Elevating Powers
Camp’s ascent into the Tory upper realms was being propelled by twin engines: his talent for devising strategies based on intuition about what the rival Grits would do, and his ability to run a publicity campaign that was focused, colourful, and dramatic.
Snapping fast onto breaking news about Liberal failures, counter-punching with memorable phrases, and doing it all on a small budget, was pure Dalton. In this, he flew solo. Others helped, of course, like Norman Atkins with operations and Bill Kettlewell with creative design. He also drew on well-informed allies like Ralph Hay, Finlay MacDonald, and Kenneth Carson at Hugh John Flemming’s side. But he was a lone combatant, the happy warrior working through the night, calibrating the right trajectory for his fire, crafting the most devastating verbal bombardment to land upon Liberal forces.
Camp waged guerilla war from his typewriter, delighting in this kind of politics, charmed by his own effect marshalling and dispatching words to do battle for the forces of Progressive Conservatism, shining a merciless spotlight on Grit lapses through editorializing advertisements, radio texts for announcers, and speeches for candidates.
In addition to his normal writer’s requirement of solitude for creativity, Camp disliked committees and eschewed being an “organization man.” He declined to tie his identity to a larger entity, be it a university community or the army, or even a church or social club. True, he’d joined the Tory Party, but that had been on his own terms. He’d also quit the Liberal Party precisely because he disliked its operations and, by extension, his association and identity with them. Dalton was an individualist. He preferred specific information he ferreted out on his own to the vague generalizations, rumours, and theories that circulated among groups. It was how he kept his edge sharp.
Camp was a participant observer, subjectively involved, objectively detached. While never an “organization man,” Camp understood all the same that “no man is an island unto himself” and knew he could only mount effective campaigns by working with a wide-ranging election organization. If possible, he’d happily leave meetings, logistics, nominations, vote rigging, and running the ground war in the hands of others. Yet, when required, he proved adept at campaign organization, and displayed instinctive talent on this front, too, a good thing because in addition to fine writing and campaign strategizing, his work as a political organizer was about to become a third engine propelling his rapid ascent.
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In the spring of 1954, Bill Rowe asked Dalton to meet him for lunch in Toronto.
The two had shared provincial campaign activity in Nova Scotia the year before, where Camp first witnessed Rowe’s devotion to the PC cause, effectiveness in aligning the diverse array of cabals and characters jousting inside the Tory ranks, and talent for scouting prospective candidates. On the basis of this “briefest acquaintance,” Dalton had come to admire his contemporary, finding him ethical, intelligent, politically shrewd, and a great companion. Both loved the chess game of politics and took pleasure, together, calculating possible next moves.
Over their meal, Rowe revealed he’d been offered the daunting role of PC national director, replacing Dick Bell, who was returning to his Ottawa law practice, intent on moving from the backrooms into brighter light as an elected MP. Some who work to make politicians look good in public realize they want such a role themselves, believing they could do it even better. Dalton was not surprised by Bell’s move.
Nor was he surprised that George Drew wanted Bill Rowe to be Bell’s successor as national director. Bill’s father, Earl, MP for Dufferin-Simcoe, was in Drew’s caucus. His sister Jean was married to Clair Casselman, Tory MP for Grenville-Dundas, whom Drew had named PC Party whip. Bill himself was an effective, respected, and pleasant party organizer. All the Rowes were major PC players, and by 1954, deeply loyal to Drew as federal leader.
Dalton believed Bill ideal for a party in desperate need of talent and, without pausing, urged his friend to accept.
Then the main course of their lunch was served. Dalton was stunned when it arrived: Rowe would only agree to become national director of the Progressive Conservatives if Camp went to Ottawa with him. Dalton, he elaborated, would be in charge of all party publicity and communications.
At last, so easily, here was the opening Camp had been craving.
Bill listened patiently as Dalton ran through a perfunctory catechism of reasons he couldn’t join him, only to then agree, enticed by a wider avenue of public service to the Progressive Conservative Party, a chance to advance causes he believed in, a way to beat Grits. Both still in their early thirties, Rowe was to be full-time national director, and Camp part-time adviser on everything.
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To the public, a party’s internal operations, being mostly invisible and mundane, don’t hold the same interest that more publicized events do, such as electing representatives, debating government programs, and handling political hot potatoes. Yet the politicians in the public eye, quoted in newspapers, interviewed for broadcasts, and enlarging their presence in all possible ways, cannot accomplish much without these unseen party functionaries, from party president through national director on to riding president and campaign manager. They’d be like soldiers in battle with no supply lines or reinforcements behind them.
A party president’s activities are only newsworthy when some internal party problem, such as rebellion over the leader’s performance, a divisive policy issue, errant campaign funding or voter fraud, demands resolution. When a leader resigns, a president briefly has an important public role, orchestrating a national convention to elect the successor. But in the main, party routines are conducted out of sight.
The Conservative Party in Canada, which Rowe would direct and Camp publicize, was structured differently than others, in part due to its longer history, which over time had produced a distinctive operational culture. As a national association of local associations, it was the opposite of a single national entity with a number of uniform authorized franchises in the constituencies. The high degree of local autonomy in Conservative Party affairs meant the National Association was more a coordinating body, its presiding officer closer to ceremonial head than senior executive with real powers running a responsive political apparatus with stringent lines of operational control. Tories wanted more modern methods, however, and this created impetus for two “solutions” to be more effective in contemporary conditions. The first had been appointment of a national director for the party. The second, still in embryo, would be formation of election campaign teams separate from the regular party structure.
The term national director was, for reasons of diplomacy, perfect. The word national made clear this officer would deal with the Conservative Party’s Canada-wide interests rather than meddle in local matters. At the same time, the term director reinforced the idea that, as in theatre, he would work with the existing talent to present a drama someone else has scripted, perhaps only tweaking some lines, changing the costumes, or reconfiguring the set. In short, whoever filled this position was not a threat, but a facilitator; not a freelancer but someone helping the elected party leader and the elected party president oversee and advance the party’s operations. A national director faced the fluctuating yet urgent and unpredictable needs of a regionalized party. Each national director would make the role into something different, a function of their individual character, the party’s standing, and the times.
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Dalton, soon called on for more than general advice or fine words suited to a particular publicity need, was becoming a “player,” as he liked to identify important political operators in the country’s public affairs network.
He relished being a party organizer. Commuting on the overnight train between Toronto and Ottawa, quartered at the Château Laurier Hotel for longer stays, he luxuriated in the convenient comforts of passenger trains and grand hotels. In Toronto, Linda, though having to raise their children by herself, felt rising pride in her husband’s growing renown. Dalton, “so soon at the centre of things,” found it astonishing to be given “so much responsibility.” It sobered him to realize that the party’s hierarchy had evolved through survival more than anything else, until “the elite essentially consisted of amiable and elderly mediocrities.” He was shocked to discover how just “a very few at the centre, generally lacking any genuine gift in political judgment,” were responsible for determining Progressive Conservative policy and strategy.
He’d already witnessed this with the 1953 advertising committee, watching Allister Grosart single-handedly engineer massive tax cuts as principal plank of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. And he was familiar with the disproportionate influence someone from an advertising agency, if determined enough, could wield. He’d fashioned a solo role for himself in the 1952 New Brunswick advertising campaign, and come close to it again in Nova Scotia’s 1953 election after co-opting Stanfield’s three “watchers” set to guard against his bellicose outbreaks when fighting Grits.
Although too few people were involved in making the party’s far-reaching decisions, Dalton did not protest this state of affairs. Hierarchical structures must, after all, narrow to a point at the top. His democratic instinct still cherished the ideal of policies widely debated and openly adopted by a broad constituency of party supporters. Yet even more, he admired intelligent strategy and effective communication and believed neither was the product of committees.
If just a few good men could get it right, especially if he was one of them, why complain? There was a vacuum at the top. Dalton felt it assisting his rise.
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Upward mobility in a broken party, however, was not to be confused with a glorious ascent to political nirvana.
Dalton climbed the creaking stairs at Bracken House, returning to the same cramped office he’d left months before. Sobered but undaunted, he and Rowe set about “to convert this dreary building into the bustling centre of party activity.” The headquarters itself functioned mostly for benefit of the caucus, sometime for the leader who otherwise used his more convenient staff on Parliament Hill, and “only rarely for the party at large.” There was minimal communication with the ridings. The budget was at subsistence level. Camp thought it ironic that the Tories, publicly damned as “the party of Big Business,” should have so little to show for it behind the scenes.
Whatever funds could be pried loose from businessmen to support publicity campaigns and election organizing was the work of a few patient and persistent fundraisers, men like J.M. Macdonnell who suffered insults and waited in corporate anterooms for hours, trying to make collections, barely managing to keep the party alive. What irked Camp, as much as scant money for operating a national political party, was how the party’s collectors “often presumed to judge how the funds could best be spent, a judgment based on their business experience, which had little or nothing to do with politics.”
There were fifty-one MPs in the Progressive Conservative caucus. Close at hand in Parliament, their political imperatives extended into the operations at headquarters, consuming an inordinate share of staff time. Rowe and Camp wanted far more Tory MPs, enough to form a government, but getting them elected could not be achieved by ministering exclusively to those already in the Commons. They needed to build the party in the ridings, through the provinces, across the country.
Making a tour of the land gave Dalton his first encounter with Canada’s western provinces. As he and Rowe took soundings, it became clear to both that they “could not organize the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in the name of George Drew.” He’d been known in Ontario as a strong premier, but that was only one province. Across the West and in Quebec, it registered with Dalton that the leader “was either anathema or a stranger.”
Maritime Tories whom Camp and Rowe met respected Drew, but were perplexed by his failings with voters. Why had Drew been personally defeated in Ontario but his government re-elected ? What had chilled Drew’s relationship with his successful successor, Leslie Frost? How had he decided to campaign federally in 1953, to the detriment of virtually all Atlantic Canada’s PC candidates, on tax cuts alone?
The national director and his associate also canvassed younger people in the party, finding them restrained in enthusiasm for George Drew, too.
Facing such a reality, Rowe and Camp devised a two-step, indirect strategy: they would build the national party by winning the provinces. A national Progressive Conservative government would be erected upon the building blocks of as many provincial PC governments as possible. To Camp, this seemed natural enough; winning favours to earn support was, after all, the currency of politics.
His native New Brunswick was more than just an example of the building block strategy. What had happened there was in fact the inspiration for their plan. Rowe had given $10,000 to Hugh John Flemming from the national party to get his moribund campaign moving, and Camp had waged spirited offences against New Brunswick’s Grits when others wanted to concede defeat. New Brunswick proved you could knock off entrenched Grit regimes. That meant the PCs newly in office were in position to give tangible electoral support to the federal party.
This double-whammy strategy, building the national party province by province, required taking advantage of local conditions, supporting provincial Tory leaders looking for help, and taking emphatic action whenever oppor-tunity called.
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In March 1955, Prince Edward Island’s legislature was dissolved for an election, handing Camp and Rowe “a severe test of our policy to involve the national organization in provincial elections.”
The difficulty was “outsiders” appearing at election time. That’s why admen from Montreal and Toronto agencies never worked from a provincial party’s campaign headquarters, but secreted their operations in a hotel. For an insular island province whose population numbered about the same as the small Ontario city of Oshawa, the risk was far more pronounced. Nobody “from away,” it was felt, should come onto the island and interfere with its intricate electoral mechanism. The idea that outsiders “knew better” rankled locals and caused natural resentment for Rowe’s and Camp’s hands-on strategy. But they were young, believed they could make a difference, and pressed on.
Rowe brought funds to get the PEI campaign rolling, reprising his role from New Brunswick when stubborn Hugh John Flemming refused to start because the provincial PCs were penniless. Camp, likewise, followed his established form. He “again resorted to the editorial column as the prime element in the advertising campaign” and, as before, his fine fighting words quickly provoked attention.
The ads were the “first thing everyone looks for in the paper,” a Tory bank manager in Summerside, one of the few who knew of his presence, confided to Dalton with glee. “They’ve never seen anything like it around here.” For entertainment value, Camp’s daily blasts ranked high, but for impact on voting intentions, their effect seemed negligible. The Liberals appeared secure for re-election.
Camp’s control over party publicity was “absolute.” That’s what he wanted, but it led to problems. Free from a restraining committee like the one Stanfield set up, perhaps after detecting something in Dalton’s make-up that caused the cautious Nova Scotian to want a brake on bad impulses, he “allowed a personal sense of frustration to overcome better judgment.” Unhinged, his daily editorials “became increasingly crude and acidulous.” Even after he realized his columns were damaging the PC campaign, they “increased in vehemence.”
To this point in his Tory career, Camp had been chagrined to find how Tories internalized their defeatism. But now he himself was launched onto an “adventure in political nihilism.” When defeat came and he departed the Island, he knew it had been “the first time that a campaign I had been involved in actually weakened the party’s position.” It would never, he resolved, happen again.
In the larger picture, Prince Edward Island also handed the duo from head office a humbling report card of their building-block strategy. “Our assumption that Tory prospects could be measurably enhanced by the provision of reasonable funds and an aggressive publicity campaign,” concluded Camp ruefully, “was not to be proven in the Island’s general election.”
In fact, the Island Tories would have been better left alone.