Dismantling the Machinery
Ontario’s motto, “As it began, so it remains,” applied to the Progressive Conservatives themselves. Just as the province heralded a rise in PC fortunes in 1943, so it remained a place foretelling the party’s fate toward the end of the century. Where the big blue machine came into greatest prominence was where it would also be destroyed.
After Ontario’s Davis-led PCs won re-election in 1981, the secure comfort of a majority in the legislature induced an easy-going complacency. The Tories became less alert than they had been with a minority government. And even though the PCs had more seats, it was the same old story: they’d only earned them with 44 percent of the popular vote. Vote splitting had kept the Tories in power since 1943, and in 1981 had saved their day once more by dividing the 55 percent of non-PC support, 34 percent to Liberals and 21 percent to New Democrats.
The electoral system made Ontario’s PC Party, the Tory governments, and the big blue machine appear more powerful than they really were. In addition, the Davis government itself was running down. Cabinet needed an overhaul. But instead of tapping the new energy and fresh thinking of ambitious younger MPPs, the premier kept worn and self-important veterans in place. Loyalty trumped renewal. Many practices needed to be updated, but even decisions so routine as adding a driver’s photograph to provincially issued licences bogged down for lengthening rounds of further reconsideration because there was little rush and less decisiveness.
Such lethargy became oddly mixed with strange initiatives and stranger distractions. The premier stunned everyone, even most members of his Tuesday-morning circle of insiders, by announcing the Ontario government had purchased 25 percent of Calgary-based oil and gas company Suncor. “Suncor was one of those decisions everybody realized, as soon as it was announced, as dumb and wrong,” said John MacNaughton. “Who could think you’d get a ‘window on the oil industry’ by buying shares of just one company, and a minority interest at that, and of an American-owned company?”
The Davis government, oscillating between sluggish performance and shocking decisions, also got distracted by national politics. In early 1983, Joe Clark, despite getting two-thirds approval in the mandatory “leadership review,” perversely resigned, called for a leadership convention, and declared himself a candidate for the job he’d just been confirmed in but tossed away. That alone was enough to get people’s attention. It certainly drew consuming interest from those meant to be focused on governing Ontario.
At Queen’s Park, Bill Davis, having again assumed the lustre of a successful political leader with a majority government, gave renewed consideration to running for the national leadership. The idea of being PM had danced in Davis’s imagination since youth, and accounted for many of his adult actions. If ever he was to make his move, it had to be now.
Over at the Camp agency, Hugh Segal, Bill Kelly, Norman Atkins, and key blue machinists had, since 1981, been actively building a Davis campaign organization across the country, in anticipation of making William G. Davis Canada’s next prime minister. They would prove support for Davis in a tangible way by putting together enough committed support from party leaders in many provinces, then go to Ontario’s premier and say, “Look, you have a chance at this thing!” They convened a dinner for Davis at the Albany Club, a show of support to pressure him, announcing the names of prominent PC players who were behind him. They draped the room with a large banner from the 1981 election, its same provincial slogan BILL DAVIS NOW FOR ALL THE RIGHT REASONS notionally reapplied to the federal scene.
These efforts faced stiff opposition from PC premier Peter Lougheed in Alberta. He had never been beholden to the blue machine because he’d built his own campaign organization. Beyond Peter’s partisan independence and Albertan sentiments about central Canada, his hostility to Bill Davis becoming national leader of his party also incorporated the political fallout from Davis’s support for the contentious constitutional amendment package negotiated by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and Ontario’s support for the Trudeau government’s National Energy Program, which Albertans saw as favouring Ontario at their expense.
Ontario’s premier, already facing such iron-clad opposition from Alberta, learned that in his very own backyard a Toronto-based group, spearheaded by Hal Jackman, was mounting a strong “Draft Lougheed for Leader” movement and gaining support from many influential Ontario Tories.
History made clear that the route to 24 Sussex could never run through a provincial premier’s office, but ironically it took another premier to save Bill Davis the embarrassment of showing he’d failed to learn this lesson.
The blue machinists who’d taken Nova Scotia’s premier through three unsuccessful national elections hadn’t got the point, either. “I wanted him to run,” said Atkins. The night Davis announced he would not, Norman was interviewed on CBC national television by Barbara Frum for The Journal, and all but burst into tears.
Without their candidate of choice heading to the August 1983 PC leadership convention, members of the big blue machine either remained neutral or scattered to different campaigns. Bill McAleer ran Joe Clark’s re-re-election campaign. Roy McMurtry supported fellow Toronto progressive Tory David Crombie. Davis attended the convention, as did Atkins, Armstrong, Curley, and most other blue machinists, observing it all and remaining neutral, more easily done because of their hollow feeling inside.
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As the months passed, Davis reconciled himself to having reached the end of his political road. He dealt with matters that had troubled him, clearing his conscience as well as his desk. A second stunning and controversial move, after Suncor, was to repudiate his own 1971 decision on funding Roman Catholic separate school education for grades 11, 12, and 13. Saying no to such funding had contributed electoral support to his majority PC win that year. But in June 1984, with full support from his Cabinet, he reversed that very decision and said yes, driving away electoral support not only from many Protestant Tory voters, but also from others seriously concerned about implications of religious schools and public funding.
By October 1984, Davis was ready to bow out completely. He invited Atkins and McMurtry for lunch and served up the news. Both were shocked and tried to change the premier’s mind. Roy believed Davis the only person who could satisfactorily explain to voters extending separate school–funding, and that without him doing so the PCs would likely lose. Norman, deeply attached to Davis personally and apprehensive about the fate of the blue machine without him, became deeply morose. Later, he would call it “one of my saddest days in politics.”
Bill Davis made another decision with adverse long-term consequences for his party. He stipulated that only party members in good standing for a year could vote to elect delegates to the Ontario PC leadership convention to choose his successor. Hotly contested conventions are a primary growth engine for parties. Candidates and their supporters recruit new voting members, who swell party ranks, add momentum, and bring refreshing perspectives.
Davis had been appalled by the sensational news when “instant Tories” in a few ridings had given a voting edge to Brian Mulroney’s convention forces but a black eye to the national PC Party. He vowed the quality of party membership in Ontario would not be sullied by rounding up indigent voters and handing them a paid membership card and a few dollars on their way into a meeting hall to vote as instructed. The premier’s high-minded decision contributed further to the demise of his beloved party by freeze-framing it at an earlier date in time. No recruitment, no renewal.
Roy McMurtry might have been a strong contender to succeed his friend, except he’d spent his Cabinet years in the same portfolio, failing to gain a breadth of government experience. He’d long been diffident about his political ambitions anyway, and had not prepared for a leadership run. He began to call members of the big blue machine. Norman volunteered to chair his campaign and recommended Brian Armstrong for campaign manager. McMurtry reached Armstrong vacationing in England. “When you get back, I’d like to talk with you about my campaign.” Soon the two were together in Toronto, discussing the nature of the leadership race.
As Armstrong put it, the provincial PC Party had gone through “a strange transformation during the period of the minority government and then in the period after 1981 with a majority in the legislature.” He itemized a sequence of controversial measures taken by Premier Davis that had “antagonized the right wing of the party,” such as imposing rent controls and acquiring a shareholder interest for Ontario’s government in Suncor. Armstrong felt the government “had fallen out of touch with the grassroots of the party.” The youth wing “had become much more conservative than progressive. Resentments had built up.”
While feelings about “not listening to or paying attention to regular party members” focused on the leader, it was hard for Tories to openly criticize likeable Bill Davis. So they redirected antipathy instead toward the big blue machine and the cadre of advisers around the premier, men like McMurtry and Atkins and their increasingly infamous backroom colleagues.
“All these elements have coalesced around Frank Miller,” summed up Armstrong, “and give life to his campaign for the leadership.” Miller was health minister, then provincial treasurer, in the Davis Cabinet. He and two other ambitious ministers, Dennis Timbrell and Larry Grossman, had been openly campaigning, even though Davis had not yet resigned. McMurtry had not even made quiet plans.
“We are seriously behind the eight ball,” concluded Armstrong. Still, with Atkins chairing the “McMurtry for Premier” campaign, a credible effort, if not a winning one, could be mounted. McMurtry declared his candidacy, several weeks after all the others had done so. “We put together a great team,” said Armstrong. “A lot of people who’d worked for Norman in Ottawa in the 1984 campaign joined us, including Bill Saunderson, Paul Curley, Bill McAleer, and George Stratton. Freddie Watson drove the tour bus. We fought hard against tremendous odds.”
Delegates from across Ontario arrived for the Toronto convention in early February 1985. Because the McMurtry campaign had few committed delegates, the blue machinists looked for ways to demonstrate support. They’d developed a bloody-minded attitude that, if they could not win, they would have a lot of fun losing.
Someone in the group, gazing at the McMurtry campaign bus parked by the convention facility at the CNE grounds, got the idea to run a free shuttle bus service between the downtown hotels, where delegates were staying, and the CNE site, using many such buses as mobile billboards. Soon, twelve big buses were circulating around Toronto with the McMurtry colours, sometimes empty, but visually dominating the routes.
Another gambit was to have singer Burton Cummings perform at a McMurtry event. It morphed from political gathering into a Cummings concert, with over six thousand in attendance. “Cummings loved it,” said Armstrong, and then became “part of the cheering section for Roy on voting day.” The convention’s third night brought more of the same when Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, a long-time friend of McMurtry’s, gave a fabulous concert that again attracted thousands of people, few of them delegates voting for the new premier of Ontario.
Segal, working on Larry Grossman’s campaign, quipped of the McMurtry effort, “They have surrounded us with buses and singers.”
This showy but desperate exercise revealed that not only had the Davis government run out of steam, but so had the big blue machine, deploying its resources in a diversionary and costly way, coming late into play with more show than substance.
Opinion polls indicated Roy McMurtry was the only candidate among the PC leadership contestants who could beat David Peterson and the Liberals. But those surveyed included few delegates to the convention. On the first ballot, McMurtry got three hundred votes and, forced to drop out, supported the next most progressive candidate, fellow-Torontonian Larry Grossman. This enabled Grossman to pass Timbrell on the second ballot. When Timbrell, also from Toronto, dropped out, he too supported Grossman for the dramatic final ballot.
Then another deep sentiment across the province that united Ontarians came into play: antipathy toward Toronto. On February 8, Frank Miller, from small-town Bracebridge, won the leadership of the Ontario PC Party, surpassing all three Toronto candidates to become Ontario’s nineteenth premier.
As Brian Armstrong had clearly understood, all the feelings within the ranks of Ontario’s PCs against their own government’s direction and the legendary blue machine had “coalesced around Frank Miller.”
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From Ottawa, Prime Minister Mulroney offered McMurtry a dignified way out, passage to London as Canada’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom. As well as distancing him from Ontario provincial politics for a spell, Mulroney hoped the move would also provide McMurtry with increased stature so that, on his return to Canada, he would be in a position in a few years to run for Parliament and enter his Cabinet.
Whatever that future might hold, members of the blue machine in Ontario were dejected when Roy resigned to take up his foreign posting. “A lot of us were disappointed because we’d hoped he would be a force for moderation in the Miller government,” lamented Armstrong. “When Roy went, there was nothing left for us there.”
“At that point,” he said ruefully, “the big blue machine started to come apart.”
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A man of intelligence who chose to disguise it, Frank Miller lacked instinctive aptitude for politics. Fate had placed the new premier beyond his natural realm, where he was pulled one way by his hardline advisers who wanted a break from the past, and pushed the other way by moderates who understood that reality required bringing the party’s competing groups together.
Although he’d vowed that his first act would be to “get rid of the big blue machine,” the leader began a unity drive. Frank started to reach out, but possessed neither the skill nor, really, the determination to reconcile the smarting factions. His attempt was decidedly perfunctory with the blue machinists, most of whom he called, none of whom he asked to help. When Armstrong heard from Miller, he inquired what role Norman Atkins would have in the upcoming provincial campaign. Though the conversation went on awhile, it ended without Miller making any commitment about anything. “It was odd, because if the leader asks you to do something, you usually do it,” said Armstrong. “But this was different.”
Ontario’s novice premier, making an absolute break in continuity, turned to Patrick Kinsella to run his election campaign. Kinsella, an insurance broker who’d been executive director of the Ontario PCs in the late 1970s but had long since departed for British Columbia to become a deputy minister in the Social Credit government, then backroom strategist and chief of staff to Socred premier Bill Bennett, was out of touch with Ontario players and issues.
When the leader told Norman he’d named Kinsella, Atkins said simply, “That is fine, Premier. You have made your choice. Good luck.”
Attorney General Alan Pope, the PC member from Timmins representing Cochrane South, met several times with Miller to discuss the coming campaign, especially its timing. The premier did not heed the northern Ontarian’s urging to wait before calling an election. Alan knew that with Atkins and the blue machine’s key players removed, rebuilding the apparatus behind the scenes would take time, and was essential before the PCs would be ready for a province-wide campaign.
Yet the PCs were up in the polls, some 20 percent ahead of the Liberals, the usual bump of support following a televised leadership convention, approval that can melt in a hot campaign when partisan opponents and aggressive media pounce on any glitch. Miller was innocently confident. Just six weeks after becoming premier, having thought he’d done his full duty by naming a new campaign chair, he called an election. The Tories he led were unprepared to fight.
For the first time since 1970, the extensive group of individuals who had coalesced in Ontario around Bill Davis as the blue machine would not be mobilized in a provincial campaign. A number tried to support the effort, for the party’s sake, but were fairly aggressively pushed aside. This was now “Miller’s Ontario,” they were told.
When it came to a televised leaders’ debate, the new premier, relatively unknown to most Ontarians, refused to participate. With weak organization, inability to handle the Catholic school funding imbroglio, and facing an effective Liberal campaign, the PCs were reduced to minority government on May 2. Edged out in popular vote by the Liberals, who got 38 percent to 37 percent for the Tories, the PCs lost eighteen seats yet still managed to emerge with fifty-two members. But the Liberals were close, with forty-eight, and the NDP held the balance of power with twenty-five MPPs.
As the results began emerging, Segal phoned Robertson’s Point to inform the banished blue machine organizer. Norman was sick to his stomach. He couldn’t sleep at all that night.
At Queen’s Park, Miller’s PC members were outvoted on June 18, on a motion stating the Opposition had no confidence in the government, ending more than four unbroken decades of Progressive Conservatives governing Ontario.
Later that same day, a number of blue machinists gathered for drinks at the Park Plaza Hotel’s roof garden bar. Looking west as the sun set for the last time on what Frank’s narcissistic inner circle had promoted as “Miller’s Ontario,” they raised their glasses and bid nostalgic farewell to Ontario’s Tory dynasty.
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Miller lost power, but no new election occurred when Lieutenant Governor John Aird consented to David Peterson’s Liberals forming a government because they had a two-year pledge of support from Bob Rae’s New Democrats.
Eddie Goodman challenged the pact as unconstitutional, but what Tory really wanted another election? The prospect of winning back power as long as Frank Miller headed the party was not realistic. Compounding the dilemma for the PCs was the incredibly shrewd manoeuvre by the two opposition parties. The Liberals now had twenty-four months to implement a program the NDP had agreed to support. This not only broke the Tory grip on power, but broke through a psychological barrier for the majority of Ontarians who had only known Progressive Conservatives governing their province. The people would have two full years to get used to something different.
When the Liberal-NDP alliance expired, Liberals won ninety-five seats in the ensuing provincial election, the NDP nineteen, and the PCs sixteen. When Miller resigned after losing the premiership, Atkins chaired yet another provincial leadership race, this time for Larry Grossman. The peppery Torontian won the convention, but failed to lead the party back in the 1987 general election, unable to budge the diminished Tories from their reassigned bottom position in Ontario’s electoral triangle. The PCs trailed the NDP, and Larry even lost his own Toronto riding, triggering yet further leadership changes.
PC member of the legislature Mike Harris believed he could not get elected leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party at a traditional convention where most voters were constituency delegates. “The big blue machine still has its tentacles into most ridings, through the control of appointments, the running of election campaigns, and other ways,” he said. “That means it also has a lot of control over who becomes a riding’s delegates to a convention, and which candidate they’ll support.”
Raising this spectre of a blue machine bogeyman now vanished, Harris accelerated the democratization of party leadership selection. “Moving from the pressure-cooker atmosphere of a delegated convention to ‘one-member, one-vote’ is what will help me win,” he emphasized. With the revamped leadership selection system that resulted, he became leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, chosen by rank-and-file members in the direct balloting process that was part of a larger democratizing overhaul of the party.
In the spring of 1990, with Harris just elected PC provincial leader, Liberal premier Peterson hoped to catch the Tories off guard, divided, and unprepared. He called a premature Ontario general election for May. Peterson was also seduced by polling results in which he glimpsed an even larger Grit majority than the overwhelming one he already had. Senator Keith Davey, the Liberal’s astute campaign mastermind, tried to persuade Peterson of his folly, pointing out that it was the premier’s personal approval rating that considerably exceeded other Ontario party leaders, not the strength of the Liberal Party when measured against the PCs and NDP. If anything happened to turn voters against the premier himself, cautioned Keith, the bottom could fall out. But even a “Rainmaker” cannot dispel hubris. David glowed with his vision.
Ontario voters found the opportunistic premier lacking common sense. His ratings plummeted as more people decided they’d prefer the province’s first socialist government to his. He was rewarded for his inexplicable gamble and the province’s unnecessary election by an NDP upset victory. The New Democrats, led by Bob Rae, formed a majority government with seventy-four seats to thirty-six for the humiliated Grits.
The Conservatives came in third, again, with twenty members. The PC campaign organizers, after several bumpy rides and bad defeats, had lost their cockiness as critics of the now legendary big blue machine.
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This plight of the Progressive Conservatives in Ontario was a harbinger of more widespread Tory fate.
Another province where the blue machine had held great sway, New Brunswick, birthplace of the Camp-Atkins campaign organization, was no longer controlled by Progressive Conservatives. A stunning result in the October 13, 1987 general election saw the Liberals win every seat in the fifty-eight-member legislative assembly. By September 23, 1991, when the next election took place, New Brunswick’s voters elected forty-six Liberal members, but only three Tories. Regardless of popular support and electoral system distortions, the political reality and public image of the PCs was again that of a party in the wilderness.
Next door in Nova Scotia, two years later, voters ousted the Progressive Conservatives. The Tories won just nine seats as the Liberals took forty. Newfoundland and Labrador’s Progressive Conservative government, elected in 1985, had been replaced by a Liberal government in 1989 and the Grits would go on to win three more elections in 1993, 1996, and 1999. Prince Edward Island’s Progressive Conservatives, in office from 1979 and re-elected in 1982, lost to the Liberals in 1986, in 1989, and again in 1993.
Quebec was not only without Tories, but even the party’s remnant forces in the Union Nationale had dissipated, its federalist bleus making their home with Quebec’s Liberals, the nationalist bleus entering the ranks of the Parti Québeçois or Action démocratique de Québec. Manitoba was undergoing another of its periodic political realignments, with Progressive Conservatives back in power after election wins in 1988, 1990, and 1995, only to be replaced by the New Democrats in 1999 and for a number of elections thereafter. Saskatchewanians elected Progressive Conservative governments in 1982 and 1986, but by 1991 the NDP had taken over, winning three more consecutive majority governments after that. When the New Democrats were supplanted, it was by a coalition of non-socialists calling themselves the Saskatchewan Party.
Alberta remained solid Progressive Conservative through the 1990s, continuing with the majority governments that started with Peter Lougheed’s stunning win in 1971, and the creation of an indigenous Albertan blue machine. But after more than four decades in office, through a dozen consecutive election wins under a succession of rejuvenating leaders, this PC dynasty appeared as tired and disconnected as the Social Credit regime it had earlier replaced. In its final stages, it cycled through a rapid succession of leaders until, in 2015 it was displaced in another stunning upset as the New Democratic Party led by Rachel Notley formed a majority government.
British Columbia, like Quebec and Saskatchewan, was a province where the Conservatives had morphed into other identities, first through a coalition with Liberals, then through a merger with Social Credit, and, with the demise of Social Credit, by means of a reinvention as Liberals yet again. This time, however, it was the Liberal name that identified their unified front in British Columbia, unlike in victorious election campaigns in 1945 and 1959 when the amalgamated centre-right forces had been called Conservative. Certainly there was no provincial PC Party now.
This shift from Progressive Conservatives in the provinces removed the party’s pillars, and the foundation of the Camp-Atkins blue machine. It represented a complete reversal of the building-block strategy Bill Rowe and Dalton Camp had pursued, as federal organizers in the mid-1950s, to win nationally on the underlying structure of Tory strength provincially.
By the early 1990s the consolidated operation known as the big blue machine no longer existed.
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Against this backdrop of sagging PC support in the provinces, and following the retirement of Brian Mulroney as leader, the federal party went into a general election in 1993 under Kim Campbell. The B.C. MP and Mulroney Cabinet minister had won the PC leadership with organizational support from Norman Atkins and Dalton’s son David Camp of Vancouver. Dalton even wrote her convention speech.
When Prime Minister Campbell called the election, the PCs stood 12 percent above the Liberals in the polls, thanks to the temporary uptick following a televised leadership convention, augmented by pride and fascination Canadians felt in having a female prime minister. The Campbell-led PCs, with a distracted leader and a disconcerting campaign, then set a world record.
No other party in any democratic country before had gone from a strong majority in the legislature to only two seats. The Tories lost 154 MPs in a single election. The two elected, Jean Charest and Elsie Wayne, no longer had official party status in the Commons. The calamity for the party extended to the grassroots, where 2,186,000 PC supporters found themselves shortchanged in Commons representation. Jean Charest took over and, as is common for party leaders in the political wilderness, advocated electoral reform.
Within eight years of Brian Mulroney leading the Progressive Conservative Party to the largest win in Canadian history, the national PCs had been carved apart, the party’s nationalist supporters in Quebec reassembled within Lucien Bouchard’s sovereignist Bloc Québeçois, and its supporters west of the Ottawa River who embraced economic liberalism having decamped for the Reform Party tent.
The failure to combine the Mulroney team of organizers successfully with the Camp-Atkins blue machine contributed to the PM’s inability to establish the “Tory dynasty” he’d boasted about at party functions. Having two factions of campaigners in the same party made this potential difficult to realize, an updated replay of the gulf between Dief loyalists and Camp supporters, though its bitterness never that open or widespread.
The estrangement between Brian and Norman not only personified this internal party dilemma, but exacerbated it. When the former prime minister wrote his memoirs, he continued in print what had been his pattern in practice: to denigrate, diminish, and dismiss the contributions of his backroom rival. It was sad, and unnecessary, because Brian Mulroney’s significant accomplishments in Canada’s highest public office had become his true legacy. Only political insiders cared about who got credit for him getting there, or the way his election campaigns had been run. When Mulroney arrived for his book launch at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, the former prime minister said to Paul Curley, anticipating Atkins’s response to his Memoirs, “Your friend is not going to be happy.”
Beyond doubt, the big blue machine was busted. Its structure had been dismantled. Its un-patentable innovations copied by other parties, equalizing the advantages, leaving Canadian politics changed forever.