Confrontation and Turmoil
On the morning of October 22, 1962, Livingston Merchant, a former American ambassador to Canada, flew to Ottawa as special envoy of President Kennedy to give Prime Minister Diefenbaker a top-secret briefing on what the CIA had discovered in Cuba and provide advance notice to America’s continental military ally to ensure no surprise and full support for a high-stakes confrontation only hours away.
In a galvanizing television broadcast that evening, the American president revealed to the world that the Soviet Union had been caught secretly installing missiles in Cuba. Viewers were shown high-altitude spy photographs substantiating the alarming claim and making real the deadly threat.
The Soviet Union’s nuclear warheads would reach major North American cities with unstoppable swiftness and accuracy. Forget about those manned bombers the Bomarcs were intended to take out. This threat was closer and more imminent. President Kennedy had United States Navy ships set up a blockade around the island to prevent Soviet ships bringing further military supplies to Cuba. He issued Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev an ultimatum to remove the missiles and destroy the launching sites.
The world held its collective breath, gazing into the stark face of nuclear war that had been everyone’s worst nightmare since the Cold War began. For thirteen days, a tense world would wait on the brink of global annihilation.
Prime Minister Diefenbaker did not respond right away with Canadian support for the American president’s stance. Nor did he put Canadian forces on full alert, as expected. The government’s “procrastination” was criticized by Liberal leader Lester Pearson and infuriated Kennedy, making them political allies.
Some attributed the PM’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis to poor personal relations between the two North American leaders, or to Diefenbaker’s innate suspicion of American governments, or even “anti-Americanism,” an enduring animus among segments of the Conservative Party. While those reasons may have contributed slightly to Ottawa’s delay in supporting Washington, the main reason was grounded in domestic politics about Communism and the Bomarc missiles.
Earlier in the year, during the 1962 election, Diefenbaker had positioned himself as an ardent foe of Russian expansionism. As Canada’s prime minister, he’d presented a resolution at the United Nations calling on the U.S.S.R. “to give its subject-peoples the right to decide their own future by a free vote.” The Tories were staking out political turf, hoping to corner Liberal leader Lester Pearson as soft on Communism, ready to lavishly quote the former diplomat’s assertion, “I’d rather be Red than dead.”
According to Diefenbaker’s closest advisers, Cabinet minister David Walker and Allister Grosart, Diefenbaker’s strategy was to “suck in” Pearson and get him to reaffirm his anti-nuclear arms policy, which, as Walker explained in confidence to Henry Jackman, his predecessor in Toronto’s Rosedale riding, “would then give Diefenbaker the opportunity to accept nuclear weapons and go to the people in an election on a strong anti-Communist platform.”
But the Cuban missile crisis unexpectedly intersected this manoeuvre.
At a time when most Canadians strongly supported President Kennedy and felt visceral urgency about standing with the Americans, continuing to hold onto an unexplained partisan stratagem was not astute on Dief’s part. Canadians lived the Cold War like few others, occupying the only country directly between the Soviet Union and the United States and now feeling extra vulnerability from Cuba’s offensive missiles aimed north. After two days delay and under intense pressure, Diefenbaker expressed Canada’s support for the American action, but not in time to arrest the dissipation of more of his support among Canadians or prevent emergence of a belligerent antagonism from Kennedy.
When Soviet chairman Khrushchev withdrew his missiles, removal of the immediate threat of war between East and West allowed people a sigh of anxious relief. But the larger issue of Cold War unity with the Americans remained, and was of great strategic importance. Canada was a treaty partner with the United States for shared North American defence. Missiles had been installed in Canada and, because of the Cuban missile crisis, arming the Bomarcs had now been catapulted to even greater prominence.
Taking a serious political toll on the Diefenbaker government were the cumulative effects of cancelling the Avro Arrow, buying Bomarc missiles and fighter aircraft (the CF-101 Voodoo interceptors based in Canada and the CF-104 Starfighters with Canada’s forces in Europe), dithering over acquiring nuclear warheads to arm them all, and hesitating to support America’s ulti-matum that the Soviet Union remove its Cuban-based offensive missiles. Many Canadians feared their government too feeble for Cold War engagement, their prime minister too paralyzed by choices to make up his mind.
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John Diefenbaker’s plot to impale Lester Pearson on the nuclear weapons issue, and to win back a majority government by fighting an election over it, was nullified in January 1963 when the Liberal leader reversed his own position.
Pearson said Canada was “honour-bound” to accept nuclear warheads for the rockets under the NORAD agreements. This shocking about-face caused widespread public demonstrations. It drove a number of Liberals away from their party, at least for a while, and provoked Pierre Elliot Trudeau, a professor in Montreal supporting the NDP, to write a scathing analysis of Nobel Prize–winner Pearson’s embrace of atomic weapons, calling the Liberal leader “the defrocked prince of peace.”
Dief could not trigger an election over the issue, as he’d once envisaged, because his Cabinet was split down the middle, as was the PC Party itself, over whether to accept nuclear warheads for the Bomarcs. The government’s indecision continued to strain Canadian-American relations.
Political divisions within the PCs continued to threaten the party, and Camp tried deliberate and diplomatic ways to maintain some unity by paving the way for an eventual leadership transition. But Cabinet ministers pressed on with their blunter method, a political coup. Defense Minister Doug Harkness, disgusted by what he deemed the PM’s shameful failure to honour Canada’s commitment to acquire U.S. nuclear weapons, resigned. George Hees led a number of irate Cabinet members into the PM’s office where they angrily insisted he step down. Overcome by their vehemence in this showdown, Diefenbaker wobbled out of the room muttering, as he pointed to Fleming, “I’ll resign. I’ll resign. I appoint you, Donald, my successor.”
But as word that Canada’s prime minister had been toppled began spreading through the Parliament Buildings, Alvin Hamilton, a deeply loyal Cabinet minister from Saskatchewan, rushed about to rally Dief’s allies in caucus. They pulled off a scheduling switch so The Chief would meet national caucus before his next Cabinet meeting, rather than after. At caucus, deftly orchestrated support for the leader boosted Dief and sent him into the Cabinet meeting resolved to recant his statement of resignation, beat down the political insurgents, and defiantly retain his position as leader.
With the Cabinet revolt disintegrating in failure, Hees resigned. Others in the plot to topple The Chief included Richard Bell, Wallace McCutcheon, and Eddie Goodman. Senior ministers and party figures Roland Michener, Pierre Sevigny, J.M. Macdonnell, Davie Fulton, and Donald Fleming also resigned or retired from politics, expressing lack of confidence in the prime minister as they left Ottawa.
Against this tide, Dalton Camp defended John Diefenbaker. He angrily opposed the Cabinet revolt, and tried to prevent it, on the basis “It would take years for the party to recover.”
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The government was defeated in the Commons. A general election would take place on April 8, 1963. It would not be fought over Lester Pearson’s nuclear arms policy, but on John Diefenbaker’s leadership. Dalton’s plan to reclaim voters from the NDP and Social Credit parties had evaporated.
Camp agreed, in response to Diefenbaker’s request, to replace Allister Grosart as manager of the entire national campaign for the April election, with Norman Atkins at his side as the campaign’s production coordinator.
Dalton proposed, and The Chief agreed, to reprise an election “whistle stop” campaign aboard a train. He tried everything he could to revive the magic of 1957 and 1958, working with a leader equally determined to stop the Grits at the gates. Camp called on his friend Finlay MacDonald to run, who dutifully became a candidate in Halifax.
But the Pearson-led Liberals, who benefitted from support of Kennedy in Washington and their behind-the-scenes emissaries in Canada, managed to win enough ridings to form a minority government. Liberals had 128 seats to the PCs’ ninety-five. Social Credit went back up to twenty-four MPs, regaining supporters in western Canada who’d last time gone to Dief, and holding onto most of its representation in Quebec with twenty Socred members. The New Democrats slipped to seventeen MPs, which is where the Liberals made their gains. With the Liberals at 41 percent in overall popular support and the New Democrats at 13, some suggested the two parties should merge. With the Progressive Conservatives at 33 percent and the Social Credit at 12 percent, proposals were advanced for these two parties to get together, too. Nobody talked about just reforming the electoral system.
Camp blamed George Hees for costing the party the election. Part of the defeat could certainly be attributed to the Bomarc issue — the way the crisis had been handled, not only by the PM but also by his ministers. Either decision would have been defensible. Either would have lost the PCs some of their public support. It was the indecision that created the debilitating political turmoil that exacted a far greater price.
The new Liberal government of Prime Minister Pearson accepted nuclear warheads for Canada’s nuclear-capable forces, which were delivered from the United States to their North Bay and La Macaza sites on the last day of December, 1963, virtually unnoticed, as intended, because Canadians were preoccupied getting ready to celebrate New Year’s Eve.