A Date with Destiny
Dalton listed “basic issues” around which he thought the Progressive Conservatives, in light of party stances and current events, might build a 1957 election campaign.
He had a clean slate. In John Diefenbaker’s victory speech to the convention, their new leader told delegates that PC policy had been drafted “as the result of the application and thinking of every Conservative at this convention and many more not privileged to attend.” It was “representative of the viewpoint of every walk of life and people from every part of this country” and dealt “with the needs and aspirations of every Canadian.” Then Diefenbaker ordered the party-approved policy resolutions burned.
Thus freed, Camp began his own list of top issues for the PCs’ policy agenda. First on the list were the economic problems of have-not provinces, the impasse in dominion-provincial relations, credit restrictions, fiscal policy, and inflation. Agriculture, social services, social security benefits, natural resources, and human resources, were issues he added next. Raising his eyes to the international scene, he listed the United Nations, the Commonwealth, and the United States. Back within the country, he then covered off Louis St. Laurent being “a lame duck prime minister,” res-toration of the two-party system, and “the rights of the people in Parliament,” which, he noted, was “The Chief’s expression.” Already he was referring to Diefenbaker by the handier deferential title, “The Chief.” Tories liked how it rymed with “Dief.”
Reviewing each issue, Dalton saw how they cancelled themselves out. An item popular or necessary in a particular region or certain segment of society would be “either rhetorical or inflammable” in others. Of all the possibilities, Camp saw only one concept that was “truly national in scope.” It was what he’d identified as “the personal appeal of the leader himself.”
Dalton Camp had rationalized a campaign focused exclusively on John Diefenbaker.
It was the one theme he knew The Chief, who insisted on personally approving everything, would go for: full adulation of a party that had twice denied him the mantle of leadership. It was an issue that allowed PCs to attack Grits and be positive, much better than such hoary stances as restoring a two-party system, which made Tories seem like nostalgic fogies, or cutting taxes, which made them resemble fastidious accountants. And, a focus on the leader alone would work best for impressionistic television. Camp’s idea was the genesis of a cult of personality. When he’d come back to Canada, Dalton lamented how the country had no heroes the way they did in the United States. Why not make one? He’d turn Dief the Chief into a Canadian national celebrity.
In early 1957 Camp confided to Churchill, when still national director, that while it was not always possible “for a party to consider its leader as its first asset and best issue,” opinion polling indicated that “the average voter appears to have an intuitive confidence and liking” for John Diefenbaker. Translating that into a strategy for campaign publicity, Camp urged that for “the greatest effect on the greatest number of people,” PC advertising would have to “give the highest priority to Mr. Diefenbaker.”
Certain that Churchill would share his memo with the leader, Camp summed up, “Thus, of all these issues, the one with the widest common denominator is the leadership issue.”
No one would be happier to read that than The Chief.
Dalton could ascend, allied to Diefenbaker, even higher.
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If the PC’s national leader had fixed views about politics, so by this stage in his career did Camp.
When he’d become estranged from the Liberals in the late 1940s, it was because the federal party placed its corporate well-being ahead of true reform and because New Brunswick Grits circulated the benefits of office for themselves while excluding people at the margins. “They do not seek office,” he said, “but the spoils of office.” To preserve his integrity and uphold his beliefs, he’d left the party.
Camp never resented “the Liberal machine” as a political operation, but rather for the way it was run and what it produced. As a political organizer, in fact, he remained in awe of the Grit machinery’s seamless wielding of power, conduct of public business, and election-winning record. He wanted to build a Tory version of the same thing.
To do this he emphasized concentrating focus on the leader, maximizing use of television, and designing a hard-headed plan for campaign operations. In principle, Camp favoured a decentralized campaign that would enable the party to deal as needed with various provinces and individual ridings, in keeping with the historic “local autonomy” nature, structure, and culture of the party. For pragmatic reasons, however, Camp knew the modern age had different requirements.
As a result, Camp’s three-part plan not only accommodated Canada’s new era of democracy, to which television was fast becoming instrinsic, but advanced it, with: (i) a national publicity campaign; (ii) a national tour by the leader; and (iii) a campaign organization that supported all campaign publicity and the leader’s tour by keeping focus on the big national picture with “appreciation of the overall situation.” It was a perfect “progressive” and “conservative” plan because it enabled the Progressive Conservatives to go in two opposite directions at once and yet be consistent.
There would be tight national control over what really mattered in the age of television politics — the image of the leader and a unified national publicity campaign — but beyond that, efforts would be decentralized and run locally as much as possible. “It’s your show. You run it!” became the mantra from national headquarters when asked how to handle local campaign problems, a reassuringly hands-off attitude promoted even as the centre continued to hold tight reins on the campaign’s most crucial elements: all advertising and the leader’s tour.
To be a true political machine, Camp made clear, national publicity had to be rigidly controlled — tactically, administratively, and financially. The national tour, he envisaged, would no longer entail the leader making some speeches here and there, slamming the Grits and saying what a PC government would do in its place. Instead of that limited role, the tour would now anchor the campaign’s overall strategy. Dalton stressed the need for painstaking selection of Diefenbaker’s staff for this mobile operation, just as he emphasized judicious preparation of the itinerary to maximize the leader’s impact for gaining winnable seats.
Camp knew from his own tour around New Brunswick in the 1948 provincial election with Liberal premier McNair the need to put in play a tightly knit cadre of savvy and versatile individuals. For Diefenbaker’s tour team, Dalton’s recommendations were specific. Derek Bedson, recruited from the Department of External Affairs by George Drew to the party leader’s office, was chosen for the role of personal secretary and administrator. Camp had come to appreciate the Manitoban’s refined political sensibilities and courteous ways. They’d also become good friends, Bedson living in the same Ottawa house as Rowe and Camp.
Allister Grosart had to handle press relations and be the TV and radio producer, said Camp. The two men had differences, but Dalton recognized the McKim’s executive as someone highly knowledgeable about campaign momentum, news media, and The Chief himself, a formidable man who could get his way dealing with others. He named a research assistant to travel with Diefenbaker on tour, paired with “an opposite number” remaining in Ottawa, so the two could check any fact or chase down a new rumour while the campaign was in progress, to keep the leader accurately informed.
An “assistant on the road would prepare speech material.” Camp already knew The Chief did not need or even want a set text, the way he wrote speeches for Stanfield, but merely notes that, in a pithy paragraph, covered an entire issue. These speech fragments the leader could then rearrange and select as he progressed through his remarks, in harmony with whatever response he was getting from his audience. It was how John argued his case before a jury in court, operating from the centre of a seemingly chaotic cluster of documents. Sometimes The Chief would just waive a document aloft without reading it, or jab at a newspaper clipping with his finger to make a larger point. For John Diefenbaker, speech-making was all about the dramatics.
The two other slots for the leader’s tour, in Camp’s blueprint, were “a detail man for local arrangements” and “regional advisers.” Camp said the former would likely best be chosen by regional appointment, and for the latter recommended “caucus members, where advisable.”
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Dalton’s plan for the organization itself was premised on what he knew about riding campaigns. Once the election had been called and core elements of the national campaign launched, he said, “there is no longer a federal election but rather 265 by-elections” — the number of federal constituencies in 1957 — as far as the national organization at headquarters would be concerned. For the duration, headquarters would simply “coordinate in whatever way we can the varied conduct of these constituency elections.”
There was no separate facility out of which to run a national campaign. The existing party headquarters at Bracken House served as centre of operations. Two members of the party’s permanent staff in Ottawa would liaise with the ad agencies for English and French language advertising. Regular employees would also handle administrative aspects for the tour itinerary. Extra staff would be hired for clerical duties and mail room work.
Camp built nothing into his plan for opinion polling during the campaign. He had little interest in pollsters’ mass of detailed numbers that someone would “interpret,” and only low regard for the general conclusions produced by 1950s sampling techniques. The election would be won on the ground in individual ridings and by the transcending magic of John Diefenbaker’s Canada-wide appeal. Opinion samplers were useless for both. They did not know how to measure unscrupulous ground-level poll-by-poll warfare, nor could they calibrate magic.
When it came to knowing what to do next, Dalton would not look to samplings of the opinions held by sideline members of the public. He would rely instead on reports from humans directly engaged at the front lines of battle. That was how he’d written his potent political columns, seizing on the hottest reports of partisan combat and transforming them into entertaining and politically lethal messages that turned public opinion itself along a different direction. Camp, knowing victory resided in the raw volatility of public opinion, did not want to be distracted by polling. Besides, all polls showed the Liberals under Louis St. Laurent were a shoe-in for another majority government.
“Our campaign intelligence will be based largely on our direct relations with responsible persons in the various provinces,” he instructed. In early 1957, these PC sources varied “both in degree of responsibility and in usefulness,” so he urged “substantial contact” with the stronger point people and “immediate action to strengthen the weaker ones” to build the election machinery.
The two-pronged campaign strategy outlined by Dalton was a ground war fought poll by poll in the ridings combined with an aerial attack by The Chief who would roam the entire country on a well-planned and highly coordinated leader’s tour. For the latter, Dief would excite voters through orchestrated interactions with reporters, radio stations, and television outlets, and raise fresh hope among party workers at well-run rallies in centres where an extra effort could defeat the Grits.
“We come closest to direct involvement in a riding,” Camp said of the national campaign, “when the leader is in a candidate’s area, when we assist them with regard to publicity, and when we deal with them on matters of finance.” The national party would put its own money into ridings where extra cash could help. Few rules governed campaign spending in 1957, and none imposed limits on the amount of money used.
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Camp’s innovative plan was sound, but three major hurdles remained — the lacklustre party image nationally, absence of voter support and party organ-ization in Quebec which gave a large majority of the province’s many seats to Liberals by default, and lack of money to run the campaign.
It seemed the Progressive Conservative brand, despite high hopes a decade-and-a-half earlier, held little appeal for most Canadians. The ill-fated 1953 campaign, the most recent in voters’ memories, had again tarnished the party’s image, but it was just one more in a string of bleak defeats for the supposedly revamped Progressive Conservatives.
Why not give voters something truly progressive — a new style of politics? The Conservative name and all the history it evoked would be set aside. The campaign, in keeping with the strategy to highlight the one common interest in all regions, would have a single, simple message: “It’s Time for a Diefenbaker Government!”
The slogan emerged when Camp, Bill Kettlewell, and Hank Loriaux brainstormed in the Toronto boardroom of Locke Johnson. Dalton knew it resonated perfectly with the “the greatest common denominator of the campaign — the belief that the Liberals had been in office too long.” But there was more. A soft change to “a Diefenbaker Government” would not invoke antagonistic partisan loyalties or repel Liberal sentiments the way calling for “change to the Conservatives” would. “Diefenbaker” suggested “ethnic origins, a social order other than Toronto, and politics other than Tory.” The slogan, he believed, evoked “painless change, buoyant hopes, a new order, glints of strength, and fresh promise!”
The second challenge was Quebec, a province rich in seats — most solidly Liberal. Besides their partisan traditon, voters were emotionally predisposed to support native son Louis St. Laurent, which meant voting for the Liberal prime minister’s candidates. The Progressive Conservative organization existed on paper, not in the parishes. The scattering of Quebec seats held by Tories were the product of strong individual appeal and good organization in specific ridings. Léon Balcer in Trois-Rivières, for example, as a relative of Maurice Duplessis, got solid help from Union Nationale troops.
Third, being a moneyless party was like being a band without musical instruments. Though never openly acknowledging this reality, Camp’s campaign strategy was crafted as a small budget operation. That’s how modest circumstances had first schooled him to fight Grits in New Brunswick, proving not only that necessity can give birth to invention, but that the result can be a major improvement. He’d also concluded, watching the losing New Brunswick Liberal campaign in 1952 and hearing backroom details about the Tory national campaign of 1949, that ad agencies were inefficient, and their decisions often inept, frequently based more on making a profit than mounting an effective campaign.
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A hardball way to confront the PC’s lack of campaign funds and chronic weakness in Quebec would be to write off the province’s seats.
The PCs could husband limited resources for more effective use in ridings easier to win, spending only token amounts in Quebec and having the leader’s tour touch just a few safe places. Quebec Tories might appreciate running their own show anyway, not having to make apologies when parading before audiences a leader who could not speak the language and who’d slighted them at the Ottawa convention. The risk in such a blunt strategy was that it would, yet again, infuriate the bleus of Quebec who were being ignored by Diefenbaker. It would also provoke outcry from Conservative workers expecting to scoop money from the campaign.
Gordon Churchill would get credit for this strategy to campaign as if Quebec had somehow separated from the rest of Canada, but he never had the makings of such a brazen strategist. The malleable Manitoban’s real role in this was as fall-guy in case the plan badly backfired. For this simplistic divide-and-conquer “Quebec strategy,” Churchill was taking direction from John Diefenbaker, to whom he was now devoted.
Diefenbaker’s hardnosed approach to winning the leadership by focusing on the majority of non-francophone voting delegates planted the seed that sprouted in this 1957 campaign decision to bypass Quebec. If it was numerically possible to form a government without winning seats in la belle province, why dilute the effort in other provinces where greater gains could be made? Win where you had the best chances.
Diefenbaker wanted to appeal, as the first national party leader with origins other than French or English, for “One Canada.” He took smug satisfaction believing his stance helped him gain the party leadership, winning over delegates silently happy to see him pointedly exclude a French-Canadian presence. He would apply the same tactic a second time, on a national level.
Camp disliked this strategy for the election as much as he had for the convention. He’d seen Progressive Conservative victories in French-speaking communities of New Brunswick where he’d been told the party could never win. He stuck up for minorities and abhorred seeing people pushed to the margins. But nothing could change The Chief’s view about French Canadians, born on the multiethnic Prairies and matured during seventeen years’ witnessing the astuteness of French-Canadian political leaders in the Commons. As well, personal embarrassment about his German name, especially during the war, propelled him to advocate “un-hyphenated Canadianism.” A campaign that treated all Canadians equally was fine in his books, consistent with the “melting pot” concept of a New World society and, even better, a strategy to beat the Grits.
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As the 1957 election loomed, Diefenbaker’s national campaign committee gathered early on Sunday, April 7, in the Château Laurier. The powerful group assembling that warm, quiet morning included major players in the party, all anxious to hear Camp present the advertising campaign he’d devised.
Four years earlier, after Dalton tried in vain to take charge of the 1953 campaign publicity, he had resolved “to assume control of the advertising campaign for the next election.” Now that Diefenbaker had given him “important special responsibilities for creative planning of national advertising,” he was where he wanted to be — in the driver’s seat.
Camp told the large number present that “nearly all the promotional copy” would be not something written by Tories but extracts from “unimpeachable authority — the press of Canada.” He’d collected a string of “pearls” from editorials, each one testifying to some special quality or ennobling attribute of the party’s leader. Those endorsements would be evidence to support the slogan “It’s Time for a Diefenbaker Government!”
There would be only two ads, both full-page. One showed a handsome photograph of John Diefenbaker. The other was an adaptation of a Globe and Mail political cartoon that portrayed the Peace Tower as a guillotine, reprising the national outrage when the Liberal government invoked closure on debate, the year before, to force its pipeline legislation through Parliament. At the time, the press had dubbed the fateful day “Black Friday.” This full-page campaign ad carried only the stark words BLACK FRIDAY at the top. To maximize impact, the image had been reversed by Camp, so that the whole page was black with the outline of the Peace Tower/guillotine appearing in white. Both ads were clean, bold, visually commanding.
Camp’s presentation done, the meeting erupted, first with applause, then a standing ovation.
Within hours, the ads were en route to Maclean’s, Reader’s Digest, and many other magazines, to cover everyone from farmers and veterans to anglers and Daughters of the Empire. As Camp had designed it, the advertising campaign “was a model of simplicity, efficiency, economy, and reach.” The editorial testimonials with the picture of John Diefenbaker would run in every daily newspaper across Canada, and in every Canadian magazine of record.
The layout for Reader’s Digest, a small-format publication, ran the photo on one page and the “pearls” on its facing page. This double-page spread was then also printed, in hundreds of thousands of copies, to be shipped to the ridings for local printing, on the blank side, as campaign pamphlets. The BLACK FRIDAY ad, which ran later in all daily newspapers (except those in Quebec, where use of closure to end debate had never been an issue), was similarly converted to a pamphlet.
With a single fold, the local PC candidate and his or her workers then had a four-page handout. The key message of the national campaign was thus uniform across all ridings in Canada, one of Dalton’s three campaign objectives, yet each constituency had two pages of local content as well to hit points important to the riding and its Tory candidate. “It’s your campaign!”
The national campaign had thus been “put to bed” even before the party leader delivered his opening speech of the election. Altogether, the 1957 PC election advertisements contained fewer than a thousand words, less than fifty of them written by Camp. There was but a single photograph, the handsome one of John Diefenbaker, and only one other illustration, the dramatic newspaper cartoon.
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When Gordon Churchill stepped down as national director and was promptly replaced by Allister Grosart, the latter’s real role, as Diefenbaker instructed, was not to direct the party but run the election campaign.
Dalton at first was dismayed, thinking he’d been beaten by an end-run, and chagrined that Grosart would not be on the leader’s tour with Dief to deal with television. But Dalton mellowed when campaign manager Grosart told him to divide up the publicity budget billings, which had been set at $800,000. “It’s your campaign. Take what you want, and allocate the rest.”
Camp gave McKim the pamphlets and the placement of ads in the Ontario dailies. Foster Advertising got all radio ads and western dailies. To Locke Johnson he allocated all magazine advertising, Quebec English-language dailies, and all Maritime daily newspapers. The money divided pretty much equally amongst the agencies.
Camp’s own agency, Locke Johnson, also got into the work of distributing materials, following the pattern of McKim, which was filling pamphlet orders coming in from riding campaigns. Dalton liked having the ad agency so closely entwined with the party’s ground campaign that it became part of it at an operational level, in addition to its more traditional role in the creative work and placement of ads with broadcasters and publications. What McKim and Locke Johnson were doing was much faster and far more efficient, since it eliminated an intermediary step of getting the materials to party headquarters in Ottawa for redistribution from there.
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Camp considered becoming a candidate in New Brunswick.
The campaign structure he designed did not depend on his presence in Ottawa to operate it. He knew at some point he’d make the transition from backroom to front bench. It was not a question of if, only of when, to make his move.
He exchanged correspondence with political friends in New Brunswick, who sought to enlist him. While he did “not quite find the idea impossible,” he concluded it was “rather unlikely.” Although frequently in New Brunswick for work and vacations, his home with Linda was now in Toronto, where their children were in school and, when he intermittently returned to Locke Johnson, where he also worked.
What really ended his thoughts about running, though, was that Diefenbaker and Grosart suggested Dalton take responsibility for the entire campaign in the four Atlantic provinces. Camp believed he’d be far better off, at this stage in his political career, getting more Tory MPs elected than becoming one himself. At thirty-seven years of age, his ambition for high public office had plenty of time for fulfillment. Elections came along as regularly as commuter trains.
Already he occupied a unique role in public affairs and party politics, wielding influence in PC backrooms in Fredericton, Halifax, and Ottawa, increasingly renowned for prowess in campaign publicity and prescience in electoral strategy. It would be smarter to see just how far this could take him.
Of the thirty-three seats in the four Atlantic provinces, Grits held twenty-seven, and because the region was still a two-party enclave, each loss by a Liberal counted twice in the simple arithmetic of gaining an advantage over Liberals in Commons seats. Dalton realized the key to a possible win by Diefenbaker, and thus his best role in the campaign, lay in his own corner of Canada.