To the Polls
When the Second World War began, the Liberals under popular premier Mitch Hepburn seemed poised to become a decades-long governing force in Ontario. Then something snapped in the onion farmer. Hepburn’s change of character spread turmoil in Liberal circles and promised opportunity to the Tories.
Hepburn got bored heading his own government and abandoned its running to the province’s top civil servant, Chester Walters. The premier and his northern Ontario gold mining cronies partied in the Liberal leader’s suite at the King Edward Hotel, with jazz on the radio, women companions laughing, and liquor flowing. Whenever his mind wandered back to his government up at Queen’s Park, it was only about how to turn the thing over to somebody else. By the time of the 1943 Ontario general election, Hepburn had twice handed his premiership over to other members of his Cabinet, first Gordon Conant, then Harry Nixon, and even tried to form a wartime coalition government with Conservative leader, Earl Rowe. The Ontario Liberal Party that had been re-elected with a big majority in 1937 found itself torn apart.
Handsome and boldly visionary, George Drew was the opposite of Hepburn. The new leader of Ontario’s “Progressive-Conservatives,” one of the most impatient men in Canadian politics, was also a counterpoint to slow-moving John Bracken, his national leader. Within Ontario Tory circles, Drew, ambitious to lead the provincial party, had been made all the hungrier for the top position after being rebuffed by the Conservative establishment, not once but twice, before finally winning the provincial leadership in December 1938. Once he became leader, Drew worked hard to gain the Ontario premier’s office. For his campaign organization he relied, in the pattern of the time, on the strength of the constituency organizations and provincial officers of the party.
Drew knew he needed fresh policies to counter the rising appeal of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, or “CCF.” Turning to the Port Hope resolutions, he found what he needed for a progressive Progressive Conservative platform and fashioned them into his provincial party’s Twenty-Two Point Program. The package of policies was extensive, specific, and touched virtually every sector of Ontario society. Drew announced it on radio.
In the midst of Ontario’s general election, with voting slated for August 4, 1943, Drew was bullish about his party’s prospects. In Windsor, he addressed an afternoon audience in a local movie theatre on July 14, telling his supporters, “We’re going to build a big blue machine that will advance from one side of this province to the other and roll up a big majority at Queen’s Park.” The Windsor Star reporter filed his story of the meeting, which was picked up by the Canadian Press wire service. Daily papers across Ontario to Ottawa and north to Fort William quoted the Progressive Conservative leader’s imagery of the Ontario Tories as a “big blue machine.”
Drew’s “machine” metaphor fitted his wartime context. Canada was a major player in the war effort, thanks to a tightly organized, highly disciplined, and resolutely motivated domestic war machine, producing munitions, foodstuffs, and trained soldiers, sailors, and airmen. By blending pragmatism and idealism, resources and planning, Canada had forged a nation-wide mechanism for victory. In these dramatic circumstances, it was easy for “Colonel” Drew to envisage, and portray to others, how the party he led might, likewise, resemble a machine.
The vote tallies on election night gave Drew and the PCs enough MPPs to form a new government for the province, but the blue machine had not rolled up a big victory. It barely eked out the narrowest of wins. The policy was strong. The leader was outwardly confident. And several valuable campaign innovations, such as the artful packaging of almost two dozen major programs and extensive use of radio, greatly helped the Progressive-Conservative’s 1943 Ontario campaign. Falling short of a majority resulted from the party’s general organizational weakness, and the expected spectacular rise of the CCF.
The discredited Liberals plummeted from majority government to third spot. Representation in the legislature was thirty-eight seats for the PCs, thirty-four for the CCF, and fifteen for the Liberals. The CCF surge had helped the PCs get past the Grits, thanks to vote splitting.
The voting system worked to the disadvantage of the Liberals. All three parties were close, with the Progressive Conservatives claiming 35.7 percent of the popular vote, the CCF 31.7 percent, and the Liberals 31.2 percent. Although the PCs won more ridings than the other two parties, the Tory’s vote actually dropped more than 4 percent from the prior election in 1937. The Liberals had fallen 20 percent. All gains were by the CCF. Results riding by riding made clear that, by just a handful of votes in a scattering of constituencies, Ontarians had come razor close to electing the first socialist government in North America. That distinction would, instead, belong to Saskatchewanians a year later.
The interplay of circumstances helped the Progressive Conservatives end up on top, and the slight 4 percent difference between the PCs and CCF meant Drew could take power and establish a Progressive Conservative government. The only one in Canada, it was a bridgehead, Tories elsewhere in the country hoped, for the new progressive brand of Canadian political conservatism.
Being able to exercise powers of government gave Drew and his small blue machine the ability, over the ensuing months, to turn promised policies into programs, reap the partisan advantages of making appointments and awarding contracts, and ride the crest of people’s renewed optimism as the tide of war, at last, seemed to be turning toward an Allied victory.
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The 1945 Canadian general election, with voting slated for June 11, featured a battle of the Prairies, where leaders of the country’s four strongest parties were each candidates.
The CCF leader since 1942, Saskatchewan’s M.J. Coldwell, had been an educator and union activist before getting elected to Parliament in 1935 from Rosetown-Biggar constituency. In Alberta, where Social Credit had come to power provincially in 1935, Solon Low had been leader of the federal Social Credit Party since 1944. Liberal prime minister King was seeking re-election in Saskatchewan’s Prince Albert constituency, a seat of convenience he’d held since 1926 after having been beaten in his Ontario riding. The fourth national leader in this Prairie faceoff was, of course, Manitoba’s John Bracken of the Progressive-Conservatives.
Bracken won rural Manitoba’s Neewapa riding, one of only two seats the Tories claimed in a province where he’d been premier for two decades. A damning measure of the feeble clout a provincial leader wields in the sterner contest of national politics was provided by the CCF winning three more seats in Manitoba than the PCs, the Liberals seven more.
The tallies across Canada from the June 11 election gave the Liberals 118 seats with less than 40 percent of the popular vote, the Progressive Conservatives sixty-seven with 28 percent, the CCF twenty-eight, a majority of them in Saskatchewan, with 16 percent popular support. Social Credit, with only 4 percent support nationally, won thirteen Alberta seats. That was another thing about Canada’s voting system: a party strong in one region or province could achieve disproportionate weight in the law-making assembly. Mackenzie King formed a government, based on 40 percent support of voters; 60 percent of Canadians had voted for other parties.
The Progressive-Conservatives had garnered only one or two seats per province, except for the anomaly of Ontario, where the party elected forty-eight MPs. This gave them enough seats overall to rank as Official Opposition in the Commons. Ontario stood out in another way, too. Progressive Conservative premier George Drew had called a provincial election to overlap with the federal one, with voting just a week ahead, on June 4, 1945. When the provincial PCs won a massive victory, the national campaign sought to capitalize on this momentum. Large newspaper advertisements across the country exhorted voters heading to the polls on June 11 to rally behind the PC Party: “Ontario shows! Only Bracken can win!”
PC campaign ads suggested it would be impossible to form a majority government in the country without winning a plurality of seats in Ontario, which, the party contended, only the Tories could do. This unappealing stance was more than offset, however, by the arrogance of Liberal prime minister King who, believing only Liberals could, or should, govern Canada, threatened voters that if his party did not receive a majority, he’d simply call another election.
The June 11 contest brought fully three-quarters of Canadian voters to the polls. After they’d rendered a collective verdict, the Liberals had lost fifty-nine seats, the Progressive Conservatives gained twenty-two, but both parties saw their share of the popular vote erode from the prior election. At just under 28 percent, the Tories had in fact hit their lowest popular vote in history. The exhilarating promise that filled the air in Winnipeg in 1942, when the Port Hope resolutions had become party policy and the party’s name changed to indicate a more progressive nature, had evaporated.
Except for Ontario, the Progressive Conservatives were still in the wilderness.