Politics Reimagined
Even at the best of times, the relationship between a party’s president and its leader requires a delicate touch, often tricky to achieve, usually difficult to maintain.
If the relationship clicks and each recognizes an appropriate division of labour, the partnership can be productive for all concerned. The mid-1960s, however, were not the best of times for Canada’s federal Progressive Conservatives. Harmony had given way to rivalry.
Dief was still “The Chief,” but he was an embattled leader. His long years suspecting the presence of plotters, saboteurs, and knavish rivals now had a basis in reality as ambitious contenders plotted to replace him.
Dalton, though ambitious himself, occupied a unique position. He knew John and Olive better than most Tories. He’d travelled with the Diefenbakers for a decade and weathered a great deal with them. Camp also had deeper connections than anyone else, as a result of his numerous provincial and federal election campaigns, to most of the PC apparatus: the campaign backrooms, individual caucus members, party headquarters staff, provincial leaders and their advisers, and those who set policies, ran party publicity, and worked as partisan troops in widely scattered ridings. In ways both practical and emotional, the party was his as much as anyone’s.
He feared the fractious Tories were on the verge of disintegrating. Its elected members in Parliament, and its senators, were either deeply loyal to Diefenbaker, or adamant that it was time for the old coot to go. Few were neutral. This fault line divided members of caucus and extended throughout the party membership across Canada.
Added to the sense of division arising from these intense feelings about The Chief was a second challenge for “party unity.” It arose from the lack of cohesion amongst many of the separate centres of organized Progressive Conservative activity, and from individuals who believed themselves more important than the party as a whole: the leader and those supporting him; the parliamentary caucus; the party’s elected national executive; and the riding association executives and members. There was also the women’s PC association, the PC Youth, and the campus clubs. All were part of the same party’s national structure, but each had a different role, and not only were at odds with the others but also divided within by the internecine splits over Dief.
There were still other centres of power in the party. The PCs’ bagmen knew they were irreplaceable, a real if largely anonymous presence in the party, because without the money they raised nothing else could happen. The admen in charge of campaign publicity knew they occupied positions as indispensable persuaders, because without them campaigns to win political power would be ineffectual. The national director and staff at party headquarters knew they held things together, because the administrative structure supported all other parts of the operation.
Each of these rings of operation needed to be joined, or balanced, or assuaged. Each had to be enlisted to support the leader, and the efforts of each other. If not, the work of one or other of them could become counterproductive to the efforts of the rest. Unity required coordination of all party components.
Camp’s immediate duty as president was to save the party from exploding. Dalton envisaged his role as a bridge between the pro- and con-Diefenbaker factions, as he’d signalled at the annual meeting that elected him, to mollify the dissidents while giving the leader time to adjust to reality and retire with dignity. He needed, for this strategy, an activity all factions could focus on, other than themselves. Convening a conference on something utterly different, replacing stale and churning arguments about Diefenbaker by something that looked toward the future might help Tories advance together and find a fresh rallying point. In the process, Camp could show the news media and Canadians generally that the party over which he presided was progressive and relevant.
But what kind of conference? Camp wanted Progressive Conservatives to be in phase with the ’60s, with the decade’s exhilarating, in-your-face humanism and counter-culture upheaval, and the era’s new issues. One option was a policy conference, such as Liberals had organized at Kingston in 1960 to develop specific proposals and refurbish their party after its humiliating 1958 electoral crushing. Conservatives at Port Hope in 1942 had achieved something similar, at a time when their party was in a political wilderness. Special-purpose party gatherings, clearly, could play a constructive role as counterpoint to a generally bleak situation.
Yet when Camp assembled a planning group, it became clear that deep divisions existed even in this aspect of party affairs. Some strongly favoured a policy conference. Others were just as adamant about avoiding debate over policies, fearing it would degenerate into a proxy battle between the two sides contending over Dief’s leadership.
This group consisted of Camp and Atkins, George Hogan, Eddie Goodman, Hal Jackman, Patrick Vernon, and David Meynell. They met several times at the Camp agency. Hogan and Goodman favoured what Eddie called a “yahoo” event, a “feel good conference to build party esprit.” Meynell, an earnest intellectual type, held out for a “thinkers’ conference” but was in a minority. Asking a Jesuit friend how to turn the line of argument his way, he was told, “That is not difficult. What you say, when asked for your opinion, is, ‘It’s got to be a thinkers’ conference because it is useless.’ Say nothing else, just leave it at that.” Puzzled, he nevertheless delivered these lines at the next meeting. “The effect was electric,” he said. Meynell did not understand the line, but “Goodman did a 180-degree turn on the spot, as if I’d punched a button. With Eddie turned, the battle was won.”
For the Progressive Conservative thinkers’ conference, designated a “National Conference on Canadian Goals,” there’d be four day-long sessions, each covering a different “basket” of issues. The gathering had to be “big picture” if it was to work at all. Camp wanted participants to think about Canadian problems that were not yet well framed in the public discourse. He hoped new thinking about culture and communications could help Progressive Conservatives imagine Canadian politics differently. Dalton wanted speakers who could see the horizon, even if unclear about how to reach it.
Meynell was assigned the crucial opening day, about “the future,” to highlight education, medicine, computerization, and the future generally. With few “futurists” around, Meynell contacted a laureate friend at California Tech, who said he’d be happy to come, “but you want the leading guy in the field and he’s right there at the University of Toronto. His name is Marshall McLuhan.” Meynell immediately bought and read McLuhan’s most recent book. “It set my hair on end. I had found my way to the future.”
A McLuhanesque view of communications would not be the only demanding new frontier the thinkers would confront. The Front de libération du Québec had begun detonating bombs and claiming lives, and Camp knew Canada’s parties had to come to grips with terrorist activity linked to political aims. In 1963 the FLQ had proclaimed that “suicide commandos” would “completely destroy by systematic sabotage” colonial institutions, English-language media that held French Canadians and the FLQ in contempt, and businesses that discriminated against Quebecers or did not use French as their primary language. Wanting Conservatives to understand why these events were occurring, Dalton enlisted as speakers Claude Ryan, editor of Montreal’s Le Devoir; Montreal lawyer Marc Lalonde, who’d worked in Ottawa as assistant to Progressive Conservative justice minister Davie Fulton; and Montreal financier and constitutional authority Marcel Faribault. Joining them, to present the long view of French-Canadian grievances and how containing separatism in Quebec might require military force, he recruited Manitoba historian W.L. Morton. Someone Dalton did not invite was a Montreal professor he’d met. They had a preliminary discussion over dinner, but Camp found Pierre Trudeau “too superficial.”
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Dalton’s recalibration of the Progressive Conservative Party though a broadening intellectual experience required a different pace in a distinctive place. Few were surprised he chose Fredericton. The best person for on-site organization in Fredericton was the party president’s brother-in-law. Norman quickly took charge of organizing the September 9–12, 1964 event.
He and Dalton liaised with Flora MacDonald, who was preparing background papers at party headquarters in Ottawa and distributing them, along with other conference materials, to attendees in advance of the conference. Joe Clark, an Albertan active with student Progressive Conservatives, helped Norman invite participants, confirm travel arrangements, and collect fees. Nova Scotian Lowell Murray, who’d been president of the campus PCs at St. Francis Xavier and had since tried to win office as PC candidate in Cape Breton, was to ensure that reporters got copies of speeches, access to telephones, and enough to drink.
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Opening the conference on September 9, the PC national president expressed intent, “so far as lies within our power, to purge from Conservatism that which is doctrinaire, obsolescent, and irrational.” Camp added that, while clichés are comfortable, “they do not really provide a refuge from facts, and while shibboleths can be worn and waved by partisans, they provide no defence against reality.”
Then Marshall McLuhan spoke.
Progressive Conservatives listened as the professor amalgamated concepts, twisted old homilies to give them new meaning, extracted lessons from cultural anthropology, and viewed through time’s long lens how innovations in technology produce transformations in humans and society.
The 1964 Fredericton Conference was one of the early attempts to come to grips politically with Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. McLuhan had been asked by Meynell and Camp to address the issue, which he did in his unique way. Marshall talked of the electronic age “reviving tribal modes,” and said “dialects are re-emerging as a result of electronics,” although, on the other hand, “the world is homogenizing because of advances in communications.” Despite the paradox, the French Canadians present were intrigued. “They were thinking they were being submerged,” said Meynell, “but here was McLuhan saying they would become stronger. He was talking about why we were not going to turn into vanilla ice cream.”
Some thought everything Marshall said was a bit dippy, while others kept listening and began to nod in acknowledgement, if only for fear of not wanting to miss the boat, or appear like they weren’t getting it. Still others whispered, “McLuhan is really onto something here.”
Meynell was accosted by the Globe and Mail’s George Bain and other newsmen from the Ottawa Press Gallery for “foisting a charlatan like McLuhan on the press, the people of Canada, and the party.” Yet before long, their reports seemed to embrace ideas McLuhan had advanced at Fredericton.
“Dalton showed great courage to go with these ideas at the time when very little was known or understood about them,” concluded Meynell. “One thing for sure is that McLuhan’s speech and paper at Fredericton changed the rhetoric for a generation of Canadians.”
The Progressive Conservative Party could not be made over at a four-day stand in New Brunswick, but if some of those present caught hold of a new way to engage experience and understand what was happening around them, that could be enough, over time, to result in real transformation.
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Those who believed political parties needed practical policies more than conceptual stimulation were nonplussed, however. Hal Jackman, who’d not only shared in the planning but was a nominated PC candidate who attended the panels and participated in discussions, was “frustrated that no specific policy issues were discussed.” Jackman diarized his belief “that Camp’s rhet-oric, although more cerebral, had no more substance than Diefenbaker’s.” He remained convinced that “the overriding matter of leadership was the paramount issue” and that Dalton was ducking it.
Hal was not alone in panning the Fredericton Conference. Looking on the same event, Jackman’s nemesis, John Diefenbaker, also saw the gathering of “intellectuals” as an affront to his vision for the party. He also did not like the timing because Dalton’s conference detracted attention from the extended filibuster he was conducting in Parliament to prevent the Grits’ new Canadian flag with its Liberal-red maple leaf, the so-called “Pearson Pennant,” from being adopted to officially replace the Red Ensign. In the end, John Diefenbaker did go to Fredericton, but gave an address to the delegates that did little to awaken fresh patterns of thinking. The event, intended by Dalton to bridge the gap between those supporting and opposing Diefenbaker’s continuation as leader, or at least achieve a truce in their fighting while binding the party and buying The Chief time, had the ironic effect of deeply damaging Diefenbaker’s relationship with Camp.
If a party called both “Progressive” and “Conservative” was able to go in opposite directions at the same time, it was certainly living up to its name. The president wanted to bridge the gulf, to notionally reinsert the dropped hyphen that once bound both halves as one. The leader not only was “opposed to hyphenated Canadianism” in sociological terms but even, in terms of this broadened nature of his party, it seemed, in politics as well.