The Human Face of “Machine” Politics
The Big Blue Machine is about the struggle for political power in Canada during the second half of the twentieth century by those attached to the Progressive Conservative Party, both at the federal level and in many provinces. But, rather than focusing on the politicians whose names and faces are known to the public, this book presents the perspective of individuals in the campaign backrooms.
Political parties and their election campaigns have changed beyond recognition from what one would have found even a few decades ago. Those responsible for this transformation operated in tandem with the advent of television, the emergence of opinion pollsters, and advertising agencies that could shape and manipulate election outcomes. Paralleling these changes came three others: campaign publicity to “brand” the party and emphasize its leader to the exclusion of others; election finance reforms that broke the corrupt link between money and power and replaced it with an entirely new system for campaign funding; and the centralization of control over political operations that diminished local autonomy and reduced individuality. These new approaches abetted the rise of professional campaign organizers. All the while, new sources for public policy replaced traditional party-developed programs. The pace of electioneering accelerated with computers, fax machines, and mobile phones. This overall transformation set the stage for the second revolution in Canadian campaigns that would arrive with the digital age and politics in cyberspace.
In the decades covered by this book, even ordinary events like a party leader’s tour became transformed beyond recognition. John Diefenbaker’s stately election travels aboard a special train morphed into media-focused campaign caravans with chartered airplanes, fully equipped buses, the “Dirty Dozen” shock-troop advance men, and the Tories’ in-house band, Jalopy. New campaign characteristics appeared: televised leaders’ debates; the use of direct mail to solicit campaign funds; and more permissive rules for political commercials that led to “attack ads.” Both the nature and context of these changes cumulatively reinvented public affairs as we now experience them, altering people’s expectations and changing Canada’s political culture.
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The story begins with one man, Dalton Camp, whose career and motivations became absorbed in the unique role of his disciple, Norman Atkins. Out of that team, a legendary campaign organization was born. Their machine was no campaign organization assembled for just a single election or a one-off leadership race, but, rather, it was a juggernaut, one that came closer to being institutionalized — within the Albany Club and the Camp Agency, through the Spades and Rough-Ins, fused within the Tory party — than any political formation in Canadian history. The course of their lives became inextricably meshed with the roller-coaster fortunes of the Progressive Conservative Party itself, to whose cause they devoted themselves. It consumed their best efforts, produced government advertising contracts to sustain them, and required remarkable personal sacrifice.
“No one person was responsible for all that took place during the period of the big blue machine,” emphasized Ross DeGeer, himself a dynamo in the Camp-Atkins campaign organization, “but Norman empowered his team to strive for the best, and our best was punctuated with innovation.”
Ontario’s premier Bill Davis was explicit about the larger nature of the big blue machine. “You have to make clear that Norman was key,” he told me, “but you have to go beyond Norman.”
This legendary Tory campaign organization was not just an Ontario-based operation during the Bill Davis era of the 1970s, although that is when and where the Camp-Atkins apparatus most tellingly broke through the walls of the backrooms to become part of the conscious operation of government itself, and when journalist Claire Hoy hung that “big blue machine” name on it, which is why many think of the entity in those narrower terms of time and place.
The Camp-Atkins organization operated across Canada, emerging in stages, learning from its mistakes, each phase building upon the one before. It arose initially out of hardball New Brunswick politics in the late 1940s, and developed in the national electioneering that took place during the booming 1950s and counter-culture ’60s, whose new style was reflected in the political campaigns in the provinces also. The blue machine really took off with a surge of technical innovations and political psychology introduced and experimented with in PC campaigns throughout the 1970s.
By the mid-1980s, the organization was at its zenith. Looking back, one of its insiders, Brian Armstrong, said the unprecedented Mulroney sweep in 1984 was “pretty much the big blue machine’s last hurrah.” Another, John Laschinger, however, argues that the machine is still operating today, his view no doubt influenced by the fact this former blue machinist continues to run campaigns as a business, the way he’d first learned from Norman Atkins.
Still another contends the operation was always a bit of a fiction. “The big blue machine did not exist, except in people’s minds,” asserted Clare Westcott, who worked at the right hand of Ontario premiers Les Frost and Bill Davis. “It was just a bunch of guys,” he said, trying to burst an illusion. “Can you imagine the mystique of having something like that? It’s like owning the name Coke or Ford.”
Clearly, when something becomes a legend, it exceeds the bounds of reality. Atkins himself knew this. Addressing top organizers assembled in the Albany Club on the eve of the 1984 national election campaign he was chairing for Brian Mulroney, Norman said, “Remember, we have a reputation to live up to.”
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Imprecision about the big blue machine’s real nature was also fostered by the fact its activities were secretive, often to the point of being covert.
Its operatives sometimes signed into obscure hotels under assumed names. The cover identities by which some of these campaign organizers identified themselves — the Eglinton Mafia, the Spades, the Dirty Dozen, or attendees at “the Rough-In” — changed over time, reflecting the shifting roles they were playing in various power struggles. Using such terms to cloak, rather than reveal, what they were up to was a precaution against discovery by both journalists and Liberals, to be sure. But such cover also provided a buffer during the Progressive Conservative Party’s long-running factional warfare between supporters and opponents of Camp’s challenge to John Diefenbaker’s leadership.
Their use of code names — calling Camp “Mother” and Bob Stanfield “Father” when communicating over walkie-talkies at a 1967 leadership convention — resembled the practices of a security detail or spy cell. Private lingo became part of big blue machine’s modus operendi: vague phrases like “research” and “the agency,” the “war room” and “the bunker” meant, to them, quite specific activities and venues.
Adding more fog was the name itself. The term big blue machine first had currency in the early 1940s, when Ontario PC leader George Drew and his chief organizer, A.D. Mckenzie, used it to describe the new Progressive Conservative election force they were marshalling across Ontario. A speech Drew made in Windsor in 1943, using this very term, was reported in dozens of newspapers. From the 1970s onward, after the “big blue machine” label was re-popularized by Toronto Star reporter Hoy, this political shorthand came into wider use with many politicians and journalists, even though few really knew who was in the organization, what it did, or how it operated. Understandably, Wikipedia’s entry for “big blue machine” is a sorry mash-up of confusing disinformation.
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The nature of any political machine is inevitably enriched by legend, its mystique enlarged by tales of patronage-fed campaign organizations controlling elections and directing government operations.
Jimmy Gardiner’s Big Red Machine of the Saskatchewan Liberals had been as effective a political operation as the Prairies ever knew. The Union Nationale political machine of Premier Maurice Duplessis in Quebec was a seamless operation that turned out political results as effectively as Montreal’s packing houses made sausages. When Dalton Camp in New Brunswick spoke of “the awesome power of the Liberal machine” of Premier John McNair in the 1940s, he was acknowledging the legend of an invincible Grit organization that had become a Maritime model for predetermined election results.
Even within a single constituency, this potent “machine” imagery could sometimes attach itself to certain candidates’ partisan squads. At municipal levels, too, such well-oiled operations became renowned. All replicated as best they could the entrenched power networks that ran government and society in colonial times, such as the Château Clique in Lower Canada, the Family Compact in Upper Canada, the Council of Twelve in Nova Scotia, and the Legislative Council members on Vancouver Island.
In twentieth-century Canadian political life, “machine politics” fascinated those aspiring to be players, drew the resentment of vanquished opponents, inspired exposés by journalists, and prompted study by political scientists.
Use of such a term as “big blue machine” to describe the PC’s political operation fostered the impression of a single, powerful, well-defined, entrenched entity, further enhancing its intimidating psychological impact as a campaign juggernaut so good it was virtually unbeatable. This reputation often exceeded reality. A fundraising initiative using Canadian art failed. Party leaders arrived late and without having been briefed for momentous public meetings. Sometimes even its most brilliant campaigns failed, unable to overcome the charisma of an especially attractive opponent, the perverse electoral roulette of Canada’s voting system, or public fatigue with a spent government.
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Dalton Camp started life as a Liberal, which contributed a convert’s zealousness in “fighting Grits” for the rest of his days. Many whom he and Norman Atkins drew into the blue machine had also been Liberal-inclined. Roy McMurtry voted for Liberal Mitchell Sharp in Eglinton in 1963 before working for PC candidate Camp against Sharp in 1965. Paul Curley voted for Pierre Trudeau in 1968 before he worked at senior party levels for PC leader Bob Stanfield in the 1972 election against Trudeau. Tom Kierans, a blue machine insider in Ontario who was a close policy adviser to Bill Davis from the 1970s on, attended the PC leadership convention at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1967 as an “observer” rather than a delegate because he was, at the time, organizing a leadership campaign for his Cabinet-minister father, Liberal Eric Kierans, who within months would seek to replace Lester Pearson as party leader and prime minister. Dozens of blue machinists came from families with Liberal lineages. Many others had been apolitical before being recruited.
Quite apart from these personal migrations, which served to confuse the distinctions that existed between the parties, it was hard even at the best of times to differentiate between Conservatives and Liberals. When Camp was president of the Progressive Conservative Association of Canada in the 1960s, a dinner discussion with a number of caucus members about party ideology and doctrine led to a conclusion that the PCs simply had to have a clearer enunciation of the party’s fundamental principles. Camp excused himself, saying he had a document they might wish to consider. When he returned and handed out copies, the Tory MPs were unanimous in approving the concise statement of support for the monarchy, the rule of law, the primacy of Parliament, the importance of free enterprise as the engine of Canada’s economy, the value of the historic partnership between Canada’s two founding peoples, the dignity of the individual, and respect for civil rights including freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
“Great work, Dalton,” said one, as others nodded in agreement. “That’s exactly nailed it!”
“It’s a direct lift from the constitution of the Liberal Party of Canada,” he replied evenly, looking around the table at the rarely quiet MPs, suddenly silenced.
Conservatives and Liberals embrace the country’s foundational institutions and seek a moderating balance on issues of the day because each wants to maximize electoral support across the country’s diverse regions. As a result, trying to tell the story of Canadian public affairs by looking only at “fundamental principles” of these two parties is futile. In one election covered in this book — the PC come-from-behind 1988 win in a campaign battle over “free trade” — Tories and Grits even swapped each other’s defining, century-old policies.
Instead of dealing much with party platforms and political ideology, this book, instead, concentrates on the three elements that mostly determine the fate of a Canadian party: the character of its leader, the appeal of its specific platform in a particular election, and the strength of its campaign organization. Each is a phenomenon unto itself, but all three interact to produce a singular combined effect. Weakness in one can sometimes be offset by strength in the others, but seldom are electoral triumphs achieved without leader, platform, and campaign organization operating in harmony.
To such elements are added, of course, prevailing economic and social conditions, and Canada’s political culture itself, all blending as specific determinants of a particular election campaign. Sometimes quirks of fate also add unexpected good or bad luck that can propel a dismal effort to unexpected victory, or stall an apparently winning romp somewhere short of the finish line. These surprises of democracy help keep anxious campaign organizers awake nights. Norman Atkins, in particular, was a constant fretter.
As well as side-stepping political philosophy, The Big Blue Machine also leaves aside the campaigns of parties competing against the PCs. The interacting campaigns of different parties significantly determine the outcome of elections, of course. Keith Davey’s Rainmaker memoirs make clear how the disastrous 1984 Liberal campaign under Prime Minister John Turner contributed to victory for Mulroney-led Progressive Conservatives. But because well-rounded accounts of past elections have already been written by others, the focus in this book is instead on how the blue machinists, working behind the scenes, indelibly changed Canadian politics and public affairs through dozens of federal and provincial elections.
Attention to the backrooms does not mean the public side of political life is ignored. Performances by those in office sometimes created issues campaign organizers had to respond to: the Diefenbaker government’s indecision over nuclear weapons; Bob Stanfield’s fateful decision to campaign on price-and-wage controls; Bill Davis’s dramatic cancellation of Toronto’s Spadina expressway “because cities are for people, not cars”; and the Mulroney government’s contentious free trade treaty with the United States.
Finally, the impact of Canada’s electoral system on politics and political campaigns is assuredly considered here. The difference between “historic landslide victories” and “humiliating defeats” was sometimes a shift of only eight or ten percentage points in popular support, as translated through the iron determinism of an electoral system lacking proportionality between how citizens vote and are represented in legislative assemblies. The electoral system’s distorting impact caused backroom strategists to engineer vote-splitting among rivals, and to exploit the vagaries of a two-party electoral system still being used for multi-party elections.
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Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins were at the forefront of those who developed new techniques to benefit from Canada’s imprecise electoral system — in their case for the partisan advantage of the PC Party.
For years, the two men were at the very core of the inner circle of the Progressive Conservative Party, wielding power thanks to all the campaigns they ran, party offices they held, and control at Toronto’s Albany Club. But they were equally at home in the universe of commercial advertising, thanks to their Toronto-based agency with its impressive roster of clients. This nexus placed them in crossover positions, pivotal players with a transformative role in Canadian public life.
With a cadre of other backroom players, such as Malcolm Wickson, Ross DeGeer, and John Thompson, they pioneered new methods for campaigning that included techniques lifted from the American political campaigns of Republicans and Democrats. When applied to Canadian elections, their advances set precedents other parties followed, as soon as they could figure out how.
Tories traditionally looked to Britain for “best practices,” but both Camp and Atkins were openly sympathetic to, and inspired by, American ways, which they found far more relevant to North American society. The same outlook was shared by those recruited to the blue machine, such as Phil Lind and Allan Gregg, who imported the latest fundraising and opinion polling arts from the United States. Their adoptive adeptness between the 1950s and the 1980s changed campaigns, reconfigured the nature of parties and, by extension, transformed public affairs.
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Parties are to election campaigns what an ice surface is to hockey; without the two together, there’s not much of a game.
Although Dalton Camp first skated with the Liberals, he became a free agent and traded himself to the Conservatives, which is how our country’s longest running political formation, dating from the mid-1800s, became intrinsic to this saga. At the time, ironically, the Conservatives’ future was so dark many believed the party had run its course. Its dismal plight and the deep pessimism of the Tories were forces Dalton had to contend with, in the era when this story of his unique campaign organization began to take shape.
Over ensuing decades, Camp worked hard to change the party’s fortunes. Many others joined him in this quest. Despite many operational and personality changes in the organization, one constant imperative energized the blue machine: winning. Camp distinguished three types among the political throng: “gentlemen, players, and politicians.” The individuals he and Atkins hand-picked for campaign positions were players.
The blue machinists bonded into a cohesive force at the Albany Club of Toronto, in private homes and smoky hotel rooms, at relaxing weekend retreats in the countryside, intense elections at urban campaign headquarters, and Atkins’s renowned campaign meetings at the back of a restaurant or in his “war room.” He transformed disparate yet talented individuals into an enthusiastic and unified team that came to treasure winning an election as the biggest prize in the most competitive sport of all. They were, as Tom Kierans observed, “a band of happy warriors who loved what they were doing, who were part of an organization with well-defined roles, and who carried out those roles with remarkable success.”
As the blue machine’s organization kept getting deeper, stronger, and more innovative through the 1960s and 1970s, the enterprise gradually transferred from Camp’s hands into those of his understudy brother-in-law. Brian Armstrong, who’d started as a student volunteer and ended up a Tory éminence grise, described Atkins as “the gold standard” for campaign managers.
There is no shortage of testimonials. Another recruit who became a close friend and political partner of Atkins, Paul Curley, concluded, “He was the best organizer up to that time, and probably since.”
Ross DeGeer said, “Norman was outstanding at putting a campaign together, and developing personal relationships with people across the country was probably his strongest suit.”
Bill Saunderson, who started into politics filling ice buckets in hospitality suites, then helped the blue machine keep track of money, and went on to become an Ontario Cabinet minister, said “Norman and Dalton really democratized Canadian political parties.”
Pollster Allan Gregg, after working in over fifty far-flung campaigns, was unequivocal about those run by Norman: they “were the best because there was no one else like him in Canadian politics.” Atkins, added Gregg, “was the only person who could get the best of the best — be it a strategist, adman, or policy analyst — into the same room and have all of them accept his leadership without question.”
Yet behind Norman’s emergence as Canada’s most durable campaign organizer was his unbreakable connection to his brother-in-law’s tortured evolution. In some respects, Atkins resembled a clone of the older man, who, from first encounter, became his hero. Camp’s complex personality — alternating between brilliant, brazen, and baffling — was a central presence throughout Norman’s own life.
This rare relationship accounted for how Camp remained a luminous presence, even after he withdrew from direct campaign operations and daily operations of his advertising agency for other pursuits. The continuity and cohesiveness displayed in the multi-purpose advertising and campaigning organ-ization that Dalton had first launched in the 1950s were the direct results of Norman’s unshakable embrace of his mentor’s values; he remained deferential to him, even in absentia. Many who became part of the big blue machine through the 1970s and 1980s never saw Camp in action and only knew of him by reputation, with Norman the zealous keeper of his flame.
Across the board, blue machinists were driven by a passion for adapting new technology and innovative techniques to achieve more effective political results, believing their actions important for Canadian democratic politics and for the country itself.
If public service fused with politics was their religion, an election campaign was its most hallowed sacrament.
J. Patrick Boyer
July 1, 2015
Bracebridge, Ontario