Job Openings in Ontario
Dalton Camp’s easy entry into PC backrooms of the Maritimes, the federal party, and Manitoba, where Progressive Conservatives in opposition were eager for his help, was a taunting contrast to his failure to break through the serried ranks of Tory Ontario. Here the party had been restored to power when he was still in Camp Utopia writing love letters to Linda.
Ontario Progressive Conservatives formed the government, at the pinnacle of which towered Leslie Frost, hard as nails behind closed doors, pleasingly avuncular in public. McKim and Allister Grosart had a solid lock on the government’s publicity business. Frost was no more looking for lavish spending on admen than Hugh John Flemming had been in New Brunswick.
Dalton, seeking to expand his advertising operations and looking for a political role in the province where he lived, could not find even a mouse-hole sized entrance to Queen’s Park. He had only one contact in Ontario’s government. He’d met Clare Westcott, executive assistant to Premier Frost, over lunch with some mutual PC contacts. Sharing a party connection and common interest in the political game, they stayed in touch. A few months later, Westcott was dispatched from Frost’s office to work for Robert Macaulay, Ontario’s dynamic minister of energy resources. When Frost retired in 1961 after twelve years at Ontario’s helm, triggering a race to succeed him, Westcott and Russ Ramsey, a student working for the minister, organized Macaulay’s leadership race.
During the campaign, which Dalton joined, he happily met and worked with the candidate’s brother, Hugh Macaulay, another Queen’s Park insider. Camp also met Bill Davis, the MPP for Peel riding who was chairing Macaulay’s campaign. They got along in the friendly way of two men thriving on politics and sharing a common endeavour.
Bob Macaulay was not a politician in need of much direction; he knew the business and had a strong mind. He did not require others to write his speeches so that he’d know what he believed. With little scope for Dalton in the Macaulay campaign, he yielded to Westcott’s pressure to run the candidate’s campaign letters through his Pitney-Bowes postal machine at the Camp agency, helping keep postage costs off the books and under the $75,000 campaign spending limit the party had imposed.
When PC delegates from across Ontario convened in Toronto to choose Les Frost’s successor, it took six ballots to choose between seven candidates. As the rounds of voting progressed, not one of the contenders dropped out to swing his support to another, or even to shorten the process when it was clear he could not win.
The outcome was unclear until the fifth ballot, and even then there was doubt. Only three candidates were left by then: John Robarts, Kelso Roberts, and Bob Macaulay. Macaulay could not win, but if he wanted to be kingmaker, his withdrawal in support of either Roberts or Robarts could determine Ontario’s next premier. He remained neutral. In the end, of course, Robarts won.
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Upon taking office, John Robarts promoted Macaulay to minister of economics and development, where he soon decided Ontario needed a “trade crusade.”
A survey showed 55 percent of all Canada’s manufactured goods were made in Ontario, but the only trade vehicle to support their sale outside the country was the federal government. Because it was doing little overseas promotion, the province had a problem. “Let us get into the trade business,” decided Macaulay. His goal was jobs in Ontario and prosperity across the province.
Westcott brought in Camp, reminding Macaulay that he’d helped in his leadership race, thinking Camp’s ad agency might promote the campaign to boost sales of Ontario’s manufactured products abroad. It was not the easy meeting Westcott expected. A clash erupted between the smart Maritimer who respected the indispensable role of the federal government and the smart Ontarian who saw Ottawa as a stumbling block to Ontario’s best interests. Camp protested Macaulay’s concept of sending salesmen on trade missions, arguing Ontario could not do so because trade was a federal, not provincial, jurisdiction.
But Dalton was not running, nor even influencing, Ontario’s government. Robarts agreed with Macaulay’s recommendation to set up foreign offices, and Westcott was dispatched to Europe, opening Ontario trade offices in Milan and Dusseldorf, adding others later in Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.
“Dalton was pretty sour, until he found out how much our advertising budget was,” observed Westcott. Business was business, but Camp believed strongly in two principles. The first was constitutional: Ontario should stay out of overseas operations, exclusive purview of the national government.The second was pragmatic: Ontario’s market economy should be supported by Ontarians in their own self-interest. He persuaded Macaulay that the biggest market for Ontario goods was also the closest. Millions of Ontarians needed to stop buying the imported products of foreign competitors and start purchasing items made down the street or across town.
The Camp agency came up with what Westcott viewed as “an odd kind of advertising” campaign about a hippopotamus. Still rooted in small-town Ontario values, the ministerial assistant expected nothing more than a full page ad commanding consumers to “Buy Ontario!” or “Buy Canadian!” He, Macaulay, and just about everybody else were stunned when the clever campaign “just took off like you would not believe, with billboards and newspaper advertising.” Camp’s marketing concept was that some things just had to be imported, like a hippo, because Ontario didn’t have any of its own. But apart from exotic things like that, Ontario produced just about everything else and Ontarians should give themselves an economic boost by buying Ontario-made goods. The more prosperous Ontario’s economy, the better it would be for all who lived in the province.
Dalton found effective ways to spend the entire budget of several hundred thousand dollars. Decades later, people who’d been exposed to the hippo campaign would still remember the image and its essential message about buying Ontario-made products. The Camp agency was paid for its creative work and production, plus a commission on buying billboard and newspaper advertising space and airtime on radio and television. Dalton prevailed in a campaign that was constitutional, which mattered to him on principle. The rest, he simply could not change.
Westcott took sales missions to Britain, Germany and Italy, but whatever benefit they created for Ontario’s economy and employment wasn’t doing much politically for the Progressive Conservative government. As Westcott said, “word wasn’t getting back.” So Dalton, adept at getting big results with little money, at least helped the overseas operations by outlining a “this-for-that” scenario. Westcott accordingly phoned Canadian Pacific Airline’s president, Grant McConaghy. “Look, we are going to buy a lot of tickets from you for our overseas sales missions. For every twelve tickets, I would like one free so I can take a newspaper man.” McConaghy immediately saw the benefit for Canadian Pacific and the deed was done.
The first reporter to fly was David Grenier, respected financial editor of the Conservative-supporting Toronto Telegram. The second was rich-voiced Jack Dennett from Toronto’s wide-reaching CFRB Radio, owned by Ted Rogers, a Conservative. A steady succession of friendly or impressionable newspapermen working for city dailies around the province, from the Kitchener Record to the North Bay Nugget, would follow.
“All of a sudden their reports back here in Canada, especially by the influential Jack Dennett at CFRB, began to give us great publicity,” said a gleeful Westcott. “This effort, with Dalton Camp helping Robert Macaulay and the trade crusade, created a great image for Robarts across Ontario.”
Although Robarts himself thought highly of these efforts, his close friend and political organizer, fellow MPP from London Ernie Jackson, could not forget that Camp had backed a strong rival of John Robarts for the leadership. Jackson, given power by the new leader to carry through the transition from one premier to the next, including party organization and campaign operations, hired new staff at Progressive Conservative headquarters and brought in an advertising agency that had been friendly to Robarts in the leadership race and had helped him keep his campaign costs below the spending limit, too.
Norman Atkins, miffed about any loss of business, was greatly agitated over cancellation of the Ontario government’s advertising business that the Camp agency had only recently begun to acquire.
The Camp agency at least kept the provincial government’s trade crusade account. Dalton had been so successful with the hippopotamus it would have seemed petty and spiteful for Robarts and Jackson to pull that business, and politically stupid, too, since Camp had an expanding circle of friends in Tory ranks.
It was hard in Ontario, whether on the factory floor, at an ad agency, or in a political backroom, to get the jobs.