Dalton Camp’s Resurrection
Late in 1949, Dalton and Linda, returning after his year at the London School of Economics, arrived in New Jersey to stay with her parents. Several days later Dalton heard a knock at the Atkins’ front door. But unlike 1947, the caller was not a Liberal operative. Rather, he was a Western Union messenger, although he, too, brought a political organizer’s invitation as Robert Tweedie had done.
In the closed-circuit universe of New Brunswick politics, word that Dalton had decamped from the Liberals circulated among the Tories, who hoped a disgruntled partisan might be turned into a valiant warrior against his former side. Camp studied the cable from Ewart Atkinson, president of the provincial Progressive Conservatives, offering him the position of executive secretary with the New Brunswick PC Party. The prospect struck him as “both alluring and forbidding, like a sudden invitation to climb Mount Everest.”
His friends, family, and most especially an alarmed Linda, objected with strenuous sincerity to the preposterous idea. Apart from questions of political ideology, the Conservatives were a lost cause, a rag-tag assembly of losers. Everybody knew that. Dalton himself could easily list dozens of reasons to reject Atkinson’s offer.
He managed, in fact, to come up with only three positives: return to Canada, live in New Brunswick, and “teach Tories how to fight Grits.” What he could not add to that stub column on the Yes side of his ledger, because it remained inarticulate, was his idealism about politics. If anything, his time at LSE had burnished it brighter.
Camp would convert. He decided to enlist with the New Brunswick Tories.
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A rebel returned to fight his former allies, he now took fuller measure of the province’s realities.
Camp saw how many New Brunswickers came to be, and remained, Liberal, “not because of any private convictions, but because their ordinary lives depended upon it. These were not only the select in the higher organizational echelons, nor merely the contractors and entrepreneurs. They included the numberless people who subscribed to the Liberal Party in recognition of whatever they got from it.”
In his view, “charity and compassion” once ennobled Liberalism, but what now corrupted the faith was “its expedience and the haunted insecurity that led it to accompany humanitarianism with the menace of fear.” The gist of Liberalism had simply become that “everyone was better off being Liberal, everyone would be worse off being anything else.”
He was nuanced in this appraisal, adding that “the philosophy was not so simply pejorative as that.” It had been “refined and tailored for countless applications, wherever uncertainty could be seeded, wherever there was fear to be fostered. Liberalism had become not a faith but a command.” He even suggested Liberalism probably had to be this way, because “no party on earth could treat so many claimants.”
But the end result of this kind of politics was bleak and rekindled his outrage about conditions in his home province, “much of it directed at the Liberal Party.”
Dalton walked the streets of Woodstock and Fredericton. He saw men “consumed by idleness, their women worn by harsh routine, bearing the pallor of self-neglect, the children with bad teeth, the early beginning of a life cycle of decay; store windows displaying the hideous litter of cheap merchandise, malevolently designed for lives of quiet despair, for an existence amid an abandoned culture, in a ghetto of memory.” This wasteland human condition was the result of partisan political conduct of public affairs in which “charity and compassion, cynicism and greed, lived side by side.”
Dalton knew the culprits. In New Brunswick, “the merchant class took few risks but prospered, and among the risks it did not take was an involvement in politics.” Instead, community service was safely rendered in the safer havens of church activities, charities, and service clubs. Government and commerce “remained at peace, exchanging tributes with graceful facility and tacit understanding.” Each operated so as “to avoid colliding in the other’s jurisdiction.”
Politics was left to lawyers, business to the merchants. Those who benefitted most in terms of personal enrichment were the facilitators who “glided in between” these two worlds, “advertising a common usefulness.” To Camp, this was “a classic kind of Liberalism, satisfying and rewarding to the principals, stultifying to the people, suffocating to the province.”
The new Progressive Conservative recruit raised his sights to take in, as well, the province’s own larger setting. Canada’s constitution had, over time, become unrealistic in its allocation of powers. “There was a growing gap between provincial resources and provincial responsibilities,” he realized, which meant that while the New Brunswick’s government “held title to sovereign responsibilities under the constitution, providence had not provided for the means to discharge them.” Like other Maritime provinces, New Brunswick was “a ward of the federal state.” That had prompted Camp and other Liberals at the August 1948 national convention to draft policies for regional fairness, which he’d seen overridden by the party’s desire to give Canadians nothing more than a perceptibly smooth transition in prime ministerial leadership.
But now he updated his earlier appraisal, noting how constitutional incapacity was itself married to New Brunswick’s bankrupt political system. “If politics and the parliamentary system are meaningless ritual, merely a crude public deception, then argument could be made that the condition of New Brunswick, in 1949, was its natural state.”
Camp saw a party system that had collapsed, and citizens who’d become fatalistically passive. The capacity for public protest, the claims of those with true grievances, even vigorous political dissent had “all been abandoned, indeed, had devolved upon less than a half-dozen men, no more, each of whom, for one reason or another, lacked the strength, skill, or competence to discharge so large a responsibility. In New Brunswick, the party system was dead.”
The refurbished idealist now looked upon the politics of New Brunswick “as a personal challenge and a private duty.”
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Dalton found the man who’d hired him, Ewart Atkinson, a bulldog-like lawyer and aggressive optimist for all things Conservative, in a hospital bed late on a Sunday afternoon. Atkinson told his fresh recruit that he’d booked fifteen minutes of radio air time the next night. Camp’s job was to show up at the station and fill the quarter-hour with a powerful message. It would be entirely up to Dalton what to say.
Over the next twenty-four hours Camp fashioned his first PC political manifesto. As Monday darkness descended, on December 5, 1949, he walked over to radio station CFNB and into the broadcast studio. The red light came on, the microphone was live:
“The business of politics is looked upon by many of us in this province as a practice somewhat unhealthy and sinister,” he opened, connecting himself with his listeners. “That this is so is, in itself, mute indictment of the present party in power,” he added, making clear the villain was the Liberal Party of New Brunswick. “It should be of little comfort to us that a national Canadian magazine recently listed elections in New Brunswick as among the most corrupt in Canada,” he offered by way of external reinforcement, from Maclean’s magazine, for his allegation.
Now with his audience readied, he hit full bore: “Let me make it clear that the professional Liberal, in power today, is opposed to the collectivist state. He is also self-dedicated to freedom. But the professional Liberal will sell any principle, as he has done throughout history and looks like doing today — if the selling will yield him increased power. If professional Liberalism means anything today, it means an ability to hold power, by the subtle exploitation of fear and suspicion.”
He then expressed hope that no sales tax would be introduced by the Liberals in New Brunswick, because people could not afford it and did not want it, only to add his stinger: “But a sales tax is the logical result of the government’s postwar fiscal policy.”
He took note of rising unemployment in New Brunswick to further condemn Liberals, calling the attitude of the provincial government towards labour as “totally unreal” and “anti-labour.”
As for the lop-sided Liberal representation in New Brunswick’s legislature, where the government had forty-six members, Camp said he did not doubt their motives or sincerity. If New Brunswickers set aside the leader of the Liberal Party, however, and looked at the crowded benches behind him, they’d see “a startling array of nonentities collected together for the purpose of governing a modern state.”
“Surely we have not endorsed one-man government, nor a one-party state,” he said. A “political machine” had been put together in the province, he argued, one “highly skilled in the subtle art of patronage, a wealthy machine, a smooth machine” whose masters did not sit in the legislature. “We do not elect them. They do not seek office, but the spoils of office. The greatest task at hand is to crush this machine.”
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The next day, that smooth machine began spreading oily rumours that a disgruntled Camp had left the Liberal Party because Premier McNair refused to name him director of New Brunswick’s travel bureau, a plum appointment. Another version put about explained Camp’s dark anger as the result of the Liberal premier not supporting his supposed ambition to become editor of the Daily Gleaner. In case those two allegations did not stick, another claim to discredit Dalton was that he’d bolted over not getting appointed secretary to the Cabinet.
The Grits added social ostracism to isolate and diminish Camp. “Erstwhile Liberal friends crossed the street,” he observed, “or ducked into the nearest store to avoid meeting me.”
It had been suspected, he was able to chuckle, that his departure from New Brunswick for the London School of Economics meant he’d “gone off to Britain and returned a socialist, or worse.” As his feisty support for Tories confirmed, “it was worse.”
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The executive secretary of the New Brunswick Progressive Conservative Party barely had time to get his feet under his desk and start work when he had to deal with a quick by-election called for January 9, 1950, in Charlotte, a solid Liberal riding. It was as if McNair wanted to humiliate his former confidant.
As the party’s new chief operating officer, Camp accompanied provincial PC leader Hugh Mackay to a meeting with the riding’s Tory executive, only to hear him plead that they not field a candidate. The impoverished provincial Conservatives sole-sourced their campaign funds from the leader, and Mackay was still in debt from the 1948 election.
Being Conservatives, however, a couple of locals resented being told what to do and, anyway, just wanted to fight Grits. So they nominated a candidate, pooling enough dollars to cover the $100 deposit a candidate had to pay, as earnest money, submitting the funds with his nomination papers. Camp found himself twisting between the do-nothing wishes of his leader, the combative desires of a handful of riding association diehards, and, to his dismay, the great reluctance of many Progressive Conservatives to rise and do battle at all.
The only advertisement that the meagre PC campaign could afford was a newspaper ad Dalton prepared. It challenged the Liberal candidate to declare his position on the expected introduction of a provincial sales tax. He actually responded, saying he knew nothing about it.
Dalton took up an offer of free air time and drove the PC candidate from his home to the radio station. During their hour long trip, while Camp reviewed the hottest New Brunswick topics with the candidate and suggested approaches to dealing with them during his thirty-minute address to voters, the candidate mostly sang country and western songs. When he delivered his talk on air, it was not about unemployment or the likelihood of a Grit sales tax, but the importance of the new United Nations in world affairs.
On election day, through a blizzard and freezing temperatures, the Liberal machine hauled supporters to the polling stations and accumulated, for its effort, some 5,547 votes to 3,156 for the PCs. The candidate did not lose his $100 deposit, though several PCs had bet he would. Taking account of “the sour predictions of some of our Tory friends,” that small victory alone pleased campaign organizer Camp.
The Progressive Conservative vote would have been somewhat higher if Liberal-appointed returning officers had not moved two polling stations in strong Tory areas. After the election, Camp demanded “full investigation of the gross abuses and violations of the provincial Elections Act.”
Premier McNair “seemed only puzzled by this unexpected sign of defiance.” He issued a statement filled with patronizing comments about Dalton Camp and his misunderstanding of New Brunswick electoral laws.
Dalton replied, to keep the issue alive in the newspapers and on radio news, but most every other Tory thought he should drop the subject. After all, the election was over and the PCs had lost. One senior Conservative wearily told him, “I don’t think anyone cares about it, really.”
But they did not understand Liberals the way Camp did. “I knew he was wrong,” Camp said. “The Grits cared; they hated it, despised the publicity, the controversy, and ‘that son-of-a-bitch Camp’ landing on their doorstep.” They became what they did not want to be: “cautious, careful about doing things, so that things should not only be done right, but appear to be done right. It was an unaccustomed consideration.”
Dalton, because he was a Liberal convert among long-time Tories, seemed almost alone in his understanding. He suspected the Liberal machine could be persuaded of the risks and dangers. “If the machine could intimidate people, we had to intimidate the machine.” The PCs must, he concluded, “fight fear with fear.”
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Working for the Conservative Party provided a hard apprenticeship in politics.
Linda had been right. The intelligence and energy Dalton expended tilling New Brunswick’s barren ground for the Tories, with nothing to show for it, made him ask whether he needed to refocus. The fact the threadbare provincial PCs were out of money, had closed the party office, and could no longer pay him helped answer his question.
“At a mere twenty-eight years of age,” he acknowledged, “you do not like to admit defeat. But Don Quixote had broken his lance on the impenetrable armour of New Brunswick Liberalism. Or was it Toryism?”
When he’d arrived in their midst, Dalton had found the Conservatives “racked by dissension, soured by intrigue, demoralized, spiritless, and fragmented.” Their makeover in Winnipeg as Progressive Conservatives may have portended a better future but, so far, nothing had moved at ground level in the Maritimes. Something would have to change for Dalton though. A married man with a growing family had to buy groceries, pay rent.