Ill-Fated Flight
Dalton was ready to do just about anything.
The Progressive Conservatives, however, were in such shambles nobody in charge knew what to do with so ardent a volunteer. All across Canada, chill provincial political winds continued to buffet the Tories, as they had for so long. By 1950, the eastern provinces of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick were each governed by Liberals. Quebec was being run by the Union Nationale machine, a case unto itself. In the West, British Columbia Liberals and Progressive Conservatives had merged into a centre-right coalition to defeat the CCF in 1945, and been re-elected in 1949, but the new formation did not even carry the Conservative name, doing nothing for the party profile. Alberta had a Social Credit government, Saskatchewan a CCF one, and Manitoba, Liberal. Ontario alone had its Progressive Conservative government, elected in 1943 and re-elected in 1945 and, again, in 1948.
With the 1945 federal election, John Bracken had entered Parliament and become leader of the Official Opposition. He and sixty-six other Progressive Conservative MPs tried to challenge the Liberals in a divided House where the Grits were shy of a majority. With sizeable numbers of Social Credit and CCF MPs, the Progressive Conservatives were as weak in Parliament as they were behind the scenes, where nothing much had been developed for constituency organization or national campaign structure, either. Such matters held no interest for Bracken.
The only show of spunk came when others in the party, spotting a potential PC headquarters, bought for little money a rundown Laurier Avenue house in a sirloin section of Ottawa. In hommage to the leader, they dubbed the creaky two-storey structure “Bracken House.”
By 1948 it was time for Bracken to take his failures and depart. But he always seemed to have a condition. The premier who’d refused to accept the leadership unless the party changed its name now insisted he would only yield the leadership if given a farm on which to retire. Senior PC bagmen Ed Bickle and Harry Price raised the money and bought the agronomist a handsome spread outside Ottawa.
This backroom deal to facilitate a leadership change sprang directly from an odd turn of events in Ontario. Mackenzie King had shown a leader could be defeated even as his party won majority re-election, and George Drew had pulled off the same stunt, too. The man who’d made the lone Progressive Conservative breakthrough by forming an Ontario government in 1943 and strengthening it in 1945, had lost his own Toronto High Park seat while leading the provincial PCs to a third election victory in 1948.
Ontario’s PCs still had a majority, with fifty-three members in the ninety-seat legislature, but had dropped thirteen ridings, all picked up by the CCF, while the Liberals and Labour Progressives held at fourteen and two seats, as before. Should Drew seek to get back into his premier’s chair at Queen’s Park through a by-election? Or might he instead press ahead for the national party leadership and become prime minister of Canada?
Tory sages at the Albany Club considered Drew a better bet than Bracken. Few, if any, raised concerns about replacing one provincial premier by another. The sweet irony was that a man the party establishment had earlier thwarted at every turn in his efforts to become the provincial leader now wanted to pull strings and orchestrate his ascent to national leadership.
———
A challenge was that, beyond the Albany Club, there did not seem much national interest in a defeated provincial premier.
MP John Diefenbaker was already in the Commons. Though portrayed as a Prairie loner, he had friends in Toronto and elsewhere, including a circle of supporters with enough money to actively promote him for leader. Diefenbaker was gaining publicity and support and was seen by many Conservatives across Canada as a deserving contender. Drew could not just declare his candidacy without appearing rudely ambitious. The Tory premier and his promoters knew a springboard was needed. He should appear to be responding to a “Draft Drew” movement when entering the race.
Drew’s close friend and political confidant A.D. McKenzie, also president of the Ontario PC Party, phoned Elmer Bell, the lawyer in Exeter who was party vice-president and his most reliable fixer. Bell was to start a groundswell of support for Drew.
After making arrangements to patch together a coast-to-coast network of private radio stations to broadcast a special political message, Bell called two nearby Progressive Conservatives, Huron County farmer Gerry Godbout and PC Youth member Clare Westcott in Seaforth, asking them to represent two different Progressive Conservative “grass-roots” voices in delivering a radio message.
Bell picked them up in his car and drove into Stratford, pulling up in front of radio station CJCS. Just before going in, he handed each a speech they’d not seen until that moment, written by someone in Toronto at the ad agency handling the PC account. The nervous duo entered the studio, a small room, where they were instructed to say nothing until a red light came on. With that signal they began reading their speeches, first Godbout, then Westcott. Their call for George Drew “to tender his name to the leadership convention” was heard across the country through the national hookup.
Drew declared his candidacy in a race against Diefenbaker and Toronto Eglinton MP Donald Fleming. The October 1948 convention in Ottawa drew some 1,300 delegates, who also voted on some three dozen policy resolutions, most of them perennial Tory favorites such as tax relief, confronting communists, reducing the cost of government, strengthening defence, and a long-term immigration policy, but a number of them were nationalistic vanguard measures: adopting a distinctive Canadian flag, for instance, and creating a national library. Little remained of the Port Hopefuls spirit or the party’s progressive policy resolutions from Winnipeg six years earlier.
Drew emerged a clear frontrunner, abetted by the strong provincial Tory organization in Ontario. His speech earned more applause than Diefenbaker’s, especially when he called for stronger relations between Quebec and the rest of Canada, criticized centralized power in Ottawa, and advocated a future centred upon personal initiative, saving, and security. Winning on the first ballot by taking two-thirds of the votes, Drew soon entered the Commons in a by-election for Carleton riding near Ottawa.
For a while things seemed more promising for the PCs nationally, but in 1949 the Liberals, smoothly in control and now led by Louis St. Laurent, defeated the Drew-led Progressive Conservatives, gaining another majority. Overall, Progressive Conservative performance remained the same in the provinces. In Nova Scotia, the Liberals swamped the PCs in a 1949 provincial election, taking twenty-seven seats to eight for the Tories. Liberal hegemony in national politics seemed more stable than ever, thanks to the post-war prosperity which folks in general attributed to the presiding beneficence of “Uncle Louis” St. Laurent’s government in Ottawa.
It seemed Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government was an aberration.