Governing with Bill Davis
The politicization of government would now enter a new dimension in Ontario, offspring of the campaign marriage between Bill Davis and the blue machine.
During 1971, Dalton Camp wrote major speeches for the premier, Brian Armstrong metered the flow into the premier’s office, Roy McMurtry occupied positions dealing with government policy and legal affairs of the provincial Progressive Conservatives, and Norman Atkins met regularly with senior cross-over players between party and government. In a parliamentary democracy, governance and partisanship are fused, so this early 1970s experience in Ontario was in no way unique.
Yet it did embrace new elements.
The new premier cherished politics more than his predecessors had. In the 1950s, conduct of Ontario public affairs under Leslie Frost had a clear line of demarcation between party and government. His political fixers, though close at hand, were not on the public payroll but paid by the party. Frost instructed those running party affairs he would attend only three PC events a year, not more, because he was premier of all Ontarians and wanted to be seen above partisan dimensions. Any time that Frost had for public appearances or platform speeches would go, almost exclusively, to large gatherings of provincial associations and public interest organizations.
In the 1960s when John Robarts replaced Frost, he too played down partisanship in public, though not so rigidly. He simply promulgated his theorem that “good government is good politics” and concentrated on the former so that he might in passing achieve the latter.
For the 1970s, Bill Davis, though acquiring much from both predecessors, did not share their partisan detachment. The Progressive Conservative Party was as central to his being and as basic to his vocation as was religion to a priest. Ontario was Bill’s parish, Queen’s Park his church, and Dalton, Norman, and their closely knit PC associates his sidesmen.
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After the election, the Camp agency was awarded the Ontario government’s tourism account.
Some Tories, aware this had become “the deal” for Camp and the blue machine in other provinces and even nationally, still expressed surprise Davis would go along with the quid pro quo arrangement, a number having negative attitudes about Dalton because of the Diefenbaker business, others dubious about the ethics of melding party interest and public business, believing the old style “spoils of office” politics had no place in modern Ontario.
This government advertising was not gratuitous patronage, however. “Whenever one of the government advertising accounts came up,” said Dianne Axmith at the agency, “we had to make a competitive presentation alongside other agencies for the business.” Bill Davis knew who his friends were, and the agency had an inside track because Davis also appreciated the creativity of Camp and those he’d drawn into his advertising galaxy.
The speeches Dalton wrote for him — “Cities are for people, not cars,” when cancelling the Spadina Expressway — had policy punch and pithy phrases that outclassed standard provincial fare. The creative quality of Camp advertising, already previewed earlier with Dalton’s successful hypopotamus campaign, would soon prove to be just as stellar.
Ontario’s tourism officials felt anxiety about losing business to neighbouring New York State with its highly successful “I Love New York” campaign. The minister needed a response. The research department at the Camp agency discovered that when people were shown the province’s travel literature, their eyes popped. The brochures about places and experiences Ontario offered were stunning, yet virtually unknown to the travelling vacationer. So Dalton, Norman, John McIntyre and others decided to create a theme to instill an exciting sense of pride, of discovery, and adventure.
They filmed Ontario’s wide variety of unique scenes and linked that imagery to the attractive travel literature, creating a double whammy: engaging television and mass distribution of brochures. Some three million copies of roto inserts were distributed to households across the province. The theme, “very much in character with the province,” said McIntyre, “had a soft-spoken quality.” It was: ONTARIO: Yours to Discover.
The slogan was an invitation. The onus was on individuals and families to make the discovery, which they were free to do. Its simplicity appealed not only to Ontarians and Canadians but Americans, too, as results from Camp agency focus groups in the United States attested to as well. They considered ONTARIO: Yours to Discover “very polite, reflecting Canadian character.” Also, “discovery” spoke to the sense of a different culture and foreign country which is why Americans would come to Canada. Yours to Discover held out that promise. The campaign was so positive that the Davis government added the slogan to the province’s licence plates, where it still remains, decades later.
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Meanwhile, on the political side, Atkins also became, in essence, full-time political organizer for the provincial Progressive Conservatives, operating the agency as a backroom hub for partisan organization.
The advertising offices on Eglinton Avenue transformed, said Paul Curley, “into the political office of the Ontario PC Party after the 1971 Bill Davis victory.” Tories John Andrews, John McIntyre, and Bob Byron all worked there under Norman’s leadership.
Others coming to the agency for political strategy meetings, when not gathering downtown at the Albany Club, included Michael Gee who’d been appointed to run Caucus Services for Progressive Conservative MPPs at Queen’s Park, Hugh Macaulay, and Terry Yates, longtime friend of Atkins’s who, a successful Hamilton businessman and chartered accountant, had been named comptroller for the coming 1972 federal campaign. Hugh Macaulay made the place his second home. Spades Roy McMurtry, Paul Weed, Patrick Vernon, and Eric Ford were regulars in the mix, the latter two now busy raising money for the 1972 federal campaign.
The agency was not only a place for planning, but operations. One of Bob Byron’s specialties was arranging all point-of-purchase materials for the PCs, getting volume discounts on signs, billboards, T-shirts, sweaters, lapel pins, campaign hats, and logo-imprinted pens and coffee mugs. “Norman understood the value these things have,” said McIntyre. From logos and pins to campaign innovation and high-level strategy, the blue machine was now truly a fusion, as Dalton had first envisaged in the late 1950s, of a political party and an advertising organization, capable of changing people’s perceptions and influencing public affairs.
With so much activity, the Camp agency moved into larger premises at the northwest corner of Yonge and Davisville. Norman enjoyed his bigger office, spacious walk-out balconies, and separate capacious boardroom on the fourth floor. “He’d spring for muffins, croissants, and coffee,” said his assistant Dianne Axmith about the change, “and more campaign meetings took place in the agency than at restaurants.” It was a modern, newly constructed building with staggered levels. The Camp agency, as anchor tenant, more than quadrupled its Eglinton Avenue space.
Davis, after discussing the personnel change with Atkins, replaced Arthur Harnett by Ross DeGeer as provincial director of the PC Party. Roy McMurtry continued as general counsel to the party. Brian Armstrong remained in the premier’s office as appointments secretary, the official gate-keeper organizing Davis’s time and controlling access to power. Camp wrote speeches, gave advice, and took on special assignments for the premier. The Spades, whose identity was still unknown, were becoming more fully inserted into the conduct of Ontario’s government.
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The party meshed with government at the highest level of policy, too, in the way every premier or prime minister needs a “kitchen Cabinet” of trusted advisers.
In New Brunswick, Dalton and Norman had established such a link with Richard Hatfield, whom they so frequently entertained that at Robertson’s Point he’d been given a permanent “guest room.” Every significant initiative the premier took, from making New Brunswick officially bilingual to government support for manufacturing the Bricklin gull-wing sports car, had first been thrashed out at Robertson’s Point.
As Bill Davis settled in to govern, a similar arrangement took form in Ontario. Weekly gatherings of a “Park Plaza Group” sought to harmonize government policy and party operations. Although kept quiet and certainly not an official body, the weekly session soon became a well established centre of power, convening throughout the year, except in summer, for an hour and a-half to two hours in a private suite at the Park Plaza Hotel, a couple of blocks north of the Ontario legislative buildings.
There Bill Davis regularly hashed out the politics of his government and party with Roy McMurtry, Hugh Macaulay, Ross DeGeer, Brian Armstrong, Dalton Camp, Norman Atkins, the Cabinet secretary, and, depending on the issues, invited senior officials. Among several reasons Davis welcomed this arrangement was his full access to Dalton’s counsel in a venue nobody knew about, an artful way of handling his unsavoriness to many Tories. With the blue machine in the control room, the politicization of Ontario’s government proceeded apace but, significantly, Bill Davis was the only elected representative in the room.
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Ross DeGeer rightly considered himself “the lynchpin of the Spades’s provincial connection” because he was now the Eglinton riding president, a member of the provincial PC executive, a campaign manager in provincial elections, and the party’s executive director.
The Spades were all, at one time or another, also directors of the Albany Club. The incumbent president of the club would have the directors to his country place for a weekend of frivolity, barbecues, and talking politics. “We did a lot of eating, drinking, and arguing,” said DeGeer. “In this setting was built teamwork, camaraderie, relationships, and trust. These were not a bunch of people who came in, worked hard, swept up, and then went away. We worked together politically for years, almost on a daily basis.” As the years advanced, those running the Albany Club were the same people running the big blue machine — the same people who were increasingly involved in running Ontario and its governing party.
Following DeGeer’s elevation as executive director, he launched an ambitious reorganization of the province-wide party apparatus. The innovations and overhaul of traditional approaches that had become a hallmark of the successful 1971 campaign were now broadened to change Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party itself. The blue machine advanced from being a campaign organization to part of the formal structure itself, in practice if not under the party’s constitution.
“It was the ambition of Davis, Macaulay, and Atkins,” said DeGeer about this change he was implementing, “to put in place an organization that would be more responsive to the kind of techniques we used during the campaign. To accomplish that objective, the centre became more directly involved with the riding associations.”
This was especially important in constituencies the PCs did not hold but where vote margins were close enough for a win next time. “This meant,” said the party’s new executive director, “communicating with the riding executives more regularly than had ever been done before.”
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The overlay of central control and direction, introduced and imposed by Norman Atkins in 1971, was the start of a true “revolution” or reversal in the core relationship within the ranks and operational structure of Progressive Conservatives.
It began with the signs, the brochures, and the “common look” across the entire province. It was extended by the leader’s tour, which transformed a general election across 117 ridings into a single centrally controlled presentation. It was reinforced by the centre’s highly professional television messaging based on Canadian pioneering with American methods for “enhanced research.” It was now being altered by headquarters’s hands-on relationship with riding associations. It would soon embrace the all-important matter of raising and spending campaign money.
The creation of a cadre of regional party organizers, answering directly to the party’s executive direction in Toronto, was also a break from the past. Leslie Frost, the province’s premier from 1949 to 1961, never lost a by-election because he never called one until his quietly reliable personal organizer, Hugh Latimer, spent a lot of time in a riding where a vacancy had occurred. After enough time unobtrusively spying around and listening, Hugh then reported to Frost what the issues were, who the best PC candidate would be, and how well prepared the riding association was. Of seventeen separate by-elections in the Frost years, the PCs won them all.
Under Robarts, when party operations at first were directed by insurance broker Patrick Kinsella, some regional organizers were hired, younger men like Jerry Lampert who handled eastern Ontario. The direct link to the premier was severed. The PCs no longer won all by-elections.
Now DeGeer, in collaboration with Atkins and Macaulay, expanded this parallel party function with a complete network of regional organizers throughout the province, “which over time helped bring the party closer to the ridings.” The closeness was that of a separate, centralized party operation. From the centre, all ridings can start to look the same.
Party headquarters in Toronto produced and sent monthly newsletters to riding association executive members in every constituency. “This in turn meant we could develop a more accurate membership list which had many uses as time went on,” said DeGeer. “We also asked the newsletter recipients to pay $10, to defray the cost of the mailing, which was another innovation for the party.” Money began flowing from the ridings to the centre. It had previously worked the other way.
The party had evolved from the ground up, in a province of vast distances and limited communications, with locals taking charge, organizing themselves, selecting their candidate, raising their own money and keeping it for their own needs, running their campaign, motivating voters according to local political culture and regional opportunity. For Conservatives, this autonomy and direct responsibility, begun as practical necessity, created a political orientation or philosophy. The provincial “party” was the Progressive Conservative Association of Ontario, a loose amalgamation of many separate organizations: riding associations, PC business associations, PC women’s associations, PC Youth organizations, and campus PC clubs.
But now the centre was exerting new control. It was not only happening politically. The Davis government took bold measures to reconfigure governance itself, including by consolidation of a number of separate municipalities into regional governments which continued the premier’s earlier steps as education minister to consolidate rural schools and expand the educational system.
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With the premier’s own interest in national politics, even the prime ministership itself, he and his blue machinist friends increasingly turned their eyes to the coming federal election. Bill Davis pledged to put all his resources behind Bob Stanfield’s next campaign.
For this effort, the blue machine had a strong political axis of men who knew each other well as close friends. Finlay MacDonald was federal campaign chairman. Malcolm Wickson would run day-to-day operations of the national campaign. Both would harmonize with Norman Atkins’s extensive reach and formidable resources, for another round of campaigning with Bill Davis across Ontario, this time for the Progressive Conservative national cause.