Chapter 33
The 1968 election had left the PCs defeated, diminished, and dispirited.
Even though the upgraded political machine Norman Atkins and Malcolm Wickson were creating was intended to work regardless of party platform, the PCs’ yawning policy deficit could not be ignored. Diefenbaker’s focus on rearguard actions over retaining the red ensign flag and other British symbols, and his preoccupation in fighting plotters, had produced aimless drift. From 1963 to 1965, the Opposition PCs held no policy meetings to seriously address programs the party might advocate. The 1964 gathering in Fredericton had been a “useless” thinkers’ conference. The 1966 annual meeting, embroiled with the leadership issue, failed to deal with any policy at all. The national convention in 1967, despite extensive efforts by two hundred people at the Montmorency Conference and by four hundred policy delegates at the Toronto convention, failed to adopt any policy statements, a consequence of the backstage deal to placate Diefenbaker’s fomented crisis over “two nations.” By the time Stanfield campaigned in the 1968 election, he had so little to choose from he just made up policy as he went: a tunnel to Newfoundland; tariffs to shield fruit farmers; quotas to protect vegetable producers; tax deductibility of mortgage interest payments; a guaranteed annual income, perhaps?
With parties seeking power to implement programs reflective of their political philosophy, policy conferences should be routine. Stanfield certainly thought so. He initiated a national policy conference at Niagara Falls, hoping to see a policy adopted for a guaranteed annual income. He also wanted regional policy conferences, on a regular basis.
In this period, the lack of coherent Tory policy and the predations of the Diefenbaker faction caused many individuals to give up trying to rebuild the PC campaign organization. Yet a few spirited individuals remained keen. Phillip Lind, long ardent in his Tory Party involvements, was one of them.
Attending Ridley College, a high school in St. Catharines, Ontario, Lind and another young Conservative, Bob Amaron, started a “campus” Conservative club by playing on the word college in their high school’s name. Thus qualifying as voting delegates to a 1960s PC annual meeting in Ottawa, the young teens received their political baptism in debate about nuclear weapons for Canada’s Bomarc missiles, and found the creative possibilities of politics exhilerating.
When Lind was later studying political science at the University of British Columbia, West Coast PCs were neither plentiful nor strong at either the provincial or federal level. Any enthusiastic young Tory had wide-open opportunities simply by showing up and taking a role. When Malcolm Wickson decided to seek the presidency of the provincial PCs, Phil agreed to run his campaign. The two got to know each other well, and appreciated the compatibility of their respective strengths.
On the federal side, B.C. Tories had representatives in Cabinet, with Davie Fulton the justice minister and George Pearkes in defence. Other MPs included John Fraser, in Vancouver South. Lind was drawn to the intelligence, modernity, and political attractiveness of Fulton and Fraser. He worked in Fulton’s re-election campaigns and after graduating from UBC in 1966 was offered a job as Fulton’s executive assistant in Ottawa. Although he thrived on politics, Lind wanted to learn more about political sociology so instead pursued a master’s degree at University of Rochester in New York. His political and academic worlds again collided when he returned to Toronto in 1967 to continue studies at York University, but this time he opted to join Fulton’s leadership campaign. After Stanfield won the contest, with Fulton’s end-game support, the new leader asked Malcom Wickson to become national PC director, who in turn hired Lind as his special assistant in Ottawa.
Malcolm knew that Lind thrived on creative political work, and that he had as big an interest as Camp and Atkins in American politics and its constantly evolving methods. Lind’s mission was to be chief Tory scout south of the border, seeking out new parts for a better blue machine.
Lind already had many connections through attending American presidential nominating conventions, and he closely followed the personalities of national and state campaigns. One of the people he’d met and befriended, Ray Bliss, was chairman of the Republican National Committee during the lean years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, when Republicans languished in a political wilderness.
Republicans vanquished by Johnson’s lopsided victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Progressive Conservatives devastated by Pierre Trudeau’s big win in 1968, may have shared common electoral humiliation, but they also had the same advantage: a clean slate for building a better, fully contemporary electoral organization.
Chairman Bliss had been unusually resourceful, perfecting a technique for direct mail fundraising, applying more sophisticated practices in public opinion research, and devising a simple method for developing comprehensive campaign policies. With these components, he laid the foundation for the modern Republican Party. Lind believed imitating Bliss’s example would be the best way to flatter him. Atkins could not have agreed more. All Lind had to do was spend time with his boss, Wickson, sojourning around the United States soaking up ideas and deciding which ones could become components of an improved Progressive Conservative campaign machine.
Lind was on such good terms with Republican organizers that in 1968, after the election of Richard Nixon, he was invited to Washington for the inauguration. Bliss was not a Nixon man, so, despite his indispensible role building a winning campaign organization, he was about to be dispensed with. On his way out, Bliss eagerly provided Lind with his key contacts.
One was a young public opinion researcher named Robert Teeter, a principal of the Detroit-based firm Market Opinion Research. Already Teeter was on his way to becoming one of the truly respected American political pollsters, whom David Broder of the Washington Post would praise as “the most consistently insightful.” Lind and Wickson, meeting with Teeter in Detroit, were not only surprised to see his resemblance to Norman Atkins but happy to find him keen to do a poll in Canada. The two Canadians believed Teeter held the key to a new era in Canadian political campaigning, but had no money to pay for his polling. Heading out the door, they cheerfully said they’d be back in touch to finalize arrangements.
Wickson had a developer’s talent for operating with little or no money, leveraging deals using somebody else’s funds. He and Lind went to see Ernie Jackson, the Ontario PC MPP who’d become legendary as Ontario’s director of political organization for Premier John Robarts, to discuss sharing the costs of a poll.
By the time of their second meeting, Robarts himself, who was pondering his political future, joined them. Recognizing his vulnerability, Lind and Wickson lathered on the persuasion and Robarts agreed to split the costs of a Teeter poll with the national PC Party. The research, to be conducted in Ontario, would ascertain what Ontarians thought about the provincial party and its leader and about the national party and the leadership of Robert Stanfield.
Few thought Robarts needed any poll to tell him it was time to pass his gavel to someone younger, leaner, and keener to be Ontario’s politically engaged premier. Yet because sampling Ontarians’ views helped gain the necessary money, Wickson had solemnly confided that a Teeter poll about Robarts was, well, essential.
It was the first public opinion research the PCs had conducted in a very long time. The national party under Dief had reverted to a pre-polling political era. But thanks to this time warp and the advances by Robert Teeter, the blue machine clicked back into the scene by leapfrogging to the latest methods in sophisticated political public opinion research. The Tories embraced a technique that would become the new Canadian standard for masterminding election campaigns.
Conducted in autumn 1969, the Teeter poll proved instrumental in John Robarts’s decision to step down as premier. As for the federal side, the American’s polling information enabled Atkins, Wickson, and Lind to calibrate a new approach for selling Bob Stanfield. All communications from the PCs would now contrast his values to those of Pierre Trudeau — values that the PC leader personified and that, as Ontarians told Teeter, they honoured.
The senior players in the PC Party’s campaign organization were both shocked and impressed by how their new understanding invited them to translate research into campaign themes. Even though money was scarce, they resolved to keep on polling. They now saw it as indispensible. Every campaign budget Norman would henceforth draw up included, as a priority, money for polling.
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Lind was bringing significant new components to the blue machine, with no doubt more to come, when late in 1969 he walked into Wickson’s office at headquarters to resign as the national director’s assistant. Ted Rogers in Toronto had made him an offer he could not refuse.
Rogers and Lind shared strong interest in Tory politics, where they’d first met as students debating on opposite sides about nuclear weapons, but the rapid evolution of communications technologies fascinated them even more. If they played it right, they could build a communications empire. Lind had agreed to spearhead Rogers’ media drive into the United States.
Wickson asked Atkins’s help to find a replacement. Soon Norman suggested Brian Armstrong, not only for his natural talent in organizing and running projects, shaping events, and operating with discretion in the presence of power, but because Armstrong could also pass for a “neutral,” despite being close to Camp and Atkins. He’d not been at Maple Leaf Gardens nor worked in anybody’s leadership campaign in 1967, since he’d instead been organizing and hosting an international conference for his fraternity.
A Spade, Armstrong became Norman’s surrogate at national headquarters, abetting his surreptitious efforts to build a campaign team that might make Stanfield prime minister, even though Stanfield was giving Atkins cause to abandon the whole effort by the way he was treating Dalton. It was normal to keep campaign development from the Grits, but in this abnormal phase of the PC Party, with Stanfield unwilling to challenge the Diefenbaker faction who continued gunning for Camp and his brother-in-law, the blue machine had to keep secrets from Tories.
Armstrong and Atkins “worked really closely together.” Whenever he went to Toronto, Brian would spend a half day at the Camp agency with Norman. After touring the facility, reviewing progress on current projects together, the two enjoyed lunch or dinner while exchanging reports and evaluating political rumours. “Although nobody else knew it,” said Armstrong, “the agency was doing all of the work for the party’s communications. We developed a Progressive Conservative newsmagazine. The agency did all the design work, and a lot of the editorial work, for that publication. But it was all sub rosa.”
The components of the upgraded political operations for the national PCs were being patiently assembled through party headquarters in Ottawa and the Camp agency in Toronto, Norman Atkins spearheading all stages of development, Brian Armstrong working as facilitator and middleman, and Malcolm Wickson painstakingly introducing these new techniques into the federal PC organization. Each had resolved that the next election against Trudeau’s Liberals would not be a repeat of 1968.
“I went to work for Malcolm Wickson and Robert Stanfield at one of the lowest points in the history of the Progressive Conservative Party,” said Armstrong. “Little did I know it was going to get even worse.”
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The PC national headquarters, relocated from Bracken House, occupied several floors of a modest office building on Queen Street, short blocks from Parliament Hill. Its skeletal staff interacted with the small staff working with the leader on Parliament Hill.
The party was deeply in debt. Money was essential to run the improving blue machine, but there was not cash enough even to maintain routine operations. With the party’s national office living hand to mouth, Wickson was a magician juggling the bills, keeping the PC Party operating when it was insolvent.
The traditional methods of fundraising were being pushed to the limit. Bagmen like Patrick Vernon were joined by Jean Casselman Wadds, Bill Rowe’s sister. She found it “very discouraging.” Perhaps, Jean thought, the direct mail solicitations pioneered by the Republicans, which Phil Lind and Malcolm Wickson had been exploring, might be a better way to end PC poverty.
Teeter put Wickson in contact with the expert running the Republican direct mail fundraising system. By far the blue machine’s best import from the United States, direct mail solicitation would, within a half-decade, prove lucrative enough for the Tories to keep their new market research system in place, make many other upgrades to the campaign machinery, and emerge as Canada’s best funded political organization, one with its own “guaranteed annual income.”
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Yet, for now, the party was still broke in another way.
Stanfield desperately needed the talent of the campaign organization that first helped him become premier and later national leader, but was paralyzed in dealing with the blue machine because he lived in fear of Dief and his squad of loyal MPs who prowled daily for Camp’s scent.
Paul Weed, a Spade who operated a collection agency and played politics just as hard, shakes the hand of leader Stanfield, whom he’d worked with persuasive force to elect as national leader.
From 1968 on, these backroom strains were taking their toll on the effort to build a better PC campaign organization as Wickson worked intimately with Atkins to develop an organization that could successfully fight the next federal election. This effort should have been straightforward, making best use of limited resources as everyone in the party collaborated to make Robert Stanfield Canada’s prime minister.
But the relationship between Camp and Stanfield deteriorated because of the Diefenbaker maelstrom. By extension, this caused cracks in the relationship between Atkins and Stanfield.
The ghost of John Diefenbaker haunted the party still, but the problem was that Dief’s was no phantom presence. The man himself lurked everywhere. He sat in a front-row Commons seat, beside Stanfield, often upstaging him. Behind them perched rows of Dief-loyal MPs.
If Bob Stanfield ever wanted to be prime minister, this was the fight he needed to take on; however, it would be several more years before his stoic patience broke. For now, he took the pacifist’s path, waiting, avoiding confrontation. Rather than facing down Diefenbaker, he distanced himself from those who’d devotedly advanced his career in Nova Scotia, and still sought to do the same nationally.
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There was another major problem to be dealt with, too: television.
The broadcasting of images had been transforming politics since the late 1950s, and unless one mastered the new medium, it could kill a campaign. Terry McCartney-Filgate, an acclaimed television producer whom Dalton introduced to improve the national campaign and upgrade Stanfield’s on-camera performance, knew Stanfield not only needed him as a producer, but also as a media coach.
McCartney-Filgate worked patiently with awkward Bob Stanfield on his delivery — an embarrassing relationship, as if he was training an adult who’d never learned to articulate. He was “trying to get Mr. Stanfield to the point,” said Armstrong, “where he could do a fifteen-second clip and present effect-ively to a camera.”
While this was underway, Armstrong worked directly with Bob Teeter on the research side, to determine how best to present the PC leader, and with McCartney-Filgate on the television production side, filming shows for The Nation’s Business on CBC that incorporated the key message.
This television upgrade initiative was vital for a successful election campaign, expected in 1972. None of the TV activity took place in the leader’s parliamentary offices, but was conducted out of party headquarters. Wickson was committed to the whole program of polling, direct mail fundraising, enhancing television performance, and everything else the blue machine was creating for the campaign, but it was against his nature to bother getting approvals from “the Parliament Hill gang,” as he called the leader’s staff and caucus. “This way Mr. Stanfield had a little separation between what these guys from head-quarters were doing with Norman Atkins,” explained Armstrong. It was also another example of how the Nova Scotian distanced himself from those associated with Dalton who were trying to help him, hoping to keep peace with Diefenbaker’s faction who sought his demise.
The CBC Sunday night free-time broadcast The Nation’s Business followed the main newscast, and those who stayed tuned were avid followers of Canadian public affairs. Mostly what viewers saw, on their black-and-white screens, was a man in a suit behind a desk with a speaking text he held and read. In an era before colour, tele-prompters, or much heed for production values, Terry McCartney-Filgate changed everything he could, to the extent technology of the day allowed. The shift from black-and-white TV had begun in 1966 in Canada, but full-time colour transmission would only become universal in 1974.
Instead of using the CBC studio and doing the show live, as was the pattern, McCartney-Filgate and his crew headed out with Stanfield to film on their own, in venues Canadians could identify with. They invested time and care, editing the footage, professionally producing the five-minute segment, then handing over the completed film to the CBC producers in advance of the Sunday evening broadcast.
“I can remember driving all around, doing location shots with McCartney-Filgate for a Nation’s Business program,” said Armstrong, “and then sitting in a hotel room for the better part of a day while we did about twenty-three takes in order to get one good one from Mr. Stanfield.” The PC leader stuck with it, apparently as determined as McCartney-Filgate and Armstrong to get it right. “It was hard work for us and for him, but eventually it paid off because he became much more proficient and effective at it.”
Yet it was never easy. An underlying reluctance on Bob Stanfield’s part to be an innovative player accentuated his natural inability to be a performer. When MP Heward Grafftey, who had travelled the country on Stanfield’s behalf to deal with housing and urban affairs issues, sought to get the leader to a location in Hull and film him outlining the need for federal action against a backdrop of desperately inadequate housing where people lived in sight of Canada’s Parliament buildings, the effort was akin to dragging an unwilling child to the doctor’s office.
Marshall McLuhan, however, proclaimed Stanfield “cool,” according to the professor’s twinned categories of “cool” and “hot” to explain how a person’s image projected through television. A cool person, said McLuhan, left plenty of room for a viewer to “plug in meaning” and interpret according to their own beliefs what the ill-defined individual meant or represented. Being vague, even silent, helped.
This pronouncement by Dalton’s friend was greeted favourably by members of the blue machine. They interpreted it as freedom to convey, through the ill-defined or cool image of Bob Stanfield, a wide variety of messages according to what analysis of polling research indicated would connect with Canadians.
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On the provincial level, elections continued to roll around like clockwork, with 1970 producing a trio in the Maritimes.
In Prince Edward Island, as communications and organization adviser, Norman performed a steady backroom role, in charge of campaign advertising and distribution of campaign materials. Taking a team with him to work for provincial Progressive Conservative leader George Key, they developed the slogan “Key Clicks” for the campaign. Only a few insiders knew all the PC election material was printed in Ottawa at national headquarters and shipped to Norman in Charlottetown. National director Wickson was also in PEI working with closely with Atkins, leaving Armstrong in Ottawa to coordinate production of materials, while in Toronto the Camp agency wrote all copy. On the Island, the campaign gave every appearance of being a local effort.
The election itself did not click for the Tories, however. In a two-way fight with the Liberals, the PCs lost 8 percent of their popular support from 1966 and dropped ten seats, winning only five of thirty-two. PC leader George Key did not even “click” with voters in his own riding.
Deeply discouraged, Norman fretted. “Almost no one would talk to me,” he lamented. “I thought my days in politics were over.”
In Nova Scotia, where people did speak to him as communications coordinator for the October 13 provincial election, Norman was local go-between for operations at campaign headquarters in Halifax and Dalton at the agency in Toronto. Just three years earlier, Stanfield’s wide esteem had ensured a strong electoral mandate for the PCs, who’d taken forty seats to six for Gerald Regan’s Liberals.
Despite assurances he’d remain in Nova Scotia, the premier then departed for national politics. His successor, Ike Smith, faced a long filibuster in 1969 by Regan’s Liberals who opposed a hike of the sales tax. At the end of the hard-hitting 1970 campaign, the PCs still had a marginally higher popular vote than the Liberals, 46.9 percent to 46.1 percent across Nova Scotia, but forfeited the government as the Liberals took twenty-three seats to their twenty-one.
Despondent over the second loss, and now missing the advertising account of another Maritime government, Norman crossed back into New Brunswick, where he’d also been active during the previous weeks, juggling two campaigns at once, as PC organization adviser for an October 26 election. It had been called unexpectedly by Premier Louis Robichaud, hoping to catch new Tory leader, Richard Hatfield, ill-prepared for a snap election. But Hatfield immediately announced the PC platform, well ahead of the Liberals making their program public.
Now victims of their own snap election, the Liberals rushed to complete their platform, but missed the newspaper deadlines for which they’d hurriedly booked advertising space. The papers printed blank pages, which they had held to insert the Liberal program. Hatfield, Camp, and Atkins pounced on the gaffe, pointing out that the Liberals, after ten years in office, could think of nothing more to do. Because there was no Liberal program, it was time to turn them out. The Liberal blunder became a campaign turning point.
The blue machine had more ready for New Brunswick. Next it took the wraps off its pioneering campaign effort at rapid and frequent campaign appearances by the leader: travel by helicopter. Young Hatfield dropped in everywhere around New Brunswick for his campaign, growing increasingly confident, touching down in the province’s French-speaking and English-speaking communities, impressing everyone with his easy communication in both languages.
By the end of it all, the Liberals stayed slightly higher in popular vote, but the Conservatives won a majority of seats in the provincial legislature, thirty-two to twenty-six, and formed a majority government.
The Camp agency regained the province’s tourism advertising business, a happy note for Norman since New Brunswick first established the precedent that inspired Dalton to go after other tourism accounts when the government was one he’d helped elect.
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Back on the national front, meanwhile, autumn 1970 brought a shuddering halt to the work-in-progress of improving the PC campaign machine.
Malcolm Wickson, who did not always master his moody periods, announced he was stepping down as national director to return to British Columbia. He was restless to resume a more satisfying full-time life on the West Coast. He was wealthy. He did not need to put himself through battle after battle in what seemed a forlorn cause.
Eddie Goodman, well-connected and still the party’s director of organiz-ation in the fall of 1970, moved to replace Wickson, even though he did not have Norman Atkins’s aptitude for spotting and vetting top organizers. Liam O’Brien would be the PCs new national director. Hollywood handsome, “Liam was just a terrific guy,” observed Brian Armstrong, “but he had no exper-ience in national politics and very little experience in political organization.” Both were, primarily, what his new job entailed.
National headquarters put together a Canada-wide tour for O’Brien to introduce him to the organization. On the day he and Armstrong started, Prime Minister Trudeau proclaimed the War Measures Act as a response to FLQ terrorist actions in Quebec. This precipitated a crisis atmosphere across Canada. In the nation’s capital, armed troops occupied and patrolled Parliament Hill. The two Tory organizers proceeded on their tour as this galvanizing drama unfolded.
At each city, from Toronto to Winnipeg to Calgary, every news report from Ottawa and Quebec seemed grimmer. The FLQ crisis was the only topic anyone cared about. O’Brien and Armstrong reached Vancouver and were having dinner with Wickson when news spread that Quebec’s labour minister, Pierre Laporte, who had been kidnapped by the FLQ, had been murdered, his body found in the trunk of an abandoned car.
Public sentiment swept across party lines in support of Prime Minister Trudeau’s handling of the crisis. Ontario Tory premier Robarts declared, in support of the PM, “This is war!” In coming days pollsters would track how the PCs sank to an all-time low of just 18 percent support after the harsh War Measures Act was proclaimed in force, while ratings for the Trudeau-led Liberals soared to their highest point ever, exceeding even the crest of Trudeaumania.
Not all Progressive Conservatives fell in line with the prime minister, or Ontario’s premier. The party’s civil libertarians grew agitated. Dalton Camp became distraught over how things were playing out, and met with the executive assistant to Ontario’s attorney general to express his dismay and discuss possible responses they could take. At Queen’s Park, Education minister Bill Davis disagreed with Robarts, but kept silent.
For members of the blue machine, where someone stood on the War Measures Act became a litmus test. “Virtually to a person,” said Armstrong, “we were all against it.” Nate Nurgitz wrote “a brilliant and passionate pamphlet we distributed nationally,” showing how the War Measures Act was unnecessary because the national government had all the powers it needed under the Criminal Code to deal with the events occurring in Quebec. Camp was strongly opposed, as was Atkins. Roy McMurtry published a strong critique.
Stanfield was also against using the War Measures Act, with its heavy-handed powers of arrest and other state actions that disregarded due process of law, but in the end he and the PC caucus voted support when the Commons was asked to endorse the government’s action. Only one Progressive Conservative, David MacDonald, displayed the courage to stand against the measure in the Commons. The NDP was opposed on principle. Quebecers saw how old scores were being settled under the act’s harsh emergency provisions; Canadians elsewhere saw a prime minister taking the hardest line anybody ever had with separatists.
In the weeks that followed, spirits in senior Tory circles and at national headquarters sank so low as to register negative. Liam O’Brien began chain-smoking. Time was bringing the next federal election inexorably closer. The huge shift in public support to the Liberals made it clear who would win.
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Wickson, though no longer national director, was considered by core blue machinists as essential to whatever success the upgraded campaign organiz-ation might achieve in the election. Atkins, Armstrong, and others implored Stanfield to name Wickson successor to Eddie Goodman as chair of party organization. Although this required repeated appeals, Stanfield finally appointed the British Columbian to the post.
Being national chair of the party, an entirely voluntary position, usually entailed doing the leader’s bidding at the most senior level to intervene in party operations, including the delicate tasks of recruiting, promoting, sidelining, or dismissing individuals. With Wickson, matters were different. Having invested so much effort in revamping the campaign machinery, he instinctively remained attentive to its operation, even though Liam O’Brien was, officially, now directing it.
At the time, it was impossible, and in retrospect it is still hard, to say who fooled whom in this game of musical chairs at Progressive Conservative headquarters. But at the end of the day, Wickson’s job was not to tweak the party on orders from its leader, the way Goodman had, but to continue what he’d been doing for three years already, getting ready for the next election, building a campaign structure, developing political technology, working on electoral readiness, and getting Progressive Conservatives set for round two of the Stanfield-Trudeau matchup.