by Conrad Black
Maurice Duplessis died on September 7, 1959, of a stroke in the executive guesthouse of the Iron Ore Company in Shefferville in northern Quebec, a region he was personally responsible for developing, in a county now named after him. The rabidly hostile Le Devoir, through the elegant reflections of its editor, André Laurendeau, Henri Bourassa’s chosen successor and former leader of the Bloc Populaire, summarized the significance of the event fairly: “The man who has just died has dominated the public life of Quebec for a whole generation. He was loved, hated, respected, and always controversial; but his mastery, though passionately combated, has been incontestable over the past quarter of a century.… His achievements are still debated. It is incontestable that they have indelibly marked the province.… Now [his career] is over, just as it seemed at its zenith. Maurice Duplessis will never have known the bitterness of an ultimate defeat or of a long illness. He has fallen like a soldier.”36 He had been the premier or leader of the Opposition for a total of twenty-eight years, and was scarcely buried – after an immense funeral where the honorary pallbearers included Diefenbaker and Duplessis’s five immediate successors as premier of Quebec – when a dense mythology enshrouded his memory to the effect that his had been a dark age in the province’s history. The immediate secret to his popularity was precisely his success at modernizing Quebec. Electricity, which only 15 per cent of rural homes enjoyed in 1944, had been extended to 97 per cent of those homes by 1959. Unions were not strong or officially favoured, but contrary to all the rubbish about “cheap labour,” industrial wages and safety rules improved more quickly in Quebec than elsewhere in Canada. Construction of roads, hospitals, schools, autoroutes, and universities unrecognizably changed the face and nature of a province where in 1944 only the most important roads were ploughed and passable in the winter. Duplessis’s system was intricate and little understood, weaving industry, sociology, and politics closely together.
Duplessis undoubtedly played a role in forcing the departure of the archbishop of Montreal, Joseph Charbonneau, in 1950, after the archbishop had criticized Duplessis’s handling of the miners’ strike at Asbestos, Quebec. In that famous but much misunderstood affair, Duplessis made a generous award to the workers but cracked down on the international and Catholic unions for inciting violence and seizing control of the mining town. As the international unions were the enemies of the Catholic trade unions (and he kept them quarrelling, as he did the Jesuits and the Dominicans), Duplessis considered it inappropriate for an archbishop to be championing a coalition of the secular, American-dominated, international, and the anti-Catholic unions, and intolerable for Charbonneau publicly to attack him as hostile to labour. He was supportive of labour but hostile to those whom he considered to be the troublemakers in the labour movement. Through the 1950s, Duplessis exploited the low-paid, non-union, and highly motivated clerical personnel in the school and health-care systems to keep the provincial government’s wage costs low and focus the budget on tax cuts, deficit reduction, and massive roads and public-works projects. A benign cycle occurred: capital poured in, including on great projects linked to the iron ore and aluminum industries on the north shore of the St. Lawrence and at Lac Saint-Jean; jobs, disposable income, consumer spending, profits, saving, and investment soared, and the Union Nationale, in the Quebec tradition, did not go unrewarded for its patronage.
To some extent, Duplessis was perpetuating a priest-ridden society, but he also accelerated the inevitable start of secularization. He transposed the hierarchy of Church and State in the province; Charbonneau was sent packing only three years after the death of Cardinal Villeneuve. One of Duplessis’s famous utterances was “The bishops eat from my hand.” The extensive footnote below summarizes the progress of Quebec in this era.* These statistics are recounted so lengthily because they are the product of exhaustive and meticulous analysis, and because they completely destroy the conventional and received wisdom that Duplessis retarded Quebec and that his successors liberated it. This is one of the great frauds of Canadian history and one of the fundamental falsehoods underpinning the lengthy Quebec flirtation with independence. Duplessis was an economic and jurisdictional modernizer, his nationalism tempered by his conservatism. Diefenbaker, though he never understood anything about relations between Ottawa and Quebec and had no one to advise him, was more accommodating than the federal Liberals. He increased the provincial concurrence in the personal income tax from 10 per cent to 13 per cent, installed simultaneous translation in the House of Commons, inaugurated bilingual federal government cheques – a step St. Laurent and his finance ministers had considered too expensive – and appointed the first French-Canadian governor general, the universally respected General Georges-Philéas Vanier. This was the extent of it. Diefenbaker had not the faintest clue of the implications of the existence of two founding races. He thought he was doing the French Canadians a favour by saying they were like everyone else. Because of his own background, he thought hyphenated Canadians should not exist and that French Canadians were no different to German or Italian Canadians, all of which distinctions were outworn and reprehensible. In terms of understanding how the country had always worked, the (Progressive) Conservatives had not learned anything: if the French were just another ethnic group, they had no standing other than bilingual banknotes and postage stamps and parliamentary debates and more MPs than other groups.
St. Laurent, and to a lesser extent Diefenbaker, had the chance to negotiate seriously with Quebec toward permanent changes in the British North America Act and a division of concurrent taxing jurisdictions that reflected the arrangements of 1867, and not a concurrence, extracted by threat of double taxation after seventy years, of 10 per cent, conceded with infinite reluctance by St. Laurent to Duplessis, and then of 13 per cent more graciously agreed by Diefenbaker. The best, though not the last, opportunity closed with the death of Duplessis. The Liberals confected and laid down the myth of Duplessis’s unmitigated rascality and cynicism, and there was enough truth to this to satisfy the uncurious and unrigorous. But his departure almost ruined them too. The argument St. Laurent had invoked in favour of equivalence for all the provinces was a poor one, and it had become a federal Liberal truism: “Quebec is a province like the others.” In some respects yes, but ultimately not. This was a position that would be demolished completely by two of St. Laurent’s ministers, Lester Pearson and Jean Lesage, when, in the next decade, they would accede to even higher offices, and St. Laurent would observe it, blinking in silent disbelief, from his prolonged retirement.
Duplessis had the immense dexterity to persuade the conservatives and nationalists to vote together. He had it arranged for Paul Sauvé to follow him and for Daniel Johnson to follow Sauvé, as they could both manage the same feat (and Johnson did in the 1966 election). But he could not foresee that they would both die in office, as he did, but at the ages of fifty-two and fifty-three, dropping the nationalist torch from the dead hand of the sensible right, to be taken up by the left. The results of these transformations would shake the country profoundly.
An inkling of what impended certainly came to the Machiavellian mind of Charles de Gaulle when he visited Canada in 1960. Beneath the gracious welcome he received and the prosperity of the host country, he said, “It was impossible to disguise from me the mortgages on its structure and condition.”38 He noted that the French and English, “two communities radically different, accommodated each other more or less well by need to inhabit the same geographic space,” and a process of the attachment of “a part of the French-Canadian upper class to practice the system. But it was clear that this was a compromise between resignations, not at all national unity.” Diefenbaker, “whose intentions were certainly very estimable,” according to de Gaulle, relied on France to assist Canada in resisting the overwhelming American influence, even as he espoused nuclear disarmament, not, as de Gaulle noted, with his usual subtle asperity, from the perspective of renouncing anything himself, but in calling upon others to do so. De Gaulle claim
ed to ask himself, as he departed, if it were not as two states, cooperating “freely and by choice in two versions of independence in order to safeguard them, that one day Canada would erase the injustice that had scarred it, and would organize itself in conformity with its own realities and would be able to remain Canadian.” He would be back to test his theories, and of course they were largely self-serving French narcissism and imposture. The severance of Quebec from Canada would just create a weak French Canada and deliver most or all of the country into total dependence on the United States. The British defeat of the French at the Plains of Abraham was not an injustice; Britain ruled the waves, and no victorious power could have been more just than was Guy Carleton, and the victory was necessary to preserve anything of Canada, and especially French Canada, as only the British could protect Canada from absorption and cultural assimilation by the Americans.
De Gaulle, a patriotic French nationalist, saw only what he wanted to see and rationalized a fabricated history as only the French can. But the failure of the Canadian political system to retain fidelity to the founding principle of French-English cooperation and federal-provincial concurrence created vulnerabilities that this very astute statesman could not fail to notice, and that this seeker of the extension of French influence, even in mischief and duplicity at the expense of an historic friend of France, could not resist the temptation to try to exploit.
Duplessis had inaugurated concurrence in tax policy as a fact and brought Quebec into the modern world, with a state no longer under the tutelage of the Church, vested with the instances of a modern people, and armed with the potential for constitutional autonomy. And France was now led by one of the great statesmen of its history, ambitious to retrieve what he could of lost French influence. He was more formidable than any French leader who had dabbled in Quebec since Richelieu, and Duplessis’s successors would be more manipulable than he was. It would be an increasingly combustible condition, of the hazards of which Diefenbaker and Pearson were happily unaware as a startling reveille approached.
John Diefenbaker was the supreme example of the man who not only caught history at a miraculously favourable turn and seized the hour opportunistically, but who also suddenly found himself in a position of great importance where he had a conviction of a lifetime that he belonged but little idea what to do with it. His term was frittered away in half measures. After his initial program of belt-loosening, which included an imaginative and successful “winter works” program to alleviate unemployment, there was no program. He did pass, in 1960, a Bill of Rights, which he saw to it got into the hands of almost all schoolchildren in the country in a fine parchment facsimile with antique script and his signature. Of course, its practical importance was limited, as the federal Parliament had little authority in matters of property and civil rights, but it was important symbolically and at least helped to focus attention on the subject of individual liberties, an area where the prime minister had a long and admirable record of service and advocacy. And his bill is much more eloquently composed than previous or subsequent texts addressing the same or similar subjects in Canada, and could be usefully inserted into a preamble to a fully agreed Constitution if one is ever achieved.
Diefenbaker’s finance minister, Donald Fleming, was an old-time Toronto Tory who believed in a balanced budget and tight money, and he was continuously discountenanced by his chief’s enthusiasm for giveaways. Deficits accumulated, and with them higher interest rates and rising inflation. Canada had to be careful of budget and trade deficits to maintain its currency and avoid spikes of interest and loss of confidence in currency markets, but Diefenbaker was not accustomed to thinking in such terms, and his finance minister was not strong enough to stand up to him, as Walter Harris, C.D. Howe, Douglas Abbott, or James Ilsley would have done (though King and St. Laurent were relatively literate financially compared with most of their successors). Problems gradually arose, and the governor of the Bank of Canada, James Coyne, attempted in 1960 and 1961 to deal with them by tightening credit and encouraging reduced borrowing. He apparently thought he was doing as the government wished, as he was certainly following the line Fleming commended. Fleming and Diefenbaker had always said that the central bank was entirely independent, in the manner of elected leaders who wanted to lay the responsibility for painful corrective measures off on unelected and non-political officials. But suddenly and inexplicably, Fleming changed course and concluded that Coyne was exceeding his authority and trying to sandbag the government and that he must go. The government requested amendment of the Bank of Canada Act on June 23, 1961, to enable the position of governor to become vacant. Coyne would have retired if Diefenbaker had not insinuated that he was a crook, because he had requested and accepted an increase of his pension to twenty-five thousand dollars (compared with an absurd three thousand dollars for Louis St. Laurent). Always quick to impute the worst of motives to anyone with whom he was at odds, Diefenbaker publicly called Coyne a man who “sat, knew, listened, and took.” There was no excuse for uttering such an outrageous slander, and no need for the immense fracas that ensued, one that the government, in public relations terms, could not win.
The Liberal Party strategists saw the potential to embarrass the government, though they were not in sympathy with Coyne’s views. The Liberals were a big-spending party at this point, under the influence of Walter Gordon, a leading chartered accountant and public policy expert who had a somewhat Mephistophelean influence on Pearson. But party managers immediately saw that the Coyne Affair, as it was soon known, could turn into almost a Canadian Truman-MacArthur episode. The bill to remove Coyne passed the House of Commons on the huge majority the Progressive Conservatives enjoyed there, but the Senate Banking Committee held public hearings where Coyne, quiet, articulate, and knowledgeable, made a very good impression as a consistent public servant carrying out the statutory requirement of the Bank of Canada to control credit and influence the money supply in the national interest as best it could interpret that. Coyne also thought he was carrying out the often publicly expressed wishes of the minister of finance and the prime minister. The Senate rejected the government’s bill and at that point, having made his case and debunked any suggestion of corruption on his own part, Coyne resigned on July 13, 1961. He was succeeded by the deputy governor, Louis Rasminsky, but he didn’t much change the Bank of Canada’s policy in the areas that had caused the split.
A great controversy in Saskatchewan, which would influence Canada more than any other development in that province’s history, was well underway. The issue was state assured universal medical care, and it would culminate the following summer in the so-called Saskatoon Agreement. It followed a twenty-three-day doctors’ strike, and spared the doctors the indignity of becoming government employees but constrained them as to what they could charge. Their receivables were guaranteed by the government, but everyone was entitled to be treated in hospitals at the province’s expense. There was initially a user fee for those who could afford it, and Premier Tommy Douglas had declared that the object was to establish a floor but not a cap for the quality of medical service. None could foresee what a fetish and totem this issue would become.
* * *
In preparation for the now imminent election, Fleming completed his reversal of field and cut taxes by $130 million and posted an estimated deficit for 1962 of an immense $745 million. The response was a flight from the Canadian dollar that caused Fleming abruptly to jettison Canada’s long and prideful dollar worth a little more than the American dollar and to try to peg its value at 92.5 U.S. cents. Despite chirpy government efforts to portray this as a brilliant plan to give Canadian exporters a competitive edge, everyone saw it for the outright inflation that it was.
By this time, Canadian foreign policy was becoming quite complicated. Diefenbaker brought to this subject a set of attitudes; he early proposed a serious Commonwealth free trade plan, but when the British agreed, he folded under the realities of the trade relationship with the United Stat
es. British prime minister Harold Macmillan regarded him as “a mountebank.”39 Diefenbaker led a tremendous assault on South Africa’s apartheid policies segregating blacks and other non-white groups, and pushed through, with the support of African, Caribbean, and Asian member states, such fierce condemnations of the South African racial laws that South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1961. Diefenbaker had grave reservations about British plans to join the European Economic Community, and in some respects his concerns were well-founded, but not for the reasons that he held them. If he had made serious proposals about enhanced preferences between the more developed Commonwealth countries, he might have been more successful, or at least somewhat prophetic, given the problems the European project eventually encountered. If he had been more supportive of some of de Gaulle’s initiatives in NATO, or even had sought an improved trade relationship directly with the EEC, he might at least have gained some credit for the spirit and originality of his views. But Canada just gestured and postured; it couldn’t go far with the neutrals like Nehru and Nasser or relations with the United States would have deteriorated dangerously. And most of the declared neutrals, including Nehru, Nasser, and Sukarno were really pro-Soviet charlatans. Apart from the two superpowers and a few of the neutrals, no country had any influence anywhere, except China, Gaullist France, and the United Kingdom, and it was limited in all cases. All Canada could do was try to come up with some original ideas, and that would not have been impossible, given how sclerotic world affairs were at the height of the Cold War. Diefenbaker tried to show his independence of the United States by selling wheat to Communist China and maintaining trade and touristic relations with Castro’s (as of 1959) Cuba (and showing no solicitude for the victims of Castro’s dictatorship, which was a good deal more severe than the corrupt despotism that had preceded it). But where it all started to come terribly unstuck, and in both major parties, was in North American air defence.
