Blue Martyrdom Blues
Aboard a train bound for Ottawa, Dalton was off “to give advice on advertising strategy” to the PC Party’s inner circle for the coming 1953 federal election. While gazing out the coach window, he reviewed the clear lessons he wanted to share from the New Brunswick campaign.
Dalton had been called to Ottawa, he imagined, because senior people in the party’s backrooms suspected he “might have some magical properties — a talisman of better luck, an augury of a renascent political party.” Hugh John Flemming had won in New Brunswick when it seemed impossible. Camp had played a crucial part in his victory. “Thus,” ran the logic, as Dalton extrapolated it, he “might be a part of a larger enterprise. It was as simple as that.”
From his cramped room in the Lord Beaverbrook, Dalton would step, almost directly, into the backrooms of Ottawa. Nobody’s image of a political backroom could have prepared him, though, for the place that opened before his eyes in the Château Laurier Hotel. Behind the bandstand at the rear of the Canadian Grill, the hotel’s softly lighted restaurant, the door opened into a private dining room.
Camp stepped into an “almost baronial” setting. The maitre d’ “commanded silent, efficient waiters, as we dined by flickering candles.” Wine poured so no glass was ever empty, liquor replenished highball glasses. “The talk was assert-ive, incomprehensible, sometimes terse as a telegram, other times discursive.”
He was made to feel “the stranger in the midst of this warm, intimate, mellow group of men, laughter rumbling in their throats, ritual smiles on their lips as the conversation danced over the political scene, as the candles played upon the ceiling, creating both light and shadow.”
This conclave of stalwart veterans, into whose custody Progressive Conservative fortunes were entrusted, included Ottawa Journal publisher Grattan O’Leary; national party president and Nova Scotia MP George Nowlan; the party’s national director, Richard A. Bell; its executive secretary, Cappé Kidd; adman Allister Grosart of the McKim agency; and organizer and fundraiser J.M. Macdonnell, MP for Ontario-Muskoka.
They seemed to Camp “a strange lot,” men who shared filial feeling for one another, to be sure, and who seemed to have mutual tolerance for each other’s opinions, however varied. As he listened to their conversation, Camp sensed they all seemed to agree, even though each offered a different view. But the differences, really, were illusory, he thought, as though each looked upon the many facets of politics and saw something different, in different light, which all agreed was there, whether it could be seen or not by anyone else.
The meal now finished, they turned to look at him.
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“How was New Brunswick won?”
Camp cleared his throat. “It was won because Conservatives attacked Liberals on Liberal grounds, on welfare issues, and because Conservatives did not talk incessantly about taxes, government spending, and ‘what-was-the-world-coming-to?’ which Liberals always expected Tories would talk about.”
There was interest, but some noticeable bristling.
“Go on.”
“I hope the party, in the coming election, will talk to people about issues that matter to them, rather than issues that matter only to the vestigial interests of the Conservative Party.”
The party elders “smiled and nodded agreeably,” though one sought to remove Camp’s lustre by observing that Hugh John Flemming had really been helped into office by the New Brunswick sales tax issue.
They then resumed their discourse, “hazarding guesses as to the date of the next federal election,” about equally dividing between spring and fall, most seeming to much prefer the later date.
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Camp’s invitation to prepare the advertising campaign would definitely not, he realized, mean working solo as he had in New Brunswick.
This, after all, would be a Canada-wide effort, impossible for any one person to handle alone. Besides, Camp was unknown to the national party’s inner circle, was untested, and word had it that the last time he’d been in Ottawa for national politics was as a voting delegate to the Liberal leadership convention that chose the man the PCs now faced as prime minister. Could he really be trusted?
His work would be enmeshed with this committee of Bell, Kidd, O’Leary, Macdonnell, Nowlan, and Grosart, all tested and loyal Tories. Assisting would be Kathleen Kearns, a true-blue who as principal gatekeeper at Bracken House knew just about everybody in the party and held clear opinions on most.
Dalton found the national headquarters “an aging, creaking, two-storey house,” with a dusty upstairs office designated for his campaign advertising work. The optimism with which the place had been acquired by the party in the 1940s had since been degraded to a grey pessimism by the Liberals achieving another majority government in June 1949, leaving George Drew with a corps of forty battle-worn Tory MPs on the Opposition benches to face 191 Grits. Despite the bold promise that Drew might do for the party across Canada what he’d accomplished in Ontario, the party lost twenty-four seats in that election, claiming only 30 percent of the popular vote, far behind the 50 percent earned by Louis St. Laurent’s Liberals.
Anticipation of yet another looming defeat cast a pall of grim resolve over the PCs, from these dingy headquarters on through the caucus members and into the country’s constituencies.
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Dalton’s airless second-floor chamber had fewer amenities but more detritus than he’d known in his small Fredericton hotel room. His new campaign quarters were “overflowing with the unsorted accumulation of passing events.” His allotted cubicle in the Tory structure must have seemed to Dalton like a tomb.
There were certainly plenty of ghosts, a long enough procession of past Conservative heartbreaks to have achieved the cumulative impact of anticipating defeat even before it came. For the most recent defeat, 1949’s election disaster, blame had pretty much been fixed on the McKim advertising agency, Kathleen Kearns confided to Dalton.
Yet its mastermind, Allister Grosart, remained, still on the campaign advertising committee. Dalton was perplexed. He was slow to understand just how treasured a resounding defeat could be to those who felt themselves mis-understood martyrs.
For those suffering that Tory syndrome of emotions, to lose a campaign stoically was a badge of honour. Yet Tories did not, in the manner of the CCF, influenced by the inordinate number of United Church clergymen in that party’s ranks, proclaim each such defeat a “moral victory.” Conservatives actually harboured the hope they might win “next time,” or at least in some future election once it dawned on voters that the Tories had been right all along and rewarded their patience. Meanwhile, electoral defeat was simply good training, because, as Tories knew, the strongest steel came from the hottest part of the blast furnace.
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Dalton resolved to take control of the advertising campaign, despite the exist-ence of a committee and the presence of Allister Grosart, “believing this to be my purpose for being in Ottawa.”
He began to create his own cadre. After getting approval from Dick Bell and Cappé Kidd, Dalton lined up his respected and knowledgeable colleague, Bill Kettlewell, to create layouts for the publicity campaign. He decided that those layouts and other aspects of the campaign planning should be kept out of the hands of any single ad agency, including McKim and his own firm Locke Johnson. He did not want the PC layouts lying around in agencies’ art departments where Grit-friendly eyes could study them.
He was becoming increasingly wary of Grosart, whose primary mission seemed to be retaining the Tory account for his firm. Dalton’s concern was not about a rival agency getting business, however. He’d formed the view that advertising agencies in politics were “wasteful, their judgment often atrocious, and that many of their decisions were likely to be based on their interest in a profitable campaign, rather than on an effective one.” He’d seen that in New Brunswick, as had Hugh John Flemming before Dalton came along.
The rivalry between Camp and Grosart sharpened when it came to the issue on which to fight the election. It was a sobering revelation about party policy-making that by the mid-twentieth century this would be a battle fought in a political back room between two admen, rather than on the convention floor in a national policy debate between voting delegates of the party, or even in the caucus of elected MPs.
Dalton had already set down his marker at the dinner meeting in the Château, by explaining the PCs won in New Brunswick by attacking Liberals. “Conservatives did not talk incessantly about taxes and government spending,” he’d clarified. For the central theme of the 1953 campaign, however, “Grosart was determined that the issue in the election would be taxes; I was resolved that it should not be.”
With opinion polls gaining currency in Canadian politics, Grosart sought an upper hand in this contest of wills between two admen by conducting a poll, making him appear modern, Camp the reactionary. Dalton believed parties, not the public, created issues. He’d already developed “a low opinion of political polls and a healthy respect for their cost.” McKim conducted the survey itself, producing plenty of statistics from which one could deduce that taxation was the overriding concern of a large majority of Canadians. Detailed examination of the pattern of questions suggests the inevitability of such a conclusion.
Meanwhile, Grosart, who resembled a human bulldozer, seemed like one on paper, too. His proposals proliferated, outlining in “confidential” drafts a number of work plans for the 1953 general election. Some ran to thirty pages, single-spaced. They were dense, but followed an inexorable logic. Grosart expatiated at length in one on the similarities between ad campaigns for political messages and consumer products, though near the end cautioned that “the comparison should not be taken too far.” On this point, too, Camp saw things differently. He thought advertising appeals in an election campaign were entirely unlike those for commercial products, as he’d already shown in New Brunswick. He believed one would fail if trying to extrapolate a campaign about the country and people’s futures from the best ways of selling cars or Kleenex.
Camp and Kettlewell, despite a growing sense that their efforts were futile, continued to plan bellicose advertisements giving the Grits hell.
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March turned to April, spring was advancing, as was another Maritime election.
Dalton happily answered a call from MP George Nowlan. He enjoyed interacting with the Nova Scotian on the election advertising committee, taking comfort in their common Maritime outlook on most things. But even more, he found the irreverent and gregarious PC Party president easy to like.
And, happily, Nowlan was more prepared to fight Grits than most Tories Dalton was encountering in Ottawa. “As a recent entrant into the House after a fiercely contested by-election,” quipped Camp, “his spurs jangled when he talked.”
The MP for Digby-Annapolis-Kings was on the line suggesting Camp “go to Nova Scotia and meet Bob Stanfield.”
Was Nowlan seriously seeking to help his provincial counterparts, Dalton wondered, or just trying to get him off the Ottawa scene under pressure from the McKim interests? It could, of course, be both.
“Old man,” Nowlan said hoarsely to Camp, “this is not going to be like New Brunswick. Nobody’s going to beat Angus L. and Stanfield is not Hugh John Flemming. But I think you should go down, at least, and look around.”
A couple of days later in Halifax, arriving at the law offices of McInnes & Stanfield, Dalton climbed a flight of wooden stairs, having no idea what to expect. He’d only heard that Bob Stanfield was a dull, dour man.
At the top, he found himself “standing opposite Stanfield in an austere, undistinguished room, the afternoon sun pouring through a curtainless window and falling on the plain, bare table between us.” They sized each other up. Well, thought Dalton, “at least he’s not pretty.”
The taciturn leader of the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Party was seldom at ease initiating conversation. He was happier enduring long silences than speaking. If and when he did give voice, it was in single sentences. For quite a while Camp just shifted uneasily in his chair. Maritime politics could take time.
“Some of our fellows,” the Nova Scotian finally croaked out, “think we could use a little help down here in the election.”
“How does the election look to you?”
“Oh, I don’t know, we don’t expect to win, but we expect to do better.” After a reflective pause, he added, “Somewhat.”
“I looked at the last election returns and you could have won if less than two thousand votes had gone the other way.”
“That’s a lot of votes,” smiled Stanfield, “in Nova Scotia.”
“You’re a lot closer than we were in New Brunswick last year,” reassured Camp, making the Maritime connection.
“That may be true but this is not New Brunswick. The Grits are pretty strong here.”
“I don’t see any reason why you can’t win.”
“Well,” smiling again, “I do.”
“I don’t see any sense in running to lose.”
“We’ll do the best we can, that’s all,” his smile gone. “It’s not a matter of running to lose.”
The two men were grating on each other’s nerves. Camp was getting belligerent because here he now was, in yet another setting, meeting yet another senior Conservative who lacked all gumption for electoral battle. He’d become “so damned sick and tired of meeting Tories who can’t win, don’t want to win, never will win,” he said of this encounter.
Stanfield, after the silence of sunlight had mellowed things a bit, said perhaps Camp could lend a hand with a few problems, getting candidates, and the publicity. “We have a fellow here who has helped us in the past. I don’t know how good he is, really, but you might be able to help us there.”
Dalton departed, puzzled by Stanfield’s diffidence, thinking he’d never seen anybody who needed help more. Back in Toronto, he phoned Nowlan in a rueful mood, hoping the pre-defeated Nova Scotia Tories would find assistance without him, concluding he’d “only get on Stanfield’s nerves.”
Upbeat George Nowlan shot right back, “That’s just what he needs, old boy.”
Camp wanted to fight Grits. He did not want to have to do it through the enfeebling proxy of passive martyrs.
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When April 15 arrived, so did a message cabled to Camp announcing a Nova Scotia election had been called for May 26. “Anxious to see you,” signed Stanfield.
Nobody at national headquarters seemed reluctant for Dalton to depart. Perhaps they expected another miracle, as in New Brunswick, he thought, or perhaps they felt easier with his energies transported to other lands. He left, in low spirits but hoping to accomplish some good in a more clearly defined role, and “resignedly, but cheerfully, surrendered the federal campaign concerns to Grosart.” McKim’s advocate for waging the national PC campaign on the single issue of cutting taxes suddenly had a wide open field.
“Where in hell have you been?” demanded Stanfield when Camp resurfaced in Halifax.
After the confrontation, the leader departed for nominating meetings around Nova Scotia. For his part, the adman began to replay his New Brunswick scenario, moving into a small room at the Lord Nelson Hotel, contemplating his now recurring challenge: How to fight an election everyone believed lost even before the campaign had begun?
Camp’s whole thrust in overcoming an entrenched Grit regime in New Brunswick had been to relentlessly attack the seemingly invincible Liberal premier, and even mock him for the government’s significant shortcomings. However, because long-serving Liberal premier Angus L. Macdonald was highly revered, despite the fog of corruption wafting around the lower levels of his government, the waiting Tory victims imposed a rule of passivity, meaning that in preparing the ads Dalton “was repeatedly warned not to attack Macdonald, indeed, not even to mention his name.”
To ensure Camp toed the line of polite passivity, Stanfield saddled him with a three-man “publicity committee,” consisting of Halifax mayor Richard Donahue, former party leader Leonard Fraser, and leading Halifax lawyer Roland Ritchie. Encouraged by Camp’s own bellicose approach, they quickly revealed themselves to be just as belligerent. Closet Tory warriors, too, they co-operated with Dalton, encouraging, rather than restraining, him.
Pleased to find that not every Nova Scotia Tory wanted to be sacrificed on the Liberal altar, Camp set up his editorial comment advertisements, similar in style to those previously signed by L.C. House. Most newspapers were happy to get the advertising revenue, but not the austere, dignified Halifax Chronicle-Herald. As the only paper with province-wide reach, the Herald’s refusal to print a paid ad because it expressed robust opinions during an election campaign was a major setback.
When Dalton next sought to replicate the Jack Fenety radio commentaries, he cast around for the most popular radio voice in the province. Discovering it belonged to John Funston, he made a deal with the popular young sports announcer and his station manager at CHNS, Gerald Redmond. Soon listeners were surprised that some life, and even dissent, was issuing upon the electoral playing field. Others were simply shocked. Liberal organizers went to CHNS and retained Funston’s services, too, confounding listeners who heard him support the Tories and denounce Grits, then later, as the same man, support Grits and denounce Tories. This was crazy, but it would get crazier.
When the PC candidate in Colchester County, Ike Smith, wrote a strong radio speech condemning transgressions by government employees at Inverness Mine in Cape Breton, he quoted directly from the royal commission report on the scandal. CHNS’s station manager called Camp about problems with the script. Broadcasting regulations required pre-clearance of any election “free-time” talks. When he arrived, Dalton was introduced to the Chronicle-Herald publisher’s son, Laurie Daley, lawyer for CHNS. Daley and Redmond insisted Smith could not use the airwaves for his election speech unless he deleted the offensive paragraphs, sentences directly from the public findings of an independent body the Liberal government itself had constituted. Nova Scotia’s Grit fortress had thick walls of protection with deep reserves of combatants inside.
Camp was finding himself locked out. First he faced the PC hierarchy’s injunction there be no criticism of the Liberal leader against whom they were, notionally, campaigning. Now he encountered media organizations seeking to steer through provincial waters without upsetting the entrenched powers of government, their readers, or their listeners.
Dalton, in despair, climbed a single flight of stairs from his room in the Lord Nelson to where the offices and broadcasting studio of station CJCH were housed, to speak with its manager. Finlay MacDonald welcomed Camp into his office and sat back to listen.
Only part way through explaining his plight, MacDonald interrupted his visitor, left the office, went down the corridor into the studio, flicked a switch, and said in confident voice over the airwaves, “On behalf of CJCH, I want to inform all politicians and all political parties that they can come to the studios of this station and say whatever they want to say, without any interference, direction, or censorship from management. The air is free, and party represent-atives are free to use it at CJCH.” Returning to his office, MacDonald resumed his seat and asked Camp, “Now, how else may I help you?”
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MacDonald also helped by proposing that Stanfield say something dramatic in his final speech of the campaign, to show he had beliefs and determination.
The best they could come up with, after extensive brainstorming, was a pledge from Stanfield that, as premier, he would take charge personally of industrial development to lift Nova Scotia’s stagnating manufacturing operations into a new era. “Better than nothing,” sighed MacDonald, “but for God’s sake, have him say it with conviction.”
A second item for “the last big speech” was to make public a fresh scandal. Harold Connolly, the minister responsible for provincial liquor stores, had secretly received a substantial gift of company shares from a Toronto distiller. Research had been ongoing and the Tories had proof.
On the rainy night of Stanfield’s campaign wind-up speech, Camp and MacDonald stood at the rear of the Dartmouth hall, where about two hundred loyal PCs had gathered, to judge his impact on the audience. When the PC leader reached the part about the shocking scandal, he paused, looked out mournfully at the partisan crowd, and waited. Before proceeding, he apologized, “Now, they told me to say this …”
Camp was dismayed. Neither he nor MacDonald could believe their ears. They were appalled by his “flat, unemotive, half-audible” reading of charges that should have exploded as a major political scandal on the eve of voting.
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If Robert Lorne Stanfield had not the head, heart, nor stomach for politics as people knew it, he was a stark contrast to Dalton Camp’s understudy, Norman Kempton Atkins, who’d been spending the summer keenly absorbing everything his political mentor was up to.
Among his many tasks for Dalton, Norman gravitated to many roles including helping with arrangements, keeping tabs on people, driving hither and yon on urgent errands, and ensuring events came together at the right time in the right place with the right people to create the desired outcome. He’d be Dalton’s shadow to ensure a successful nomination, a well-delivered broadcast, an advertisement published when and where intended. He had bottles of liquor and buckets of ice on hand whenever and wherever required, which was just about all the time, everywhere. Dalton saw repeated evidence of Norman’s natural capacity for close attention to administrative detail and logistics.
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When ballots were counted the night of May 26, 1953, and recounted in several close ridings over the days that followed, Nova Scotians had elected twenty-two Liberals to form another government in the thirty-seven-seat assembly, exactly the outcome many Progressive Conservatives predicted. They were content, not in victory, but in fulfillment of their prophecy of defeat.
Anyone who made closer study of the results, however, as Dalton did, could see the PCs had done better than expected, moving up from eight to thirteen seats and standing only 5 points behind the Grits in popular support province-wide, 44 to 49 percent. Camp realized his Tory martyrdom blues might not last forever. Perhaps Conservatives could shuck off their self-fashioned defeatist syndrome. “Modern campaign techniques had come to the aid of partisan politics,” he noted hopefully, believing they “offered antidote for an otherwise bland and indifferent medium which, for too long, had seemed determined to maintain the status quo.”
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In Ottawa, meanwhile, Allister Grosart had jogged unimpeded into the end zone, scoring during Dalton’s absence. He’d consolidated apparent support for a PC campaign on tax cuts.
This was a different Tory affliction, Camp thought: not passive defeatism, but aggressive triumphalism in the Conservative obsession with taxes.
Grosart had won in the backrooms, but not yet with voters, and there were already three fouls against his play. Finance Minister Douglas Abbott had just brought down a budget that included a range of tax deductions, deflating the Tory’s issue.
The second problem involved timing. When the Liberals did not call the election in the spring, the Tory backroom sages concluded voting would be in the fall and they’d have time to work out the details for their massive tax cut proposal. St. Laurent caught them off guard, however, adroitly calling the election for August 10. Camp rejoined national party headquarters just as a frantic meeting was in progress to finalize a PC campaign pledge for $500 million in tax cuts. On imminent deadline, Grattan O’Leary had to finish writing the speech George Drew was about to deliver in London to kick off the national campaign.
The third foul registered in the shuddering misgivings of many serious-minded senior Conservatives apprehensive about Grosart’s big tax cut idea. J.M. Macdonnell, the PC finance critic, was skeptical about the tax cut and did not see where the cuts could be made. His cautions changed nothing. Who, after all, was the party’s official finance spokesman to derail an adman’s plans for the national finances?
That night Drew made the announcement. The press correctly reported the $500 million tax cut as the main plank in the Progressive Conservative election platform. The effect on Tory candidates and workers was, Camp reported, “instant consternation.” Most of the 248 PC candidates saw their election prospects evaporating. The party had instantly lost all flexibility and manoeuvrability, because of this one pledge. Most were dumbfounded. Where had such an astonishing policy originated?
Nobody wanted to explain that an ad agency, and in particular a single individual who was neither elected nor accountable, had such dominion over a political party. Perhaps it was because McKim had fumbled the previous election that Grosart tried so hard, for this one, to come up with a single stunning idea he’d convinced himself was the key to victory.
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In high summer, with Ottawa sweltering in steaming heat, Dalton slipped out of town, two weeks before voting.
He headed with Linda to Robertson’s Point for refuge, “uneasy and disconsolate, nursing a profound sense of personal failure, made more soulful by a feeling of inadequacy.” On election day, they drove over into Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley to sip scotch with George Nowlan and listen to the radio as voting returns were broadcast.
“Dear God,” exclaimed the dismayed PC Party national president and member of the party’s advertising committee along with Grosart, once the scope of the disaster became apparent, “where did we ever get that platform?”
On election night 1953, the Grits stood at 48 percent in popular vote nation wide, the tax-cutting Tories at 31 percent. Liberals won 171 seats in the Commons. The PCs, 120 seats behind, elected only fifty-one MPs.
In forming their fifth consecutive majority government, Canada’s Liberal government appeared invincible for all time.