Clandestine Campaigns
As Dalton and Norman learned early, secrecy is a campaigner’s handmaid.
Ever since the secret ballot was introduced, electoral politics came flavoured with uncertainty. The advent of opinion polling sought to peel back that veil over voter intent, but an element of mysterious unpredictability still accompanied the outcome. And secrecy shrouds more than the intent of voters. Familiar reference to “smoke-filled backrooms” is folksy shorthand for the clandestine campaign operations of those hidden away while waging our country’s electoral wars.
Out-of-sight operation has long been desired to shield activities that may cross an ethical boundary or breach an election law, hide questionable uses of campaign money, or obscure politically sensitive plans from rival parties and snooping reporters.
On a human level, keeping the presence of backroom organizers from public attention is also understandable because a leader wants to be seen as master of his or her own destiny rather than some puppet of campaign engineers. This secretive instinct is multiplied when the campaign guru is imported talent and the leader keen to avoid allegations of “outside interference.” A campaign organizer is desired for magic, but not to be identified as the magician.
For Camp, these normal features of Canadian campaigns were quickly learned and willingly applied: staying in hotel rooms under assumed names, working in Maritime elections away from the campaign headquarters, writing campaign speeches for others to deliver, and newspaper “editorial advertisements” signed by a fictitious character. It added appealing intrigue to the game.
By the mid-1960s, tainted by his role in “dumping Dief,” Dalton’s familiarity with secrecy was magnified. He directed Stanfield’s 1967 leadership campaign by remote control and surreptitious rendezvous. To advise Duff Roblin, he accompanied Manitoba’s premier on fishing trips to isolated northern lakes or meeting him secretly in a suburban home. Dalton wrote Stanfield’s election speeches from a top-secret “bunker” well off Norman’s organization chart. Dalton advised Bill Davis in the privacy of a hotel suite over breakfast. He met with New Brunswick Premier Dick Hatfield privately at Robertson’s Point.
It was one thing to be secretive for the sake of the campaign, another to be secreted like a pariah. Yet Camp and Atkins understood this phenomenon, too. They played the game themselves, hiding as best they could the American identity of pollster Bob Teeter. They’d even raised the stakes by forming their clandestine Spades, which had a secret bank account that operated unacknowledged to influence campaigns for the interests of the blue machine. The Albany Club, a private organization run like an upscale Tory backroom, its major events “off the record,” further enhanced this secluded nature of their campaign politics.
When Dalton and Norman sought to help Prince Edward Island Tories with their election campaigns, they discovered each time how secrecy is especially hard to maintain in the closed-loop society of a small island. The PEI experiences had conditioned them for a Newfoundland campaign, and Dalton’s venture with Flora MacDonald to St. John’s in 1962 to help the island Progressive Conservatives gave a foretaste of what might be in store again.
But nothing could have prepared Norman and his team for what they experienced in 1979.
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The blue machine was called in by Newfoundland’s new Progressive Conservative premier, Brian Peckford, who wanted help to win his first provincial election that year. Norman agreed to take control as communications coordinator of the campaign, and be his adviser on campaign organization. Peckford was adamant their support remain “behind the scenes.”
The new premier owed his position to Frank Moores’s inability to stay with anything long. After becoming an MP in 1968, Frank was elected president of the PC Party of Canada a year later, thanks to the campaign by Norman Atkins and the Spades. Frank then left national politics to become PC leader in Newfoundland and Labrador. The next year, in 1972, Frank was premier. Seven years later, Frank wanted to leave public office and trade on his connections in politics and government as a lobbyist. When he came to see Dalton for advice about extricating himself from the premiership without harming the PC Party or forfeiting power in the province, they plotted a course of action. Moores then effected the transition, announcing his departure in January 1979, with his successor, Brian Peckford, a rural school teacher and MLA, elected party leader March 17, 1979.
Preparing now to obtain his own mandate from the provincial electorate, the new premier asked Atkins to run the campaign, as the final step in the plan Camp had devised for Moores. Dalton had convinced Moores to prevail upon his successor to retain the services of the blue machine, a gambit that would also help ensure continuing business for the Camp agency with the Newfoundland government. Peckford went along, reluctant because of his cherished sense of independence and especially because he knew the political risks if news leaked out.
Atkins immediately prepared his organizational chart, but then waited for the 1979 federal election to end before placing his calls. When Brian Armstrong picked up the phone, he listened eagerly as his political mentor made yet another offer he could not refuse. Having just become a partner of his Toronto law firm, orchestrating a temporary absence for yet another election campaign was now easier.
The Camp-Atkins organization was Ontario-based, despite its Maritime origins and continuing strong connections in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, so Newfoundland Liberals, if they discovered the truth, would gain ground appealing to nativistic distrust of anyone “from away,” mock provincial Tories for importing Toronto “experts,” and accuse Peckford of thinking nobody local could run a campaign.
The strong team Atkins assembled, and brought quietly to St. John’s in the spring of 1979, included himself and Armstrong, political operatives John Laschinger, Nancy McLean, Chris Urquhart, and Derrick Ellis, with John McIntyre from the Camp agency to prepare layouts of advertisements, pamphlets, and other campaign material. “We essentially ran that entire campaign for Peckford,” said Armstrong.
This trimmed-down blue machine got some help in avoiding detection by the fact the news media, and political attention generally, was focused on the nation’s capital where Joe Clark was putting together his Cabinet amidst intense speculation about who from Newfoundland would be included, and whether John Crosbie might become finance minister.
To increase their cover, these Ontarians secreted themselves in a sleazy hotel. They stayed in the nondescript place, said Armstrong, “because it was out of the way and Peckford and Atkins thought nobody would find out we were there. We in fact ran the whole campaign without anybody ever finding out.”
As far as the provincial Progressive Conservative organization, “Only one or two guys at the senior levels, including the premier, knew we were doing all this.” Using a couple of rental cars to move between their hotel and the back parking lot at the quiet legislative buildings, where they operated during the day to run the campaign, ensured that no cab drivers would make a connection. With the legislature dissolved, members were away campaigning and political reporters were elsewhere covering the election events, not a vacated building.
Atkins was overall campaign manager. Laschinger handled organization on the ground, working with constituency associations, passing himself off as a local but always from a distant part of the province. McLean handled everything to do with television. Urquhart did the media buying. Armstrong wrote all the copy, and interpreted any survey data, although for this election the campaign conducted relatively little opinion research. Ellis and McIntyre laid out the advertising.
In the election’s opening days, before Premier Peckford hit the campaign circuit, Atkins and Armstrong joined him in his office, getting all candidates nominated. “Peckford just started calling these guys around the province and saying, ‘You are going to be the candidate.’ He would have to work on them a bit,” said Armstrong, “and cajole several until they agreed. But there was no nominating meeting, no hint of democracy in any of this.”
With PC candidates “nominated” in the province’s fifty-two ridings, Peckford filed his list with the chief electoral officer then left St. John’s to meet his standard-bearers in their towns, villages, or outports, and encourage local voters to mark their ballots for these outstanding community leaders. Atkins and Armstrong looked at each other, shaking their heads at the conduct of a democratic political party in late twentieth century Canada. “These guys were essentially appointed as the party’s candidates,” said Armstrong. The blue machinists, though having experienced many backroom styles, “had never seen anything like this before.” They clearly did not know Canada’s smaller political parties.
Norman’s war room was the premier’s office. With Peckford away campaigning, he and Norman stayed in touch, talking on the phone every day, Atkins at Peckford’s normal end of the line. Whether placing calls, reading staff memos, signing off on ads, or contemplating a next move, Norman had never run an election like this, nor operated from a more sumptuous campaign office. For campaign operations, the blue machinists “took over the entire upper floor of Newfoundland’s legislative building.” Their staff conferences took place in the Cabinet room.
A feature of the campaign making it possible for the blue machine to get the PC message across effectively was that “the press in Newfoundland and Labrador at that time wasn’t terribly competitive,” said Armstrong. “Whatever we put out as a press release, they would run.” Atkins, as a result, pulled back on the paid advertising component of the campaign. They did not need to spend much on advertising because the radio stations, television broadcasters, and newspaper editors would run “whatever we wrote without much scrutiny.”
Armstrong also wrote forceful speeches for Peckford about Newfound-landers standing up for themselves, being proud of their heritage, asserting provincial rights, and no longer beseeching central Canada or Ottawa for help. At one point, Laschinger turned to Atkins to ask, “Do you really think a Toronto-based agency is going to get this government’s advertising?” They all realized, the more these pro-Newfoundland speeches resonated with voters, the perilous risk of the whole campaign exploding if their top-secret mission was discovered.
The Liberal leader, Donald Jamieson, was a former Trudeau Cabinet minister, legendary in the province as a rich-voiced broadcaster. Being “a household name,” however, also meant Don had been around quite some time “and his star had begun to fade,” while Brian Peckford was fresh and forceful.
Peckford succeeded brilliantly in the June 18 election, with the effective force of the hidden blue machine that nobody noticed. With just over 50 percent of the popular vote, the PCs claimed thirty-three seats, while the Liberals with 40 percent got nineteen. The New Democrats’ 8 percent support produced no representation.
The voting results satisfied Norman, since they had notched up another victory, but the election’s aftermath disappointed him, signalling, as Armstrong said, “the beginning of a change in the way politics was being done.” The Canadian tradition was that someone in advertising who ran a winning party’s campaign “would be favoured with a significant amount of government advertising business afterwards. Dalton had built the Camp agency, in part at least, on that principle.”
The Camp agency had lucrative tourism accounts in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, Newfoundland, and Ontario. “It was all as a consequence of Dalton’s work and commitment to the party in those provinces. Mr. Davis had honoured that tradition and given the Camp agency the Ontario tourism account when we won in 1971,” said Armstrong.
With Peckford things were different. The blue machine’s involvement, while seemingly welcomed, had never been his idea, but a deal between Moores and Camp. When he won handily, he felt that the victory was due to his own amazing talents and strong personal appeal, not the result of unknown organizers working behind the scene. Who, after all, had handpicked all the winning candidates? Who had appeared in public to raise support by his personal appeals to get most of them elected? And hadn’t the new premier crusaded to keep more of the province’s benefits for the people of Newfoundland and Labrador? That applied across the board, from offshore oil and gas to “the spoils of office.”
Peckford took the tourism business away from the Camp agency, which it enjoyed under Moores, and handed it to a local agency, keeping all revenue within the province. The premier picked a St. John’s firm, using the same direct personal approach by which he’d selected his candidates. “Norman found that disheartening and disappointing. Loyalty meant a lot to him,” said Armstrong. “He saw Peckford’s behaviour as an act of disloyalty after what Norman had done for him. We had all been down there working for nothing to get Mr. Peckford elected. Norman expected the premier would want him to continue in some role in the province.” Even the invoices for out-of-pocket disbursements went unpaid a long time. Dalton himself had to make several calls to Peckford to get payment.
Yet in 1982, with another election in Newfoundland, Atkins, unable to refuse a direct ask by a party leader, answered Peckford’s appeal and returned to St. John’s as campaign communications adviser for the provincial PCs in the April 6 election. The Progressive Conservatives won with 61 percent of the popular vote to the Liberal’s 35 percent support, a result that translated to forty-four seats for the PCs and eight for the Liberals.
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Norman’s reputation, enhanced in 1981when the PCs regained a majority government in Ontario, was spreading.
Senior representatives of United Bermuda Party, the governing party that anticipated a strong electoral challenge from the rising left-wing and union-supported Progressive Labour Party, discreetly contacted him in Toronto. With both climate and politics enticing him, Norman signed on as senior consultant to the UBP and began laying plans for a 1983 general election. Norman asked Brian Armstrong, given their experience running clandestine campaigns on islands, to join him.
“Although we had never taken a cent for working in a campaign in Canada,” Brian said, they decided they’d need to be paid. “If they wanted our help, we would provide it as political consultants, not as Canadian volunteers trying to affect the internal politics of another country, which would be inappropriate.”
The United Bermuda Party accordingly hired the Camp agency, through which billings for campaign organizing went to Norman and Dalton Camp. Armstrong’s services were also billed by the agency so his earnings similarly flowed through to him. The duo began making regular trips to Bermuda through spring, summer, and fall of 1982. They met with the new leader of the United Bermuda Party, dynamic, entrepreneurial, and outspoken John Swan.
Swan was a charismatic and progressive leader atop a conservative and centrist party. The UPB advocated moderate social and fiscal policies, held a majority of seats in the legislature, and worried about the growing strength of the island’s Progressive Labour Party. Bermuda’s government mostly ran domestic affairs. Britain still directed the country’s foreign and defence policy and security activity. Bermuda was simultaneously in the American orbit, a result of the strong U.S. economic and military presence, and its intelligence operations, on the island.
The CIA closely followed Bermudian politics and island activities, snooping everywhere to ensure no American interests or assets were in jeopardy. The agency quickly became aware that Canada’s blue machine was operating locally, with Canadians masterminding the United Bermuda Party’s upcoming election campaign. “The CIA, we later learned, knew everything that we were doing down there,” said Armstrong.
Others did not, however. Secrecy was as important to the plan for Premier Swan as it had been for Premier Peckford in Newfoundland. Instead of being holed up in a decrepit hotel the way they had been in St. John’s, however, for this campaign the Canadian team luxuriated in the magnificent Southampton Princess Hotel, crowning a height of land from which they could overlook the entire island.
Once the election writ was issued, Atkins and Armstrong immediately flew to Bermuda. Armstrong set himself up in a Southampton Princess suite for the entire four weeks of the campaign, with Atkins coming and going as he continued to deal with business in Canada as well. Brian slept in one of the suite’s two connecting rooms and converted the other into “a sort of bunker where the writing was done.”
His primary role in the election was to write speeches for Premier Swan, advertising copy for the campaign, and policy papers for the party. Armstrong kept all the material for this top-level work in the second room. Atkins locked the outside corridor door of the bunker and hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle where it remained for the next four weeks.
This precaution was necessary because Bermuda’s political life was polarized between union and non-union forces. Southampton Princess employees were unionized. “We were concerned that if these folks came in to clean the room, they would quickly find out what was going on and word would get out. More than that, campaign intelligence would get out.” The unionized workers strongly supported the UBP’s rival, the Progressive Labour Party.
Besides locking the corridor entrance to the bunker, they also locked the interior adjoining door between the two rooms, and always double-checked that both rooms were secure whenever they left, even just briefly. The staff, Norman quipped, must have thought “this was one of the most outrageous honey-moons to ever take place at the Southampton Princess, because the DO NOT DISTURB sign remained in place for a month.” All the while, the CIA’s tap inside their rooms caused no disturbance. John Swan’s plans for enhanced Bermudian relations with the United States and the CIA’s evaluation that the UBP was a safer choice for U.S. interests than the leftist PLP meant that American intelligence officers were content to simply monitor the blue machinists’ progress.
In addition to Atkins and Armstrong, the Canadian team included John McIntyre from the Camp agency, and Canadian camera crews brought in to film Premier Swan.
Taking a page from their Ontario election playbook, featuring non-traditional colours for the PC Party and a new image for Premier Davis, the blue machine completely revamped the public presentation of the United Bermuda Party. “We redesigned their party logo,” said Armstrong, “and we gave them new colours. We wrote a campaign song for them. We did ‘the whole nine yards,’ just as we had elsewhere.”
The revamped UBP campaign worked its magic, in harmony with the party’s dynamic new leader, who’d had the smarts to recruit Atkins and use his services to maximum effect. Like Brian Peckford in 1979 Newfoundland and Bill Davis in 1971 Ontario, John Swan had automatically become premier upon his election as leader at a party convention, but had yet to win a general election in his own right. Just as those two Canadian premiers won substantial majorities in their inaugural outing with the blue machine, the premier of Bermuda was victorious on February 4, 1983. The Opposition Progressive Labour Party had, again, been thwarted.
For the flight back to Toronto, Atkins and Armstrong celebrated their first overseas election win by upgrading their tickets to first class and toasting themselves with champagne all the way home. Norman overcame his shyness and traded campaign stories with fellow passenger across the aisle, John Aird, Ontario’s lieutenant governor and veteran Liberal seasoned in backroom politics.
Atkins hoped by participating in the Bermuda election in a pivotal way that the Camp agency would have an entree to the government’s tourism business. It was a huge account, tourism being a pillar of the island’s economy. But Premier Swan, bent on decolonizing Bermuda, refused to even give Atkins the chance to bid on any government advertising. It remained with an island agency, at least a few more years before being transferred to a New York firm.
As with Newfoundland, this Bermuda experience, despite the election win, left a bitter taste in Norman Atkins’s mouth. “It also did for me, too,” said Armstrong, “because it would have been gratifying for me to have seen Norman given that opportunity. It would have been a great account for the Camp agency, and great fun to represent the government of Bermuda, travelling there on a frequent basis to do that business.” Both Norman and Brian overlooked that they had been duly paid for services rendered.
Several years later, when the Swan government’s mandate was running out, the premier’s senior campaign representatives contacted the Camp agency for another round of professional service in the upcoming election. Armstrong went to Bermuda with Elizabeth Roscoe of the agency to investigate. Back in Toronto with Norman, they discussed prospects and decided to decline this request to work for the United Bermuda Party.
The blue machine’s first international campaign had also been its last.