Unscripted Politics
For what came next, nobody had a script.
The Diefenbaker Cabinet was uneasily grappling with a controversial military agreement that, given the nature of Cold War politics, could not be disentangled from people’s surging emotions around the political, economic, scientific, industrial, and military dimensions of the now-hallowed Avro Arrow that hung like a trophy of shame around John Diefenbaker’s neck and tainted Progressive Conservatives in Ontario.
In the fall of 1958, while the PM was planning his extended world tour, John Diefenbaker’s government agreed with the U.S. government to deploy in Canada two squadrons of the American ramjet-powered anti-aircraft missiles, known as Bomarc-Bs. This defence decision flowed from the NORAD agreement between Canada and the United States, which also created a joint command structure, resulting in the two countries operating as one for air defence.
The Americans argued at the time that Bomarc surface-to-air guided missiles, having a range of 640 kilometres, would be better than the manned interceptor Avro Arrow warplane, a point they underscored by refusing to order any of the Canadian-built aircraft. That had left Diefenbaker no option but to scrap the Arrows and buy the Bomarcs, which he did.
Some fifty-six Bomarcs were procured and deployed at North Bay in Ontario and La Macaza in Quebec, under ultimate control of NORAD’s commander in chief, an American. In theory, the missiles would intercept any Soviet airborne attacks before they reached the industrial and populated heartland of Canada and the United States. But now, arising to reconfigure Canadian politics and Canada-U.S. relations, an explosive new political issue appeared: the Diefenbaker government had never made public that the Bomarcs would carry nuclear warheads.
When this became known in 1960, Canadians were plunged into intense dispute about nuclear weapons. Protests erupted throughout the country in strong opposition to arming the Bomarcs. The prime minister seemed politically paralyzed.
The missiles as a weapons delivery system were one thing, the kind of warhead they delivered, another. Some felt it crazy to separate the issue this way. Why have Bomarcs if you weren’t going to arm them with deadly warheads? Others felt it national folly to embrace nuclear weapons when Canada had already officially repudiated them at the end of the Second World War. No public debate or decision had reversed this fundamental national policy.
As the nuclear warheads crisis erupted around Diefenbaker’s Cabinet table, its explosive effects spread out to the Progressive Conservative government, the caucus, and PC Party ranks from the Women’s Association through the youth and student wings. They, like the ministers of Canada’s government, despite being united in the same party, were divided by Cold War differences over defence against Soviet aggression and the role of nuclear weaponry.
Diefenbaker was caught between the sides. His minister of national defence, Douglas Harkness, wanted to complete the Bomarc project to “honour our commitment” and be ready to shoot down inbound Soviet bombers. His minister of external affairs, Howard Green, deplored nuclear war and had vowed, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to work for abolition, not expansion, of nuclear weapons.
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The man who headed a government with the highest number of MPs ever elected should have been on track for confident re-election in 1962.
When Prime Minister Diefenbaker called the election for June 18, his support had sagged greatly. In a private poll Dalton Camp conducted to test how stormy the campaign might be, The Chief’s ratings stood lower than those for the Progressive Conservative Party itself, a complete reversal from four years earlier. It wasn’t that the PCs had risen, but that Dief had fallen. With the Avro Arrow and the Bomarc missile crisis, he’d been damned when decisive and condemned when delaying.
Allister Grosart, in charge of the campaign, asked Dalton to run the same plays he had in the past two elections, taking charge of national publicity and managing the campaign in Atlantic Canada. Camp considered the prospect. His deep loyalty to the PC Party translated into support for its leader. His ser-ious misgivings about the leader in 1956 had been cancelled out by seeing him in 1957 display compassion, humour, and concern that, if such qualities could again be brought to the surface, would surely help him reconnect with voters. And so Camp went, around and around, dizzy in a maze of pros and cons.
He often made decisions by drawing up a list of drawbacks and advantages, though it seemed a truly perverse exercise because he’d invariably pick the less attractive option. Dalton had deep motivations, impossible to add to a point-form list. Also, Dalton’s ego prevailed over any list; nobody else, he believed, could do what he did. Moreover, his sometimes unpredictable decisions sprang from undeclared ambition to someday be prime minister. Dalton agreed to run all campaign publicity for the 1962 national PC campaign.
As biographer Geoffrey Stevens said: “If he positioned himself carefully, loyal to the leader but not part of his circle, he might one day have a shot at the leadership himself.”
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This time, television would play a bigger role than ever.
In 1958 the CBC inaugurated a coast-to-coast live television network. In 1961, a rival private sector network joined the communications landscape, CTV Television Network. Also opening the television sluiceway wider was a loosening of broadcasting rules. Movement and filmed action could now be part of campaign television advertising.
The Liberal TV ads showed a campaign bus rolling up and candidates climbing off. Not bad, thought Camp. But he was significantly more inspired. He hired a camera crew to follow Dief around and film him giving speeches. Brief segments, taken from otherwise long and winding discourses, were extracted from the raw footage, packaged at Film House in Toronto, and swiftly dispatched to broadcasters across the country. Its emotional impact was dramatic and captivating. Camp understood the medium was meant to convey an impression, not win a debate.
Another image for the campaign, produced for magazines and newspapers, was the antithesis of what Camp produced in 1957. Forsaking the personality cult, which initially helped win the election but ever since facilitated focusing all blame for the government’s shortcomings on Dief alone, Dalton ran a photograph of the PM surrounded by his entire Cabinet, communicating the impression of a “team” and “unity,” even if that was less and less the reality.
All this work Dalton carried out in Toronto at the Camp agency, with Norman as production coordinator for the campaign. Atkins had surrendered his U.S. citizenship, at Dalton’s request, as a condition for joining him on this contentious campaign. Camp was sensitive to their vulnerability if it appeared an American, or any American influence, was at play in the PC backrooms when Dief was so strongly campaigning against U.S. influence and interference in Canada over the Bomarc issue. Norman complied. If he’d made this change earlier in life, he’d never have been drafted, but then he’d never have learned the advanced quartermaster skills that already were setting him apart in organizing campaigns.
The line-and-staff system in vogue with the U.S. Army when Norman served demanded he set objectives, design all tasks required to achieve them, assign individuals with requisite abilities to perform each one, allocate resources, create an effective communications system, keep track of all details, and establish a hierarchy of command. Nobody else running election campaigns in Canada did all that. Norman wedded this methodology to an organization chart, boxes with titles, each filled with names of carefully selected individuals and connected by reporting lines.
The brothers-in-law operated out of Toronto, not only for convenience but because Dalton wanted to steer clear of Grosart’s cluster of campaign workers at national headquarters. He felt they meekly agreed with whatever Diefenbaker wanted, unable and unwilling to direct the leader the way those running a campaign ought.
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For the leader’s Atlantic tour, Dalton and the PM made the rounds of a campaign circuit now increasingly routine to both.
He found Dief irrational, the campaign dreadful. “He was unable to respond to the challenge,” Stevens quotes Camp saying of Diefenbaker, “He was out of touch with the country. He could no longer reach people. He wasn’t credible.”
By mid-June, Camp expected a minority Liberal government would take office. In 1956, party insiders at the Albany Club, unable to find a challenger for the leadership, conceded it to Dief, confident he’d only last one election anyway. It turned out to be two, but they seemed about to be vindicated.
On election night, Dalton and Linda settled in at the Camp agency, with Norman and his wife, Anna Ruth, and Bill Kettlewell and his wife, to watch the curtain come down on the Diefenbaker years. But the results reaching them over national television were not as dire as Dalton feared. In Atlantic Canada, his own campaign bailiwick, the PC s won eighteen seats to fourteen for the Liberals. Then Quebec presented a stunning outcome nobody had seen coming — twenty-seven seats for Social Credit — ensuring the Liberals could not gain enough seats to form a government.
The New Democratic Party, evolved from the CCF and now affiliated with organized labour and led by former Saskatchewan premier T.C. Douglas, expected a major breakthrough. The buoyant New Democrats were held to a modest nineteen seats. Another party had taken its turn to show that provincial premiers couldn’t cut it with voters as national leaders.
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Winning the 1962 election kept the PCs in government, but with more than a million voters deserting the Tories, John Diefenbaker would have to govern without majority support in the Commons. His government faced defeat at any time.
To lose ninety-two seats, almost as many as the ninety-seven the party had gained in its historic 1958 “landslide,” brought swift recriminations from those who’d lost, rekindling ambitions among leadership rivals, nourishing editorial writers and pundits with rich political fodder. If the glory for the 1958 win had been claimed by Diefenbaker, it seemed fitting that credit for the party’s diminished standings should flow to him as well. In the party backrooms, Eddie Goodman of Toronto, vice-president of the Progressive Conservative Party, tried to get John Diefenbaker to agree to a retirement date, only to be angrily sloughed off.
Canadians looked at the number of Commons seats each party had, because that after all determines which party governs, and politicians and journalists used this same seat count for their resolute opinions, reinforcing public consciousness that the Diefenbaker regime was crumbling. Trend lines were clear, weren’t they? Another election and the Liberals would be back in power.
But Tory backroom strategists, looking deeper than a seat differential between the PC and Liberal parties, perceived a different reality, and hence a different scenario going forward. The Liberals were stagnant under Lester Pearson. In 1958, with his fresh leadership and new lustre as a Nobel Peace Prize–winner, the Grits earned 34 percent of the popular vote nationwide. In 1962, after Pearson’s four-year effort to make a better public impression, and with all the issues plaguing the Diefenbaker government, from economic recession and the declining value of the Canadian dollar to the Avro Arrow conundrum and Bomarc missile crisis, Liberal popular support across Canada had risen only a paltry 3 percent.
In the 1958 election, a rare alignment of forces raised Diefenbaker’s support to 54 percent of voters nationwide, helping the PCs pick up those ninety-seven additional seats. Now the two parties were all but tied at 37 percent of the popular vote, PC candidates altogether receiving 2,865,000 votes to 2,846,000 for the Liberals. That had worked out in the ridings with the Grits regaining fifty-one of the fifty-six seats they’d lost four years earlier, while the Tories, with slightly more votes than the Liberals overall, dropped ninety-two seats.
The future for the Progressive Conservatives, as any discerning political strategist could see, lay in the ranks of those supporting other parties, most notably the Social Credit and NDP. The former now had thirty seats (with 12 percent popular vote), the latter nineteen (with 14 percent support). Voters attracted to Dief in 1958 but disenchanted after their first date, had pointedly not gone back to the smug Liberals waiting confidently for them. Instead, they’d either been seduced by the better prospects political conservatism offered with Social Credit as proclaimed by Robert Thompson, or enticed by the new-era democracy of political socialism as preached by Tommy Douglas.
More than one in four voting Canadians had opted for either Socred or socialist candidates. Those voters represented the best route back to majority government. The Progressive Conservatives should not try winning over immovable Grits by being more Liberal than the Liberals. They should campaign to draw the disenchanted and the hopeful back for a second date with destiny. And, if they could not do that, the best option still lay along this path with stronger third parties, especially the NDP who could split the Liberal vote and produce Progressive Conservative wins, the way it had been happening in Ontario since 1943.
Camp strongly favoured this plan. Having managed much of the 1962 campaign — all the publicity, and the election operation in the four Atlantic provinces — he found himself drawn into the spinning vortex of the party’s internal rivalries. He tried to calm estranged dissenters. He embraced an all-consuming drive to find balance points for the sake of party unity. He’d have no party to lead, in the future, if it split apart now. Having embraced Toryism as fully as any man could, Camp’s immediate cause was to keep its life force intact, helping the party revive its relationship with a million Canadians or, at least, develop issues that would help the NDP take support from the Grits.
His plan depended on John Diefenbaker being astute in all his stances, and masterful when taking new initiatives. There was no guarantee a scenario envisaged in the backroom, though, would unfold as performance on Canada’s public stage. Already it seemed this political drama in progress was closer to a display of improv theatre.