly problems with the range, cost, and fuel economy of the Arrow. But there were various methods of collaborating with other manufacturer/buyer countries, and discussions with British, French, and American programs, having reached an advanced stage, began to collapse, in part because the A.V. Roe management had left it late to pursue partnerships and developed a credibility gap, in part also because the Canadian government had allowed concerns to arise about whether the project would proceed at all. The shutdown of the Arrow was defensible, but not the shutdown of the entire industry. The whole project should have been taken in hand by one of the country’s leading industrialists (Howe himself, who was underemployed, would have been ideal, and it would have been a brilliant political move as well), and the shutdown of the fuselage aspect should have been exchanged for the foreign assured purchase of the Orenda Engine or some such trade-off. Instead, Canada lost its entire jet engine industry and has never revived it, and it ceased to make warplanes, unlike Sweden, Israel, and several other smaller countries, and took a giant step backwards in the country’s advanced industrial and foreign exchange earning potential. A.V. Roe was a British-controlled company, and given its dependence on Canadian government support, the government could have patriated the company while it was sorting out the Arrow and made it a win-double for the country. St. Laurent and Howe and Pearson might have thought in these terms, but no such thoughts would ever have occurred to Diefenbaker, who had never had any connection with industry or commerce.
