Cold War Politics
Political history made clear to all Canadian Tories that, by mid-twentieth century, seat-rich Ontario was the party’s last redoubt, and its most important base for any fresh sortie nationally.
In December 1956, when federal Progressive Conservatives gathered to elect a new leader, Ontario’s respected premier, Les Frost, influenced hundreds by speaking openly in support of Diefenbaker. In the 1957 general election, Frost put his potent blue machine into gear across Ontario and helped the federal party’s candidates win sixty-one seats, almost doubling the thirty-three that Tories got in 1953. For the 1958 election, Frost’s organization waged battle again, bringing six more Ontario seats into the PC column, although Dief’s own political uplift in that election likely counted for more than the ground war at breaking ever deeper into Grit-held ridings.
With his friend finally in the rare position of heading a strong Progressive Conservative government, Frost wrote the PM, after reflecting on Dief’s whirlwind of scattered activity, to make a single point.
The PM had been riding a political merry-go-round non-stop for three years, under intense pressure with unprecedented personal demands that would exhaust any mortal. It would be wise, Frost urged Dief, with time on his side at last, to pause, restore his personal reserves, and focus. Because Diefenbaker now held unprecedented sway across the nation and through most sectors of society, he should bring together leading experts and, in calm retreat, explore Canada’s future prospects and plan effective long-term programs for his government. Frost was not asking for anything, personally or for his province. He was offering wise, selfless counsel. As a seasoned head of government, and given the roles he’d played in making Dief the chief, he had good reason to think he might be heeded. Dalton could have told Frost, had he been asked, to not even bother writing the letter.
Anyone who knew John Diefenbaker, the way Camp now did, understood The Chief did not want other people’s advice. He had not laboured so many years on barren fields to share his harvest banquet with others. The vindicated loner would continue along his own path. If Dief burnt the policy resolutions approved by his own party’s grass-roots delegates, he was hardly going to replace them with recommendations by people from the country’s various establishments who’d long disdained him. When he wanted significant recommendations on a specific issue, the PM could appoint a royal commission and pick all the commissioners himself.
Instead of following Frost’s advice, Diefenbaker busied himself with legis-lation and appointments, and worked on relations with the United States. He delivered a major speech on Canadian-American relations at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, invited U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower to address Parliament and, with Eisenhower, inaugurated a joint U.S.-Canada Cabinet-level committee on defence.
In tandem, the military side of North American air defence was rapidly maturing, in response to the Cold War threat from a possible Soviet attack over the Arctic. As part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), Diefenbaker agreed to arrangements for shared aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and defence for North America. In late 1958, Canada and the United States integrated their continental air defences and began constructing a costly air defence network, with missile bases in Ontario and Quebec and radar installations across the Far North to detect and destroy incoming Soviet bombers.
With these crucial developments in play, and other major matters looming, Canada’s prime minister astonishingly departed for a frenetic world tour of most of the Commonwealth countries throughout November and December.
Canadians, still enchanted by the Northern Vision Diefenbaker foresaw for Canada, were amazed to see a parade of front-page pictures of their prime minister — atop an elephant in India, sipping tea with the prime minister of Pakistan, dining with Sri Lanka’s prime minister, strolling Singapore’s crowded streets, angling for fish with Australia’s prime minister. Was this part of Canada’s rendezvous with destiny?
Les Frost gazed in stunned disbelief at the front pages of Toronto’s three dailies. He could not comprehend why his friend was frittering away the unique chance to build a strong and enduring Progressive Conservative dynasty, and was, instead, almost taunting Canadians who had so recently entrusted him with so much.
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John Diefenbaker, however, believed he was doing well.
His PC majority government had taken strides on many fronts since 1958 to realign international relations and introduce within Canada a new sense of equality. To deal with the economic downturn and rising unemployment, the government introduced a novel Winter Works program to construct infrastructure. To resolve the dilemma of overproduction of Prairie wheat, the Diefenbaker government began multi-million dollar bulk sales to China, where food shortages kept millions close to starvation. This initiative helped western farmers and benefitted the Canadian economy, but shocked Cold War hardliners who believed that, because China had gone Communist, Dief should “Let the Commies starve!”
A champion of those at society’s margins or who faced discrimination, Diefenbaker appointed Louis Rasminsky governor of the Bank of Canada, a lone Jew atop a Canadian banking system exclusively controlled by Gentiles. He named Helen Fairclough, one of the 1942 Port Hopefuls, to Cabinet when before only men had been ministers of the Crown. He extended the right to vote to Aboriginal Canadians in 1960, when Canada’s only First Nations voters before then had been in the army during war. He proudly enacted into law the Canadian Bill of Rights, precursor of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that a later prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, would sponsor as a constitutionally entrenched version of the same thing. In the Commonwealth, Diefenbaker led the challenge to racial segregation programs of the white South African government that effectively made prisoners of the country’s suppressed majority black population.
Yet something negative can trump many positives.
For John Diefenbaker, it was the politics of Cold War defence.
Upon returning from his world tour, the pumped PM picked up one of the most problematic files he’d left smouldering on his desk in his absence. Dief knew a great deal of public money had already gone into development of the sleek Arrow warplane by A.V. Roe Canada Limited, a subsidiary of a British corporation. A briefing note in the file confirmed no other NATO countries would buy the Avro Arrow. Repeated efforts to land advance orders and recoup funds for the aircraft’s costly development had all failed.
The government was being asked for vast additional public spending on a private company’s jet aircraft that the United States, Britain, France, and every other NATO country pointedly refused to buy, the result of high-level U.S. government political pressure being exerted on these allies, for the benefit of American competitor companies making fighter aircraft and missiles. John Diefenbaker balked. Although the Canadian-built military aircraft would operate with advanced capabilities, the PM felt Canadian taxpayers should not foot the bill for it, first through subsidies to A.V. Roe to develop the Arrow and, second, through the Department of National Defence being the sole purchaser of the fighter jet. Committing billions of dollars for a weapon of war did not seem to John Diefenbaker an appropriate balancing of Canadian values.
On February 20, 1959, the prime minister announced cancellation of further financial support. The futuristic Avro Arrow was suddenly history. The project’s abrupt demise shocked the country. Outrage was intense across Canada, but the storm centre was Ontario, where the Arrow’s development employed thousands of highly skilled workers and where protests erupted in support of the war plane.
Leslie Frost, irrevocably on track to call a provincial election, was livid.
Had Diefenbaker taken time to review the larger picture and future prospects of Canada, as a “rendezvous with destiny” invited and as Frost had urged, wouldn’t the PM have gained a deeper grasp of the country’s vital assets and advancing prowess in space and aeronautics? The country’s future development of science and technology depended on more than finding buyers for the Arrow. As part of the fallout, Canadian scientists and engineers who’d lost their jobs at A.V. Roe headed south to join the Americans putting a man on the moon. But before they left, they made sure to vote against the next Tory who put his head into the line of fire.
As the Ontario election campaign got underway, one of Frost’s new candidates, young Brampton lawyer William G. Davis, took a heavy battering in Peel, a riding deeply impacted by the Arrow’s cancellation. Wherever he canvassed, Davis met irate people vowing to never vote Progressive Conservative again in their lives. In what had been a safe Tory seat, Progressive Conservative support was melting.
By voting day on June 11, 1959, popular support for Tories had plummeted 15 percent across Ontario. A dozen PC members were defeated. Far more would have tumbled had not the anti-PC vote divided between Liberals and CCF candidates. Somehow, with only a few votes to spare, Bill Davis managed to squeak into Queen’s Park, a twenty-nine-year-old MPP.
When John Diefenbaker came calling again, there was no way Ontario’s blue machine would be in gear working for him the way it had in 1957 and 1958.