Gaining Some Ground
Shortly after the PEI fiasco, Ontario premier Leslie Frost called a provincial election, presenting a different challenge for the Rowe-Camp strategy. How can you earn support by giving help that is not needed or wanted, but in fact refused?
By 1955 Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives had been in office a dozen years and, after George Drew and interim leader Tom Kennedy, were now on their third leader. These factors could make re-election difficult. But the PCs, implementing major improvements under Drew’s Twenty-Two Point Program, had been earning credit with pragmatic voters. The economy was strong. The budget was balanced. Government spending on highways, new schools, and hospital expansions evoked a sense of progress. And the PCs had not changed the voting system, ensuring opposition to them would continue to divide between Liberal and CCF candidates.
Advances in social justice had also been made, with new human rights laws to end discriminatory practices. In 1944, Drew’s government introduced the Racial Discrimination Act, the first in Canada to prohibit publication, display, or broadcast of material involving racial or religious discrimination. In 1951, Frost’s government continued this leadership, making Ontario the first province with “fair practices legislation,” a new human rights initiative prohibiting racial or religious discrimination in employment, housing, and provision of services.
Frost thought a campaign based on “Progress” would be his ticket for re-election. He knew his province’s history and understood how the concept of progress had become embedded in the Ontario psyche, or political culture, over decades. He tested the idea with the party’s advertising executive, Allister Grosart, who in turn tested it with the creative staff at McKim and his country neighbours around his rural home. After the disastrous effort he’d engineered two years earlier, inducing George Drew to campaign nationally on massive tax cuts, Grosart had become slightly more circumspect. He reported to Frost that his excellent idea for a “Progress” re-election campaign would fly very well.
The premier had his executive assistant, Clare Westcott, who’d risen in PC ranks with Elmer Bell’s support, compile data from all departments on increased spending and new programs. The PCs then printed this catalogue of progress in a blue-bound volume for all candidates, reporters, weekly newspaper offices, and libraries. The imposing volume, entitled A Record of Accomplishment, helped link progress and Progressive Conservative in voters’ minds.
These advances, and especially the PCs’ human rights initiatives, won Dalton Camp’s strong personal endorsement. But apart from the good feeling these measures gave him about being a Tory, his own role in this election would again amount to no more than casting a ballot for his local PC candidate. The advertising and publicity team for the campaign, secured by Grosart and McKim and under Les Frost’s own vigilant supervision, did not look for nor want any input from federal Tories.
Nor could Bill Rowe, despite knowing most of the Ontario PC ministers and members on a first-name basis, get to first base either. So long as Drew headed the national party and Frost the provincial, the gulf that separated the two men translated throughout party ranks to mean “hands-off.”
Besides, the national PC office had little to add to the well-organized and fully funded Ontario Tories. Hugh Latimer, understudy of party president and chief organizer A.D. Mckenzie, travelled the ridings to find candidates and sniff out issues. Ed Bickle, the wealthy party treasurer, raised all the money needed from distillers, banks, and the Toronto head offices of northern Ontario’s lumber and mining companies. These men answered directly to the premier, as did Grosart about all advertising.
Ontario’s 1955 PC campaign, orchestrated by Frost, represented the apex of Canadian political organization at mid-century, and also became a baseline against which to measure campaign changes that would follow.
The concept of a leader’s tour, for instance, was that the leader himself travelled the province and ran the campaign from wherever he found himself. Away from Queen’s Park, Frost left his one executive assistant, Westcott, to run his tour throughout the province and get Cabinet ministers to speak wherever they could do the most good. Clare lined up ministers with events, generally on the direct suggestion of Frost, who phoned him daily. It was up to the ministers to get themselves to the meetings, and to know what to say when they got there. Each had his copy of A Record of Accomplishment. That provided the ammunition, but each minister and every candidate was expected to apply his own political smarts in framing the message. There could be whatever local variation in messages circumstances required. There were no “speaking modules” they had to follow.
A few standard newspaper ads were run by the party; local PC candidates ran their own ads, with a variety of messages, in their ridings. Free-time and paid radio political statements were made. Television was used, in relatively limited ways by local candidates, for the first time. The leaders did not meet face to face in debate. No spending limits applied to campaign expenditures. No restrictions applied to how much money any person, company, or other entity could donate.
There was no “centre” to the campaign. It involved Mckenzie in his downtown Toronto law office, Westcott in Frost’s office at Queen’s Park, and a small provincial campaign committee named by the party president, with Frost’s concurrence, which met in Toronto to hear Grosart report on the placement of ads and to ensure all nominations had been completed.
When the campaign ended, Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives won eighty-three seats in the expanded provincial assembly of ninety-eight members. The Liberals gained three seats, to reach eleven, and the CCF picked up one for a total of three, while the lone remaining Communist Party member, J.B. Salsberg, was defeated in Toronto by Progressive Conservative Allan Grossman.
The electoral system had again played its part in the Tory victory. The party had 49 percent of popular support, the Liberals 33 percent, and the CCF 17 percent; not very proportionate to their representation in the legis-lature. The two opposition parties’ combined popular vote matched the number of votes won by the PCs, but the electoral system gave the PCs thirty-three more seats than the fifty they needed for a majority government.
As for their building-block strategy, the best interpretation Rowe and Camp could place on being frozen out of Ontario was that its successful Progressive Conservative government continued to provide strength to the national party at the constituency level and among voters. Beyond that, they resigned themselves to nothing more than cordial non-engagement.
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New Brunswick was next up. Neither Dalton nor Norman Atkins could be considered “outsiders” here, and even Bill Rowe had been on the scene four years earlier.
If the province was familiar, they could not exactly repeat their campaign roles from 1952. The difference this time was that the resources of a party in power were much greater, there was a record to defend rather than one to attack, and voters, rather than wondering what risks they might face with a PC government, had become acclimatized to Progressive Conservatives in office providing a fresher approach to provincial affairs.
When the polls closed on June 18, 1956, New Brunswick PCs were rewarded with one additional seat, the party standings in the provincial assembly now thirty-seven Tories to fifteen Grits. Behind that large PC majority, the two parties stood closer in popular support. A spread of just 6 points, 52 percent to 46 percent, separated them, with Social Credit candidates getting the rest.
The building-block strategy again looked more plausible.
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A bigger test came with Nova Scotia when, earlier than expected, a general election was announced for October 30, 1956.
A swift series of changes, beginning two years earlier, had utterly altered the province’s political complexion. When Premier Angus L. Macdonald suddenly died in April 1954, Nova Scotia’s Liberal anchor was gone and a bitter feud began within drifting Grit ranks over his successor. Roman Catholic and Protestant party members divided into denominational camps and battled over an unwritten Liberal rule to alternate leaders between the two faiths.
Focused only on immediate triumph in a leadership convention, Grit denominationalists unwittingly helped the Tories by splitting their party. By the time of the by-election for Macdonald’s vacant Halifax seat, a rare alignment of circumstances saw Richard Donahoe, with Dalton Camp his campaign manager, become the first Tory to claim any Halifax seat in over two decades.
In 1954, Bob Stanfield’s wife, Joyce, died in a car accident. The grieving widower was left to care for their four young children. In making his excruciating decision to stay on as Progressive Conservative leader, Stanfield vowed he’d return home every night, no matter the hour or distance, so Sarah, Max, Judith, and Miriam could awaken to find their father home and helpful.
“Nova Scotians, moved by his private sorrow,” said Camp, “looked again at this gaunt, homely man and discovered in him the qualities they most admired in public men. He became, for the first time, set apart from other politicians and, as Macdonald had been, above public rebuke and partisan scorn.”
Henry Hicks, the strong-willed new Liberal leader, grew weary of how Bob Stanfield, increasingly perceived as a man of granite integrity, was outman-oeuvring him on a scandal involving liquor agents in the government-run stores. By 1956, the new premier called a provincial election, well ahead of his term expiring, wanting to get a fresh mandate for himself.
Camp was back, working once more on campaign advertising, again ensconced in the Lord Nelson Hotel but this time without a committee of chaperons. A second difference was that Dalton was now an agent of national headquarters, pursuing the strategy he and Rowe envisaged of winning federally by escorting provincial Grit governments, one at a time, to their political graveyards.
Norman Atkins, just ninety kilometres away at Acadia University, was a natural in the role of student provincial organizer for the Progressive Conservatives. With that title and assignment, Norman found easy hunting in Halifax. Staying with Dalton, he circulated the city’s many institutions of higher learning with their voting age students. Getting to other campuses, such as St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, was also productive. Norman found the provincial Liberals, still raw from their leadership religious wounds, fairly inactive. St. FX was already organized, its lively student PC club headed by Lowell Murray, other members including Sam Wakim and his roommate Brian Mulroney.
Atkins also began to use the telephone. “Politics,” Dalton had explained, in an aside after patient Norman had waited for an interminable call to end, “is a business best conducted by telephone.” Soon he discovered for himself what Dalton meant. The phone provided immediacy and efficiency, a direct one-on-one communication that obliterated distance, saved time, and enabled intimate candour if speaking with somebody you already knew. He returned to his classes, but remained in long-distance contact with his new Nova Scotia campus network.
By election night, the stunning news was that Bob Stanfield had become premier. The PCs barely eked out an edge in the popular vote, with 48.6 percent to the Liberals’ 48.2 percent, but claimed twenty-four of the legislature’s forty-three seats, six more than the eighteen retained by the Grits. As in New Brunswick, the Liberal machine in Nova Scotia had been broken.
Gleeful Camp and Rowe had added another building block.
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Quebec was a long-standing challenge for the Tories, but here, too, the pair at PC headquarters devised a worthy variant of their plan to build the national party through the provinces. Without any provincial PC Party, they gravitated, instead, to the most appealing Quebec Conservative as someone around whom to galvanize support.
Léon Balcer, elected Progressive Conservative MP from Trois-Rivières in 1949, had been re-elected in 1953. A lawyer by profession, Léon was handsome and bilingual, with the confidence of a natural leader. Why not get him elected national president of the PC Party?
George Hees, also an MP, was the incumbent president. His panache and movie-star looks outclassed others in the party, but that generated more jealousy than affection. And the well-connected Torontonian’s exuberant self-promotion did little to disguise his ambition to lead the party and become prime minister, fostering resentment in Tory ranks from those more discreet about their aspirations and those protecting incumbent leader Drew from usurpers.
Camp and Rowe, having discussed the party’s conundrum in Quebec, hatched a plot to replace Hees with Balcer. A successful challenge seemed possible. With the PC annual meeting approaching and Hees not yet declaring interest in re-election, they met with Balcer and found him willing to stand for the presidency. He promptly announced his candidacy, with both speech and press release by Dalton.
Hees, tracked down on ski slopes by reporters, told journalists he’d not yet decided about the presidency. He was, in truth, stunned by the challenge. Hees did not offer to run again. At the general meeting, Léon Balcer by acclamation became the first French-Canadian president of a political party in Canada.
Now Camp and Rowe had an ally in Quebec with whom to work, a man with stature on the national scene.
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Seeking to build grassroots PC support across the country, as important as toppling Liberal provincial governments, Dalton began a monthly magazine, Progress Report. Soon it “was finding wide acceptance within the party, even while it had its inevitable critics in the caucus,” mostly because the magazine reported progress in the provinces more than it extolled the existing MPs.
Another major initiative by Dalton was something that would become a hallmark of Camp-Atkins political operations: organizing memorable events and special-occasion dinners. The patterns at Robertson’s Point, where a familial group connected, relaxed, played, and interacted with a drink in hand, became their model for successful political team building. They understood the social value and communications benefits of bringing carefully selected people to a pleasing event where they would create and share a common experience.
Camp proposed a series of “Second Century Dinners” to commemorate John A. Macdonald’s founding of the Conservative Party a hundred years before. His theme of a “second century” masterfully highlighted the Tories as Canada’s oldest political formation while also focusing attention on the unfolding decades ahead. Four Second Century Dinners were organized, for Winnipeg, London, Trois-Rivières, and Charlottetown. The national leader and new provincial PC premiers, along with other rising Tory stars, addressed the formal and well-organized events, projecting to the public the image of a party on the rise while fusing a sense of identity and purpose within the party.
One very promising star was Manitoba’s Duff Roblin, a human spark plug who’d become provincial PC leader. When Camp and Rowe first met with the diminutive Manitoban in October 1955, Roblin got right to the point: Would he get the same support and co-operation they’d given Flemming in New Brunswick and Stanfield in Nova Scotia?
Rowe assured him he would. Roblin, driven by anxiety to be even more direct, was explicit. “I want you guys to come out here and do a job for me.”
No appeal like that had greeted them in Saskatchewan, Alberta, or British Columbia. They quickly assured the potential Manitoba premier, “That’s talking our language!”