1945-1951
IN DECEMBER 1942 THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY SHOOK ITSELF HALF-AWAKE BY choosing John Bracken as national leader. John Diefenbaker, despite his own double disappointment, was satisfied with the party’s apparent change of direction, but regarded Bracken with a respect that fell short of enthusiasm.1 On the single occasion when he invited the leader into his constituency in 1943, Bracken thoughtlessly touched an old nerve by telling the rural audience that farmers did not need lawyers to represent them in parliament.2
Meanwhile, the balance of war was shifting gradually in favour of the Allies, the Canadian Army in Britain was not in combat, and voluntary recruitment was holding up. Mackenzie King, in his diary, allowed himself a bit of comfort about the war effort and the weakness of his domestic opponents. He was pleased that Diefenbaker, “the most bitter in his attacks” in the House, had not been chosen parliamentary leader, and he smugly reviewed the list of his fallen Conservative challengers. “There never was a more complete confounding of the politics of one’s enemies than is exhibited by this debacle of the old Tory party which has tried to cover up its disasters by giving itself a new name. In one round, while they have been talking of my not being a leader, I have succeeded, after defeating Bennett as the leader of the Conservative party, his successor Manion as the next leader, Manion’s successor Meighen as the next leader, and now witnessing the fourth leader … without a seat in the House.”3
The party did not threaten King and his Liberals. J.M. Macdonnell insisted that the Tory “Old Guard” would have to be ousted from control by the creation of a new organization and fundraising group to assist the leader. Others, too, agreed that these changes were essential. In early 1943 Bracken named the vigorous young organizer Richard Bell - who had already assumed the role in practice - as national director; Gordon Graydon became president of a revived Dominion Progressive Conservative Association, replacing the elderly J.R. MacNicol; headquarters staff were hired; a monthly tabloid, Public Opinion, was planned to begin publication in August; and a network of supposedly non-partisan “Bracken clubs” was promoted across the country.4 But these acts of national organization remained hostage to the uncertainties of war, the tactics of the other parties, the whims of the powerful Ontario Conservative Party, and the political talents of the new leader. Within months the effort to reform the party and to place it solidly at the centre of the political spectrum had failed.
Meanwhile, the Ontario Tories were on the rise under George Drew’s leadership. When the fading Ontario Liberal government went to the polls in August 1943, it collapsed before its two rivals. Drew’s highly organized Conservatives won thirty-eight seats, and the CCF was close behind with thirty-four. The Liberals ran third with fifteen seats. The victory gave an immediate boost to federal Conservative morale, but that was soon dispelled when it became clear to Bell that Drew’s organization was seeking to take control of the national party. An initial proposal to displace the national executive in favour of a Toronto committee chaired by the businessman Henry Borden was rejected by Bracken.5 But Bell was convinced that Drew and his corporate associates had longer-term mischief in mind. In a 1944 memorandum on party organization he wrote: “Some of the Drew people are in too much of a hurry to advance the cause of their own leader in federal affairs and have not hesitated to say so at the same time either directly or inferentially damning the present federal leadership. In the opinion of a considerable number of the federal members, the basic trouble is the desire of the Ontario Party to have control of the representation in the House of Commons from Ontario after the next election as a means of controlling a future convention of the Party and determining the future leadership of the party.”6
The immediate concern of Conservative business leaders was to counter what they saw as the dangerous socialist threat now posed by the CCF. For them, that meant a frantic assertion of free enterprise propaganda and a renewed effort to commit the federal Conservative Party safely to a right-wing agenda.
Mackenzie King and the Liberal Party were equally rattled by the socialist challenge. Their response was to move left with the tide of popular opinion, to reassert their claim to the broad middle ground tentatively sought by the Progressive Conservatives at Port Hope and Winnipeg. Cabinet and party, under King’s astute guidance, made their preparations during the fall of 1943 and announced their program in the speech from the throne that began the 1944 session of parliament in January.7
That message established the foundations of national policy for the postwar period. The government committed itself to “a national minimum of social security and human welfare” that would include full employment, price stabilization, family allowances, health insurance, and contributory old age pensions. It promised to introduce the family allowance scheme during the 1944 session. For the prime minister, the postwar program would fulfil the vision laid out twenty-five years before in his book Industry and Humanity.8 Its more immediate sources were the Beveridge Report in the United Kingdom and the Marsh Report in Canada, which had given form to the widespread sentiment that the suffering of the 1930s must never be repeated. Diefenbaker called the program “the most tantalizing bill of fare ever offered to the Canadian people.”9
Family allowances were shrewdly designed as the government’s first venture into postwar welfare. They would mean monthly, direct payments to every child-rearing family in the country; they would catapult the Liberal Party to the left of the political spectrum and undercut the CCF; and they would divide the Tories. Without waiting for his MPs, Bracken pronounced the plan a “political bribe” to be opposed, and he probably had a majority with him when debate on the measure began in caucus. Diefenbaker recalled that “I was the only Member in our caucus, to begin with, not prepared to oppose it. It was demanded by some that I either oppose the measure or leave the Party … After long and stormy arguments over two or three days, all but one Conservative Member supported the bill.”10 In fact, Diefenbaker had a persistent ally in Howard Green throughout the discussion in caucus, while many others were open to persuasion because they recognized the measure’s popularity. Rodney Adamson noted the outcome on July 26, 1944: “Long caucus about family allowances. I take stand against them … Bracken is anti also but bows to Howard Green, Diefenbaker, the Western and Maritime Members. Perhaps this is good strategy. I say I will not vote for measure and will stay away.”11
Diefenbaker and the progressive wing had won the preliminary battle, but the party nevertheless lost the war. When House debate opened on the bill, Diefenbaker led off for the Conservatives with a resounding statement of agreement in principle, aimed both at the public and at his own party.
With the objective provided for in this bill there can be no disagreement; for if I understand it aright it means that … an endeavour will be made to achieve equal opportunity, particularly for those in the lower income brackets, and to give to many who to-day are denied freedom from fear and freedom from want the hope of something better in the future than this world and this country have seen before…
Changes are taking place and tremendous changes are about to take place. We in the parliaments of the empire to-day must recognize that. The state must guarantee and underwrite equal access to security, to education, to nutrition and to health for all. That assurance is inexorable through the awakening of the spiritual being of man everywhere and the recognition of all men of their responsibilities for the welfare of all other men, not only within their own state but beyond its confines. Too often some of us are afraid to approach new horizons because there has been no experience to guide us.12
Diefenbaker found his inspiration in the “reforming zeal” of R.B. Bennett - whose New Deal legislation, he reminded the House, had been dispatched to the courts by his successor, Mackenzie King, and declared largely unconstitutional. So he took the caucus’s agreed line that King should now refer the family allowance bill to the Supreme Court for a constitutional opinion. Failing that, the Conservatives would support the measure. Adamson described Diefenbaker’s address as “his finest speech in the House … it is obvious that he has taken wind out of King’s election sail” by the promise of Conservative approval.13
But Gordon Graydon and Herbert Bruce left a contrasting impression of covert opposition and grudging, tactical acceptance. Bruce made his leader’s claim more specific: the bill was “a bribe of the most brazen character, made chiefly to one province and paid for by the taxes of the rest”; and privately he pointed out that the beneficiaries would be French Canadian “families who have been unwilling to defend their country.” The premier of Ontario, George Drew, made that divisive charge public by challenging the right of Quebec “to dominate the destiny of a divided Canada.”14
Mackenzie King was amused by these voices of a departed age and by the silence of most Conservative members; the most generous thing he could say about Diefenbaker’s legal doubts was that “the raising of a constitutional issue amounts simply to throwing up a sort of smoke-screen.”15 That was a fair reading of the Conservative position. The bill passed second reading by 139 to zero.
Bracken’s failure to enter the House of Commons, or to inspire voters on his national travels, left the caucus more and more dissatisfied. While fundraising was markedly more successful after the Winnipeg convention, it remained the jealous preserve of a small group of Toronto and Montreal businessmen, “a few rich men,” in J.M. Macdonnell’s dismissive phrase.16 The Toronto contingent had given their initial confidence to Bracken, but they were all admirers and confidants of George Drew. Bracken’s selection, in their eyes, was a dubious experiment indulged in out of deference to Arthur Meighen. The whole progressive tilt of Port Hope and Winnipeg was also, for them, a matter of expediency. If Bracken could not quickly transmute it into votes, they were prepared to abandon him and reassert their rigidly free enterprise and Anglo-Canadian instincts. After Drew’s provincial victory he seemed to them, more obviously, the leader-in-waiting - a position confirmed by the overwhelming election of the CCF to power in Saskatchewan in June 1944. In Bracken’s - and Diefenbaker’s - own territory, the Progressive Conservatives lost all their deposits. The electorate was undoubtedly moving left, but it seemed unimpressed by a Conservative Party uncertain or opportunist about its principles.
The opposition was shackled in its wartime role, since that called for constant affirmation of its loyalty to the cause. Diefenbaker told parliament that the House could not fulfil its duties if it acted as “a cockpit of contending factions, each desirous of preparing for the hustings.” Instead, he saw parliament’s primary wartime function as propagandist: “to strengthen the resolution of the people to carry on to the end; to energize our people against the apathy that too often follows military successes.” But he added another that was covertly partisan: “to assure our men and women of the forces that other men, with the necessary equipment, will be available as reinforcements and to see that our manpower is fully mobilized and put to the greatest possible use.”17
On that issue of manpower and reinforcements the Tories appealed to their English-speaking constituency with the claim that they were more loyal, more patriotic, than the government. But it was a chancy thing. The language of conscription and “race” was dangerous - and Mackenzie King was a master of the patriotic game. What was more, the rural Conservative electorate was probably as sensitive about compulsory service as were French-speaking voters. The farms needed labour. As long as voluntary recruitment for overseas held up, the Conservative Party had to focus its criticisms on labour allocation and the call-up for home service: Why was it not fairly and evenly applied across the country? Why did so many conscripts evade service? Why was enforcement so lax?
Beneath this litany of hints there was a hidden ethnic line. What John Diefenbaker called “the inequality of call-up and the inequality of service … ordained by this government” meant that the King government favoured French Canadians, and did so for political gain.18 This kind of complaint was relatively harmless to the government, yet it was meant to sustain an undercurrent of suspicion outside Quebec - for exploitation if and when battlefront losses began to mount.
Until the Normandy invasion, few Conservatives chose openly to revive the call for overseas conscription. But in the summer of 1944, with casualties mounting in Italy and in France, the patriotic issue was not to be resisted. In mid-June the new national chairman of the party, C.P. McTague, called for the dispatch of home service conscripts as overseas reinforcements. The decision, he insisted, was a matter of national honour; the troops had never been needed for home defence but were needed overseas. Bracken endorsed the demand.19 This opening emboldened what Adamson called “the Globe group” (those Conservative MPs like Herbert Bruce and Earl Rowe who were close to the publisher of the Globe and Mail, George McCullagh, and to Drew) to press in caucus for a House motion in favour of overseas conscription. But the MPs baulked. “Caucus,” wrote Adamson, “is 100% against taking this suicidal step. Really a great show and a sock in the eye for the Toronto crowd.”20 Instead, the party produced a thoroughly confusing budget amendment that criticized the home defence army and called for its use on the farms, in industry, or overseas - or all three. Diefenbaker’s long and almost wholly irrelevant speech on the amendment prompted the impish Liberal backbencher Jean François Pouliot to respond: “The hon. member for Lake Centre (Mr. Diefenbaker) appeared to be more illogical than ever. He said he supports the amendment; he spoke against it and apparently he will vote for it. I cannot understand him. If he made a speech of that kind in Saskatchewan, his own province, then I am not surprised that not only has his party been wiped out but all remembrance of it has been wiped out in the last election.”21 Given the variety of shadings on the amendment, Pouliot wondered whether Diefenbaker, or Green, or Rowe, or Bracken, or McTague spoke for the Conservative Party. “They meet each day in caucus,” he taunted, “Why do they not take advantage of it to tune their violins and come into the house with a united front? They go to the right; they go to the left; they look to the right and they jump to the left. That has been the Tory policy since the beginning of this session, in fact since the beginning of the war.”22
The real conscription crisis erupted in October 1944, when the minister of national defence, Colonel J.L. Ralston, returned from Europe to insist, on military advice, that 15,000 home defence troops should be called overseas before the end of the year. King and a majority of his government disagreed, but the cabinet was harshly divided and near breakup. After two weeks of hesitation, King summarily fired Ralston and appointed General A.G.L. McNaughton as minister on a pledge that he would find the necessary reinforcements from the home army through voluntary transfers. But that desperate effort failed, and on November 23 the prime minister forestalled another cabinet collapse by reversing direction and committing 16,000 conscripts to overseas duty. By doing so he saved the unity of his cabinet (only C.G. Power resigned in protest) and his caucus.23
Throughout November, as the recruiting and cabinet crises intensified, the Conservative Party and the English language press mounted a noisy and often vicious campaign for full overseas conscription. The demons of national hatred, so far contained, were loosed again. After November 23 there were anti-conscription riots in Quebec. Power lamented that “I envisaged the prospect of one-third of our population uncooperative, with a deep sense of injury, and the prey to the worst elements amongst them, and worst of all, hating all other Canadians.”24 In English-speaking Canada sentiment seemed to be overwhelmingly in support of conscription, either partial or complete, and the Conservatives sought to ride the wave. The opposition amendment to the government’s motion of confidence asked that all NRMA conscripts (there were more than 100,000) should be “enrolled to serve in any theatre of war,” including the Pacific, where conscription had never featured in the government’s calculations. Without any explicit mention of the French-English divide, Diefenbaker played on the familiar theme that “partial conscription” meant unequal sacrifice that would “endanger the last vestige of unity in this country.” Although it was evident that the Liberal majority would sustain the government in its policy of desperate gradualism, Diefenbaker insisted that “there are hon. members all over the house who will say privately that they believe in everything in the amendment. There is no politics in it.”25
There was politics in it. The Conservative Party had again abandoned Quebec to the Liberals by exploiting English-speaking Protestant prejudices. On the surface the debate was less damaging than in 1917, but that could be put down to the government’s caution (or cynical realism) more than to the opposition’s reaction. The Conservatives carried their condemnations into General McNaughton’s by-election campaign in the Ontario riding of Grey North, where a colourless candidate defeated the minister of defence in early February 1945.26 Bracken campaigned actively, and the victory briefly enhanced his reputation. But the issue was a fading one, as allied victories promised an early end to the war in Europe. That came on May 8.
By this time it seemed clear to Mackenzie King and his party that the election could be fought on postwar issues. On April 12, after consultation with his cabinet, King announced that the general election would take place on June 11, 1945. After a brief interlude in San Francisco to bask in the glory of the founding conference of the United Nations, he returned to Canada in mid-May to open the Liberal campaign. For him this would be an election of “sharpened barbs carefully concealed by platitudes,” emphasizing his own long experience of government and the opposition’s inadequacy.27 The Liberals offered Canadians the attractive prospect of welfare, full employment, national unity, and international cooperation; the Conservatives, they claimed, offered racial division and Tory reaction. On the left, the CCF preached a more progressive message of reform and government activism, warning against a return of destitution under Conservative rule. Mackenzie King’s response to the CCF was to appeal for votes that would count towards a majority, to ensure “strong and stable government in Canada in these very critical years.”28
Conservative national advertising stressed the earnest character of John Bracken, “this Lincolnesque man - who has never known defeat at the polls.”29 Despite the formal platform of the party, which still reflected the progressive tone of the Port Hope conference, Bracken chose initially to conduct a negative campaign against the King government’s hesitations on the conscription issue. King’s policy, he charged, was “one of irresolute and feeble compromise” intended to satisfy a disloyal minority.30 The Conservatives, by contrast, would commit all conscripts to fight in the Japanese war. The party, which managed to nominate only thirty-one candidates in Quebec, had clearly abandoned all hope there, but it squandered support in English-speaking Canada with such bravado. There was no international pressure on Canada to shift its conscript forces to the Pacific, and no obvious target for Canadian military operations. As Canadians turned away from the tensions of war with relief, the Conservative campaign made no sense.
According to his habit, Diefenbaker conducted a highly personal campaign in his constituency of Lake Centre. He defied his party on troops for the Japanese war.31 He campaigned for the construction of a South Saskatchewan River dam, a perennial enticement offered to voters by Jimmy Gardiner at election times and lost in the mists thereafter. John’s brother, Elmer, was the reputed author of one of the Lake Centre slogans in that campaign: “It’ll be a dam site sooner if John is elected.”32 Despite the reassurances of his organizer that “you have nothing to worry about,” Diefenbaker could foresee the real possibility of defeat, and he campaigned at a frantic pace.33
In Ontario the federal campaign was accompanied by a provincial election, and on June 4 the Conservative government of George Drew won a powerful majority. While that gave the national Conservatives a brief tonic, its real effects on the national campaign were obscure. Mackenzie King rationalized the Liberal defeat as a victory for majority government, a check on CCF hopes, and a spur to Quebeckers to reject the dangerous federal Tories in that province. While he expected to lose seats to the Conservatives in their Ontario heartland, he predicted a solid Liberal majority in the country.34 In retrospect, Diefenbaker judged that “Drew, in beating back the CCF threat in Ontario, had exhausted the party’s resources at a time when they were most needed federally.”35 National opinion polls gave the Liberal Party a comfortable lead of 39 percent, to 29 percent for the Conservatives, 17 percent for the CCF, and 5 percent for the nationalist Bloc Populaire. Wide regional variations meant that the figures would not necessarily translate into House of Commons seats.36
The election result was a disappointment to both Liberals and Conservatives. The government’s majority was pared to the margin, with 125 seats, while the Conservatives elected 67, the CCF 28, Social Credit 13, and independents 11. In Quebec, King won 53 out of 65 ridings, but in Ontario his seats fell from 55 to 34, and in the West from 44 to 19. In Ontario the Conservatives were the beneficiaries, with a total of 48 seats - or more than two-thirds of their total membership in the House. In the west, the CCF were the victors - especially in Saskatchewan, where Jimmy Gardiner and John Diefenbaker were isolated survivors in a sea of eighteen socialists. The prime minister lost his seat in Prince Albert, and was elected in a summer by-election for the Ontario constituency of Glengarry.37
Bracken won his own contest in Neepawa, Manitoba, but the great hope that he could deliver the west to the Conservatives was unfulfilled. After 1945 the Conservative caucus was more, not less, dominated by its Ontario contingent, which now included twelve members from Toronto alone. They showed slight desire to give Bracken another chance. Diefenbaker wrote that “Bracken was now labelled a loser. The Liberal argument that Mr. Bracken did not have the knowledge of national affairs so necessary for one occupying the position of Leader was widely disseminated through the press, and was even widely accepted among Conservative party supporters.”38
For three years more, Bracken led the party in the House conscientiously but without inspiration, a drab leader with no clear sense of purpose, increasingly disspirited by the party’s drift. Drew’s Ontario supporters were now aggressively pursuing the succession on his behalf, and, without any broader constituency, Bracken lacked authority to put them down. His resistance was gradually worn away.
Meanwhile, the country entered an era of postwar readjustment and economic growth under Mackenzie King, while Canada established its reputation abroad under the internationalist leadership of Louis St Laurent and his activist aides at External Affairs. The King government, with the support of its enlarged and highly competent wartime civil service, began its planning for peacetime in the midst of war. Its chief objects were to avoid a postwar depression, to provide citizens with national minimum standards of welfare, to preserve tolerable relations between French- and English-speaking Canadians, and to take Canada’s place as a fully independent middle power on the international stage.
The Liberal cabinet was subtly transforming itself from a party government into something more all-embracing and permanent - an administration built on wide national consensus that included the open or tacit support of business and the senior civil service. In the public mind, the prospect of any alternative to a Liberal government grew dim. Certainly, in that atmosphere of postwar complacency at home and new strains abroad, Bracken’s Progressive Conservatives offered no real challenge. If they had a continuing role, it seemed limited to vigilant criticism in the House, meant to keep the governors honest.
Diefenbaker was not an opponent of Bracken’s continuing leadership, but neither was he a fervent advocate. He believed, with undoubted accuracy, that the Conservative Party had been governed too long for its own good as a private club. Like Bracken, he was not a natural ally of the Toronto power-brokers, and he had come to Ottawa with his suspicions of the party’s reactionary core well entrenched. More than that, by habit and instinct he was not a team player. He followed his own course in the House, sometimes in conflict with the caucus. His new colleague Donald Fleming - a peppery Toronto lawyer and former city councillor - soon noticed that Diefenbaker played shamelessly to the press gallery and could not be relied upon for regular and slogging work in committee. He had a reputation in caucus as “a prima donna and a loner” who resented being upstaged, bore mysterious grudges, and had frequent temper tantrums.39 He seemed to trust only those few acolytes who gave him complete and uncritical support. His manner provoked doubt or resentment among other members of caucus, who suspected his radical instincts and pressing ambition, were jealous of his flair for the limelight, or thought him untrustworthy and unpredictable. He sensed and perhaps exaggerated these doubts, but would not change his ways. He knew that he would have to make his way to the leadership he coveted by finding support beyond the traditional centres of power in the party.
Thus Diefenbaker understood and shared Bracken’s wish to create a new party around the old. But he saw also, after 1945, that Bracken himself had failed. Diefenbaker could not participate in Toronto’s covert efforts to displace Bracken, because he knew that George Drew was the favoured successor. But equally, he saw in the succession his own chances too. He knew that Bracken would not last, and he believed that, when the time came, a convention would not necessarily deliver a foregone verdict as it had in 1942. The need to cut into the Liberal consensus by appealing to progressive sentiment in the west and elsewhere would remain, unless, by some miracle, the party could make a breakthrough in Quebec in alliance with the Union Nationale. But that would be a project for the right wing, not for Diefenbaker. By 1946 John Diefenbaker was unchallenged in caucus as the spokesman for progressive causes. With broader contacts, a stronger national reputation, and better organization than in 1942, he thought he might carry off the succession. And if not? Well, most of the time he knew he was in this game for life. He nurtured, and was sustained by, his old sense of destiny.
The lacklustre Conservative caucus was strengthened in 1945 by the addition of some promising new members, including Donald Fleming, the reformist Toronto businessman J.M. Macdonnell, the bright young British Columbia veteran E. Davie Fulton, the veteran officers George Pearkes and Cecil Merritt, and the Calgary oilman A.L. Smith. Fulton and Pearkes were already admirers of Diefenbaker, and he returned their faith with advice and guidance about the ways of the House.40
Diefenbaker was in sympathy with the broad lines of government policy, but he prodded at its weak spots as he sensed them: the maintenance of wartime regulation and secrecy, the inflated central bureaucracy, excessive government spending, and a worrying indifference to the rights of citizens. The issues he chose for emphasis broadened his own reputation as a champion of decency and individual rights as much as they gave benefit to his party.
With the end of the war, the Grand Alliance of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union had rapidly fallen apart in mutual distrust. One element in that collapse involved the defection of the cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa in September 1945, carrying with him information of extensive Soviet spy networks in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The King government handled this unwelcome intelligence like news of some loathsome infection in the family. It sought urgent advice from London and Washington, took unusual steps to prevent any publicity, and prepared for the possibility of quarantined treatment by passing a secret order-in-council under its wartime powers. For five months nothing was publicly known of the affair, and the order-in-council lay dormant. The prime minister cherished hopes that it might fade away entirely, thus avoiding any offence to Soviet feelings. In February 1946, however, news of the defection was leaked to the press in Washington, apparently by frustrated British and American security chiefs who wished to alarm their political bosses about the Soviet challenge.41
Mackenzie King was forced reluctantly to act. A royal commission consisting of two Supreme Court justices, Robert Taschereau and R.L. Kellock, began secret inquiries into Soviet spying under the 1945 order-in-council. On February 15, 1946, fourteen Canadians were detained for secret interrogation, without access to counsel, in a search for evidence that might justify the laying of criminal charges. Prime Minister King confided his political disquiet about these unusual measures to his diary: “I can see where a great cry will be raised, having had a Commission sit in secret, and men and women arrested and detained under an order in council passed really under War Measures powers. I will be held up to the world as the very opposite of a democrat. It is part of the inevitable.”42 King’s fatalism about “the inevitable” reflected a faith even stronger than Diefenbaker’s that his life was under direct management from on high. He saw himself now as God’s chief servant in maintaining freedom against the Soviet hordes.
In March 1946 the commission published three interim reports, leading to arrests and charges under the criminal code and the Official Secrets Act. When the House of Commons reconvened that month, the Gouzenko affair was on everyone’s mind. As King had expected, the case invited Diefenbaker’s indignation, and it formed the theme when he spoke in the throne speech debate on March 21.43 He saw in the case not just the germ of international communism, but a separate disease infecting the Canadian government.
Diefenbaker began with a note of sarcasm that brought interruptions from the Liberal benches: “I have no apologies to offer for the position I intend to take. I have no apology to make for not having received support from the communist party.” The Liberal Party, on the other hand, had received and accepted such support in the 1945 election. An imprudent Liberal remarked that “We are here, though … We are on this side,” to which Diefenbaker responded: “Oh yes. There is the policy; the end justifies the means.”
But this was only mischievous scene-setting. The main charge was that the use of emergency powers to detain and interrogate citizens was a violation of the historic rights of the subject, a violation that reflected the government’s habitual wartime disregard for liberty. It demonstrated the need for a Canadian declaration of rights.
I say, Mr. Speaker - and it is not doctrinaire or a technicality - to say that these orders in council sweep aside Magna Charta, habeas corpus and the bill of rights. Some say the people of Canada are not interested in that. Sir, I do not believe the minds of liberty-loving Canadians, however much they hate communism, have become so apathetic in six years of domination by a state in a period when the political doctrines of regimentation… have been in effect. I believe the time has come for a declaration of liberties to be made by this parliament. Magna Charta is part of our birthright. Habeas corpus, the bill of rights, the petition of right, all are part of our tradition. The United States has its own bill of rights, and I think out of the events of the last few years a responsibility falls upon parliament to assure that Canadians, as well as others in the empire and the people of the United States, should have established by their legislature a bill of rights under which freedom of religion, of speech, of association and of speech [sic], freedom from capricious arrest and freedom under the rule of the law, should be made part and parcel of the law of the country.44
The occasion was telling, and the government was ill at ease in its actions. It could only plead that the overriding needs of security, or reason of state, justified its deeds. A few days later Mackenzie King told the House with “immense relief that the secret order had been revoked.45 Of the eighteen persons eventually tried in Canada, only eight had convictions sustained. In the short run, public opinion supported the government’s actions. But John Diefenbaker - with only a few other members - had found a symbolic issue of conscience and an illustration of the corruptions of power now infecting the King government. The issue was genuine. It was a subject that suited his individualism, his sense of tradition, his sympathy for the voiceless, and his rhetorical genius.
In April and May 1946 he returned to it, in debate on the Canadian Citizenship Act, when Diefenbaker made clear the American inspiration for his views on citizenship and nationality. He noted that the provision of formal Canadian citizenship was supported by the official opposition, but embellished that support with arguments notably his own. The bill, he said, “achieves a lifelong dream of mine” that Canadians should enjoy “a new vista of their responsibilities and privileges as citizens.” He hoped that the bill would help “to encourage and develop in this country mutual trust and mutual tolerance … for Canada’s destiny and Canada’s future can and will never be achieved on the basis of racial prejudice.”46
His objective, beyond the legislation, was to see the creation of “an unhyphenated nation … the prophetic dreams of nationhood, the vision of Macdonald and Cartier, remain as yet to be completed … Canada must develop, now that we achieve this citizenship, unity out of diversity - a diversity based on non-homogeneous peoples of many religions, peoples of clashing economic differences based on distance, and jurisdictional differences as between federal and provincial authorities. The great challenge to our generation is to fuse these clashing differences.” This was the American myth of the melting pot. He quoted his own words of 1944 in praise of the American example. “As I have said before, no one thinks of Mr. Roosevelt as a Dutch-American. No one thinks of General Eisenhower as a German-American. No one thinks of Mayor LaGuardia of New York as an Italian-American. They are great Americans.”47
For Diefenbaker, the citizenship bill inevitably raised two other issues: the need to eliminate records of ethnic origin from the Canadian census, and the need for a Canadian bill of rights as a declaration of traditional British rights in Canada. The logical links might seem tangled, but for Diefenbaker belief in common citizenship, common rights, and national unity was one whole, born of his prairie experience both personal and political. The identification of ethnic origins in the census offended him as a reflection of prejudices he had felt in his own life. A bill of rights would alert Canadians to the dangers of political intrusions on their liberties like those so recently demonstrated - intrusions that might often have a racial or a religious basis. Later in the debate he attacked the government’s efforts to deport Canadians of Japanese origin under a 1945 order-in-council.48
Diefenbaker’s amendment, to provide for a declaration of rights on the certificates of citizenship issued to new Canadians, was rejected by the government. But Paul Martin, in his reply on behalf of the cabinet, showed his prudent respect for the case made by the member for Lake Centre.49 He reminded Diefenbaker that Canada had adopted the British, not the American, system of government. Canada had no organic law, no revolutionary constitution to which a bill of rights could be attached. Instead the country was, in Tennyson’s words,
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent.50
If parliament desired such a change, it should be accomplished “on the basis of a bill by itself, when all aspects could be considered and all the implications noted, a bill which would be the result of mature and careful judgment,” rather than “a subsection of a section which prescribes conditions for the issue of certificates.”51 Martin was a match for Diefenbaker in parliamentary give-and-take, if not quite in populist instinct. Both the Globe and Mail and the Winnipeg Free Press took up Diefenbaker’s claims that Canadian rights were being steadily whittled away, and many members of the House showed interest in the idea of a Canadian bill of rights. A Globe editorial noted that “too few members of the House of Commons have interested themselves in the liberties of their constituents. There has, however, been one outstanding exception among them. He is Mr. John Diefenbaker, the Progressive Conservative member for Lake Centre. Mr. Diefenbaker has not only been a tenacious but a brilliant and rugged guardian of all civil liberties.”52
More than any other MP, Diefenbaker had become a public tribune, focusing and echoing complaints about the government’s disregard for rights. Members of the King cabinet - whether out of troubled conscience or political alertness - were themselves sensitive to the issue. In Quebec, the Union Nationale government of Premier Maurice Duplessis was engaged in an aggressive battle to suppress the Jehovah’s Witnesses, using its own Padlock Law and the Criminal Code in its efforts to uphold the Catholic faith. The Witnesses responded with a national campaign for toleration, and by June 1947 they had accumulated half a million signatures on their petition to parliament for a Canadian bill of rights.53 In Saskatchewan the new CCF government had sponsored passage of a provincial bill of rights, the first to be enacted in Canada.
At the United Nations, wartime atrocities had prompted discussion of an international declaration of rights. In May 1947 the King government, responding to the mood of the times and to Diefenbaker’s nudging, proposed a parliamentary motion to establish a joint committee on human rights and fundamental freedoms. The government thus hoped to put itself on the side of the angels, taking its distance both from Quebec’s intolerance and from its own wartime record. But as Ian Mackenzie said in support of the motion, that did not necessarily mean support for a Canadian bill of rights. “It is well,” he concluded, “that Canada should play her part in drafting and proclaiming to the world an international bill of rights as a guide and a direction post for the freedom-loving peoples of the world. It is less evident that Canada, free Canada, heir to the common law, should tamper with her heritage of liberty by seeking to inscribe in statutes the freedom that is inherently ours.”54
Diefenbaker did not want to tamper. He wanted to repair a damaged heritage - and more than incidentally, to undermine the Liberal government that had initiated or tolerated recent infringements on Canadian liberties. He laid out the case with care and eloquence in a speech that became the touchstone for all his later approaches to a bill of rights.55 He favoured an international declaration of rights; but that, he insisted, “will not be sufficient to establish and assure rights in our country.” To do so would require a specific, Canadian declaration of rights, adopted “either by way of constitutional amendment or by statute.”
Diefenbaker recognized a paradox at the heart of the parliamentary tradition. Canada had inherited the English charters of freedom, but from the Star Chamber to the Gouzenko case those charters had been violated. He could even concede, as he had in his support for wartime emergency powers, that there were occasions when basic rights must be curtailed. But that should be done deliberately, by parliament, not the executive. And citizens should always have access to the courts to prevent abuse.
From the beginning of his campaign, Diefenbaker thus had two objectives: to renew ideals in a solemn declaration and to guarantee the right of appeal against the arbitrary acts of government. His list of abuses was long, and it applied both to federal and to provincial governments. A province had interfered with freedom of religion on the ground that it was a provincial right, yet those affected had no means of protecting that “charter right” by appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The federal government had sought to deport Canadian citizens and had limited economic freedom, detained and questioned persons in secret without access to counsel, and made administrative rulings that could not be challenged in the courts.
Diefenbaker saw remedies both legal and political. At the legal level, he wanted assurance that no laws or orders could apply without the right of appeal. At the political level, “what is needed are civil liberties by declaration of parliament which will guard the individual against the state. It might be argued that another government, another parliament, can revoke a bill of rights passed by parliament. True; but has not history shown that when laws are put upon the statute books, having the support of a vast majority of the people, they stay there?” He offered his own draft declaration of rights for study by the committee.
In addition, Diefenbaker made several specific proposals. The War Measures Act, standing on the statute books since 1914, “constitutes an invitation to any government in the future … to declare an emergency to the detriment of the rights of our people.” It was necessary in wartime, “but in the days of peace, with the challenge that the state is making to the rights of the individual … the act should be repealed.” The presumptions of guilt contained in the Official Secrets Act “which deny an innocent person his full rights of defence” should be removed. The Public Inquiries Act should be amended to deny commissions the power to examine witnesses in secret. Parliament should declare that judges should not sit on commissions of inquiry “dealing with matters in any way of a political nature,” as had occurred in the Hong Kong inquiry of 1942 and the Gouzenko inquiry of 1946. As a public broadcaster, the CBC should no longer possess the power to regulate its own competitors.
The member recognized that his speech left some loose ends. In particular, he had not dealt with the issue of constitutional entrenchment or the possible application of a federal statute to the acts of provincial governments. These were confusing matters, since the BNA Act made no clear or complete allocation of power over rights and freedoms. But he noted that the 1938 Supreme Court judgment in the Alberta Press Case suggested that “every freedom is guaranteed to every Canadian and that when the British North America Act was passed it was never intended that any provincial authority should be allowed to derogate from those freedoms which are the inherent right and heritage of every Canadian and British subject.” A declaratory bill passed by the federal parliament, at the least, would strengthen the hand of the minister of justice in disallowing provincial laws that limited individual freedom.
In his peroration, Diefenbaker linked his concerns with his own personal history, noting that “I speak with feeling on the subject.”
I want to see a bill of rights declare the principles of liberty for all racial origins who come here and have come here because of their passion for liberty and their belief in tolerance. My right hon. friend mentioned that my mother’s grandparents came to Red river with the Selkirk settlers. They came for the same reason that those who came later did so, because of intolerance and the denial of the right of the individual to have recourse to the courts of Scotland. They came to this country, as thousands since have come, because they believed that here they would find justice, righteousness and tolerance without regard to race and creed … Though we may speak different languages, all of us have the same heartfelt concept of liberty. With the trend that is taking place, having regard to the unanimity there is in this country, surely we in this parliament will join together … in a great crusade to assure, not only freedom today to every individual under the law, but freedom to those who will come after us.56
For this western outsider, the issue shrewdly combined principle, personal grievance, and political advantage. The element of advantage could conveniently, perhaps even unconsciously, be cloaked in righteous garb.
Praise for the speech was widespread. A Canadian Press dispatch, taking too easily for granted that the government now intended to sponsor a bill of rights, said that “the clear-thinking, brilliant-debating, realistic” member from Lake Centre was “father of the idea.” “It was a great speech. When the history of the Canadian constitution is written and the passage of the Bill of Rights becomes recognized for the great milestone of freedom that it will constitute, Diefenbaker’s address undoubtedly will be re-read as one of the great speeches by which the cause of human liberty has been advanced in the Canadian Parliament.”57 Elmer wrote to his brother that “the newspaper accounts are more than laudatory … You have carved yourself a niche in history. It stands out as a milestone in Canadian history and is the Magna Carta of Canada.”58
But once in committee, Diefenbaker’s initiative languished. The government had diverted the pressure and had no intention of bringing forward a bill. Diefenbaker wrote to Glen How, the lawyer for the Jehovah’s Witnesses who had organized the mass petition, that “the Government is trying to ditch the whole question of civil rights but I am glad that we got as far as we did.” To another correspondent he wrote: “As far as the Bill of Rights is concerned there is no possibility of it being enacted so long as the present Government is in power.”59 As he had foreseen, the committee recommended against either a constitutional amendment or a parliamentary statute.60 Diefenbaker continued to advocate a bill over the next decade, while a growing body of academics, legal scholars, and trade unionists echoed his concerns.61 In 1950 a Senate committee considered the issue again, noting that an entrenched bill of rights would require prior agreement with the provinces on an amending process and that parliament should avoid any unilateral effort to invade provincial jurisdiction. Instead, the committee recommended a Declaration of Human Rights applying only to federal legislation.62 No action followed.
DESPITE THE EVIDENCE THAT WARTIME RECOVERY AND THE POSTWAR BOOM HAD been stimulated by government policy, John Diefenbaker remained a fiscal conservative unaffected by any scent of Keynesian economics. With the return of peace, he favoured tax cuts and strict reductions in the national budget. The issue seemed straightforward and politically attractive, and he pressed it hard. “I believe this,” he told the House in July 1946, “that a Trojan horse has found its way into the camp of the people of Canada, it consists of a desire to overexpend and a refusal to control, regardless of the demands in all parts of this country for curtailment. Over and over again the attitude has been, spend, spend, spend!…The government has the billion dollar mentality.”63 As illustration of “the philosophy of this government,” Diefenbaker recalled a remark of the minister of reconstruction, C.D. Howe, in 1945: “I dare say my hon. friend could cut a million dollars from this amount; but a million dollars from the war appropriation bill would not be a very important matter.” Diefenbaker gloated: “That is the philosophy; that is the psychology.”64 Thus was born a recurring Conservative taunt, later simplified to the question “What’s a million?” - a taunt aimed more and more specifically at Howe, whose autocratic style laid him open to such barbs. Diefenbaker genuinely admired Howe’s magnificent efforts as “the genius of Canada’s war production,” but found him an irresistible target because of his impatience with opponents in the House. For Diefenbaker, Howe was a useful symbol of Liberal excess and Liberal hubris.65 In fact, Howe was sceptical of central planning and quickly restored management of the postwar economy to the hands of private enterprise. In fixing on an issue of style, Diefenbaker preferred to miss the substance, with which he had no argument.
For Jimmy Gardiner, the perennial Liberal minister of agriculture and western party boss, Diefenbaker was a troublesome gadfly. His presence in the House offered daily proof that Gardiner’s skill in limiting the Saskatchewan opposition was imperfect. And Diefenbaker was not even the main challenger in the province. Liberal weakness on the prairies had been driven home by the party’s crushing defeat at the hands of the CCF in the provincial election of June 1944. In 1945, when Gardiner was in charge of national organization for the party, the Liberals suffered another huge setback in Saskatchewan. They lost ten seats while the CCF gained thirteen.66 In Lake Centre, the Conservative tribune held on against the tide, increasing his majority from 280 in 1940 to 1009 in 1945.67
Gardiner was determined to erase those political embarrassments, and he focused part of his efforts on the redistribution of parliamentary seats and the redefinition of constituency boundaries. When the redistribution bill of 1947 emerged from cabinet and committee, Diefenbaker’s Lake Centre seat, among several Tory ridings, was somewhat mangled.68 Diefenbaker complained that “to Lake Centre has been added a voting strength of 4,900, of whom only 286 were Progressive Conservatives in the last elections.” In particular, he noted that sixteen townships containing a substantial CCF majority had been sliced from the minister of agriculture’s constituency and added to Lake Centre.69
Diefenbaker rallied the Conservative caucus and the party leader to his defence, but in fact his case was disingenuous. Diefenbaker himself had been a member of the Saskatchewan subcommittee that had approved the boundaries. As its chairman, the Liberal MP Walter Tucker, told the House, the subcommittee had conceded most of Diefenbaker’s requests and he had signed a unanimous report. Diefenbaker, he said, had been exclusively preoccupied with his own riding, and the subcommittee “did, I am a little ashamed to say, more or less gerrymander things in favor of the hon. member for Lake Centre. But we did that knowing he was the only Conservative member in Saskatchewan, and he kept saying that he could not get elected unless we did something.” 70
Diefenbaker blustered at these revelations. He insisted that the boundaries remained gerrymandered against him, and referred contemptuously to Tucker as “the Minister of Agriculture’s waterboy in Saskatchewan” who “repeatedly found himself in a position in which he had to do what he did not desire to do, but was ordered to do it by his dictator in the province.”71
The CCF member of the subcommittee commented drolly that the Liberals, with only two seats to save in the province, had chosen sensibly to protect the minister at the expense of the Conservative next door - just as the Conservatives would have done if they had been in power. But he agreed with Tucker that the subcommittee’s emendations had partly restored the balance.72 Diefenbaker emerged from the debate looking less than candid. Later in the day he went to Tucker’s office - at Edna’s insistence and in her company - to apologize for his personal comments.73 In public, however, he held to his story of a blatant gerrymander. Gardiner, wrote Diefenbaker in his memoirs, “had done everything that the mind of a machine politician could envisage, short of destroying my constituency altogether.”74 The episode deepened doubts in the Conservative caucus about the trustworthiness of the member for Lake Centre.
By 1948 there were no big issues in Canadian politics. In foreign policy, as the dangers of the Cold War deepened, there was virtual consensus that the country had no choice but to shelter under American protection while playing helpful mediator at the United Nations when it could. Domestically, after an exchange crisis in 1947, there was spreading prosperity and a diffuse spirit of faith in an unlimited future. The country was in the hands of a safe and unadventurous team. John Diefenbaker continued to build his singular reputation as a free-swinging critic, populist free enterpriser, and defender of human rights, travelling the country on an endless circuit of speechmaking. But his party was in the doldrums. There seemed no central issue around which to shape a challenge to Liberal dominance.
Early in the year, the elderly and failing Mackenzie King announced his intention to retire, and in August the Liberal Party chose his preferred successor, Louis St Laurent, as its new leader. Just weeks before that convention, John Bracken was persuaded to resign his leadership, and a Conservative convention was called for October. Those who successfully belled the cat (including Ray Milner and J.M. Macdonnell, now the national president of the party) did so only after they had been assured that George Drew would seek the national leadership. After a third provincial victory in Ontario in June, his record of success in the heartland dazzled the federal party managers. They dreamed even of a breakthrough to French-speaking voters, since Drew had won six French language ridings in eastern Ontario.75
In June 1948 Diefenbaker went south to Philadelphia to observe the Republican Party’s nominating convention, and then to Prince Albert to keep his hand in at the law office. He had no warning of Bracken’s imminent resignation, writing sceptically to David Walker on July 13 of a Winnipeg editor’s claim that efforts were under way to replace Bracken with “an Ontario man.” Diefenbaker invited news: “If you hear anything at any time that might be of interest won’t you sit down and drop me a line as I find myself entirely cut off from everything of a political nature so long as I am in Prince Albert.”76
Four days later Bracken’s resignation was announced, and by the end of July the national executive had settled on a convention in Ottawa in two months’ time. Diefenbaker had already made his decision to run and he threw himself at once into a busy summer campaign. In what was still a well-contained party affair, however, he felt no need to make a public declaration of his candidacy for several weeks. David Walker took charge of the national campaign, Bill Brunt sought Ontario delegates, and Jack Anderson managed the campaign in Saskatchewan. Diefenbaker himself conducted a large, scatter-shot correspondence while dashing to speaking engagements in six provinces.
Initially he wrote to his friend Mickey O’Brien, an advertising executive in Vancouver, to suggest a spontaneous campaign of letters to the press in his favour. That evolved, under Walker’s guidance, into an independent advertisement for Diefenbaker. He told Walker that “I will know nothing about that officially but would like to look it over, as I told you, before it goes out.”77 The ad appeared in Saskatoon and Winnipeg with local signatures in late August, and Diefenbaker commented: “The effect of the grass roots movement has been tremendous. All of Winnipeg was talking about it when it came out … I went down to the Star Phoenix today and there too one after the other of the press men spoke of it as being one of the most spontaneous movements ever started. If other cities and towns will follow that lead it will mean a great deal.”78
In August and September Diefenbaker spoke or met delegates in Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Halifax, Saint John, and Montreal. He was confident about solid delegate support in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, with some in British Columbia, and wrote that “the situation in Ontario is unbelievably good and I haven’t changed my view about getting 40% of that province.”79 But those prospects were offset in Alberta, Quebec, and New Brunswick, where delegates were unreceptive.80 And he was worried by the number of delegates-at-large to be chosen by provincial party organizations. “These need not be Conservatives nor reside in the constituency for which they are allotted. I do not have to go any further than that to indicate how this may work out.”81
Like Diefenbaker, George Drew held back from any formal announcement of his candidacy while his organizers rounded up commitments from delegates, the two shadow campaigns feeding rumours of uncertainty, dispute, or weakness in each others’ camps. Both sides speculated about overweening ambition in the other candidate. One of Drew’s men in Calgary wrote that “we all have our weaknesses and Diefenbaker’s is too much personal ambition. In my opinion, he would be much wiser, and in the end much stronger, if he did not contest the leadership.”82 Walker commented that Drew “has dreamed of being the Prime Minister of Canada for thirty years and he is waiting for public demand to increase. He does not wish to appear to be preaching for a call. People feel he is so ambitious that even at the last moment an enthusiastic demonstration would swing him into the arena.”83 These were still times of sham gentility, when an early declaration of intent looked unseemly.
The autumn of 1948 was a time of anxiety and fear of war in Europe and North America, as the democracies of the west confronted an abrasive Soviet Union. For several months the Soviets had blockaded rail and highway traffic from the western zones of occupation in Germany to West Berlin, while Britain and the United States mounted a vast airlift to supply the residents with food and fuel. In Washington, planning was under way for a North Atlantic treaty of mutual guarantee, which would offer its European members the assurance of American military support in the event of war. The spy scare of 1946 was still a fresh memory. A wave of anticommunist sentiment, sometimes amounting to panic, had swept the United States and Canada since the spring. In this atmosphere, politicians could not avoid declaring their loyalties. The easy temptation was to demonize the entire political left, to link democratic socialism and trade unionism with communism and subversion, even to call for a ban on the Communist Party.
Diefenbaker’s senses were acutely tuned to the moods of the moment and he was bound to enter the anticommunist debate. In his preconvention speeches he made the subject his central theme. Diefenbaker shared the dominant anticommunist prejudices, but gave them his own populist twist. In a speech to Toronto Rotarians on September 10 he called for a campaign to educate Canadians against the enemies of free enterprise. On one side these were the communists, socialists, and central planners “promising as they do freedom from work, taxes and responsibility.” Their dreams, he said, were both empty and incompatible with individual liberty. He commended labour leaders for purging the unions of communists, and suggested vaguely that “real teeth should be put in the law, in place of the false teeth which permit Communists to operate almost with impunity.” But there were enemies on the other side, too. Diefenbaker warned against the sins of big companies, “the unfair business practices of the few,” which “if not eliminated, will destroy free business enterprise for the many.”84 He knew that the Rotarian audience of small businessmen and professionals matched his most likely supporters at the coming party convention.
The Liberal Toronto Star - hardly a neutral observer - entered the Conservative fray by suggesting that “the big money boys” had arranged for John Bracken’s retirement in order to promote George Drew, “a leader they can depend upon,” to the leadership.85 The Globe and Mail responded angrily on September 14 that the Star’s “anti-Drew complex” had now spread to the entire Liberal press in Canada. It was suggesting not only that Drew was the candidate of the “financial moguls,” but also that he was disliked in the Maritimes, Quebec, and the West. On the contrary, the Globe insisted that “there are several obvious and excellent reasons why Mr. Drew should be considered a suitable man for the national leadership. He is the only Progressive Conservative Premier now in office. He has won three general elections in Ontario, the most populous province. He has given Ontario sound and progressive administration.”86 The Star’s caustic reply was that the federal party leadership was “what he has been after all along, and nobody who has watched him flitting hither and thither for years, making speeches on national and international issues to the neglect of Ontario issues, can have thought anything else.”87
Diefenbaker was the first to declare his candidacy on September 17. “It is because,” he said, “I believe I have something to contribute to Canada in a Crusade to mobilize Canadians everywhere for Canada.”88 He announced a seven-point program of internationalism, “an end to the pampering of those who indulge in Communist subversive activities,” the restoration of parliamentary authority, the protection of provincial legislative powers, the promotion of free enterprise, the preservation of liberty under a national bill of rights, and generally fair and just treatment for all Canadians.
He was asked whether he would defeat George Drew. “ ‘Of course I will,’ he replied, and then with a smile, he added: ‘I mean that seriously, although I would not have said it two weeks ago.’ ”89 Diefenbaker relished the game. His Commons secretary RJ. Gratrix noted earlier, “I have never seen the Chief more optimistic and enthusiastic.” To his mother, Diefenbaker wrote: “I cannot hope to win but it’s a good fight. I had a press conference today and told them I would defeat Drew. That’s cheek in his view.”90
In Toronto, Diefenbaker’s campaign chairman, David Walker, predicted “a sweeping victory at Ottawa” on the basis of two special advantages: Diefenbaker was a House of Commons man who had mass appeal. The contrast with Drew was unmistakable, though unspoken.
His forte is the House of Commons. Being in the House of Commons and having proved himself a great leader, why shouldn’t he be officially confirmed in his position and given the leadership we have been looking for since Bennett dropped out in 1937?
The Conservative party has made one mistake after another in our choice of leaders. Now we have a man in the House who has earned his spurs, and we must not lose this final opportunity…
Out West … they fear if Diefenbaker doesn’t get the leadership, the Conservative party will be considered as a central-Canadian bloc…
The genuine wave of enthusiasm which has swept Canada seems to me to be a grass-roots movement … Diefenbaker has gained the confidence and affection of the man on the street, the man on the back concessions, and labor considers him their friend.91
Walker showed the talents of a natural pitchman. Delegates from the west, he said, would favour Diefenbaker by a majority. In Quebec, he had been “literally inundated with offers of help and promises of support at the convention from French-speaking delegates.” The Maritimes were “very enthusiastic,” and in Ontario Diefenbaker would have “a good majority” of the constituency delegates. Walker was uncertain about the Ontario delegates-at-large, to be appointed by the party organization.92
Three days after Diefenbaker’s declaration, George Drew announced his candidacy, and a few days later Donald Fleming did so too. The press assumed that Drew would carry the convention with the overwhelming support of Ontario and Quebec delegates, but Fleming’s entry brought speculation about his ability, as the only bilingual candidate, to cut into Drew’s Quebec support.93
While the Globe and Mail led the press campaign for Drew, the Toronto Star reminded its readers in two editorials on the eve of the leadership convention that the Ontario premier had condemned family allowances in 1944 as a bribe to Quebeckers who would not fight in the war.94 On its front pages, the Star gave Diefenbaker flattering treatment. “Diefenbaker, 2-1 Said the Choice of Average Man,” reported Robert Taylor, citing the evidence of a man-in-the-street poll conducted in “politics-wise Ottawa” by “an ardent supporter of Mr. Diefenbaker.” The article did not add, as it might have, that the pollster was one of the Diefenbaker organizers whose names had been omitted from the delegates-at-large list.95 From the parliamentary press gallery, the Star reported that gallery members predicted (27-4) that Drew would defeat Diefenbaker for the leadership, but favored Diefenbaker (18-9) when asked, “Who would be best for the party?”96
The candidate himself received similar unsolicited signals that his leadership would find popular support beyond the party. From Victoria, the crusading feminist Nellie McClung wrote: “If the friendly good wishes of a hard shell Mackenzie King Liberal can bring any help to you - you certainly have mine - I have admired your courage, and clear thinking, for a long time and hope you will be the new leader. You are young, modest, straightforward, and have an open mind. So we hope you’ll win. My kindest wishes to Mrs. Diefenbaker.”97 From Kingston, the historian A.R.M. Lower wrote:
Just a line to say that I hope you come out on top in the Conserv. leadership. Altho’ I am not of your political faith, I don’t think we differ much on essentials.
If we must have Tories, they will be relatively immunized under your leadership. But beware of Toronto, my dear sir.98
On September 30 the convention opened at the Ottawa Coliseum, the drab hockey rink where the Liberal Party had met to choose a leader in the previous month. The Liberal meeting, said J.B. McGeachy of the Globe and Mail, had been a polite one guided by a “sanctified hierarchy.” But this occasion was raucous, “immeasurably less polite, less formal and more like the convulsion of nature which a political meeting under a democracy ought to resemble.” There was talk of a party machine, he wrote, but no one could say who ran it, and the delegates were “a fractious and rebellious lot.” George Drew, looking “rather like a swan in a duck pond (as he must inevitably do at all political meetings, not to his own great advantage),” was acting affable but “decidedly restrained.” His publicity seemed to consist entirely of reprinted press articles.
The Diefenbaker campaign - the word is quite in order here - has a much less improvised air. There are Diefenbaker headquarters right off the foyer of the Chateau Laurier - an enormous, rather cheerless room in which comely young women hand out Diefenbaker leaflets. These certainly do present the Saskatchewan crusader as the able and attractive figure he is, and they leave nothing out. One of them deals neatly with the silly suggestion that his name is a handicap. “His unusual name,” it says, “like that of Eisenhower and Roosevelt, is an asset.” This leaflet names nineteen points for Mr. Diefenbaker, rather reminding one of Clemenceau’s remark, when he heard of Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen, that the Almighty had been content with ten. But the Diefenbaker drive is a real grass roots movement, and the consensus is that he will make an excellent run.99
Frank Swanson of the Ottawa Citizen also noticed the double contrast: between staid Liberals and lively Tories, and between the Diefenbaker and the Drew campaigns. “At the Liberal meeting, there was no open solicitation for votes on the scale being used by the Conservatives. It looked more like a U.S. national political convention today with leadership buttons and ribbons on nearly every lapel, campaign signs around the outside of the Coliseum and a constant undercurrent of back-room leadership chatter in evidence everywhere.”100 The Diefenbaker organizers had made “the smartest move of the convention” the previous evening at the Château Laurier by holding “an impromptu campaign meeting in one of the large convention halls. It attracted a capacity audience, many members of which were wearing Drew and Fleming buttons.” Swanson reported the claim of Diefenbaker supporters that votes were moving to him as a result, and concluded that the race had tightened.
While the press saw inspired planning in the Diefenbaker campaign, Walker insisted just the opposite. A campaign had indeed been organized, he said, but when Diefenbaker arrived, “he cancelled the events which included a reception for 2,000 persons, use of a sound truck to promote his candidacy and slogans and banners. Mr. Diefenbaker said he would not stand for that. He said that if people wanted to vote for him they would have to do so on his own personal ability. He said he wouldn’t buy his votes.” The Bay Street lawyer told reporters that one of the slogans prepared for display would read “Dief: The Man from Main Street - Not Bay Street”; but Diefenbaker had vetoed it. He preferred supporters “because they liked and admired him and not because of sectional or other reasons.”101
The convention opened with a tub-thumping keynote speech from the Ottawa Journal’s Grattan O’Leary, pouring his Irish scorn on the bloodless party of Mackenzie King. John Bracken followed with his valediction, calling on Conservatives to avoid the extremes of communism on the left and an exclusive commitment to business on the right. Instead, he urged, “this party can follow the straight path to reasoned progress and become what it has never fully succeeded in becoming in this century - the crusading party of the common man in every walk of life.”102 That sounded more like support for John Diefenbaker than for George Drew; but Bracken, by now, was discarded and uninfluential.
Nominations and speeches by the candidates were scheduled for the second night of the convention, after a full day of lobbying for votes. When Drew - apparently uninvited - entered a caucus meeting of Quebec delegates during the day, the rumour was spread by “the Diefenbaker forces” that he had been booed; but Drew’s spokesmen were quick to advertise their denials, and by evening the incident seemed to result in a hardening of Drew’s wide support among Quebec delegates.103
Old murmurings about Diefenbaker’s name and ancestry made the rounds among convention delegates, and on nomination day the Ottawa Citizen devoted an editorial to the subject. “It is an unhappy commentary … on the outlook of Canadians generally,” said the Citizen, “that as an aspirant for his party’s leadership Mr. John Diefenbaker has felt impelled to deny that he is of German origin. As it happens, Mr. Diefenbaker is of Dutch descent, and a fourth generation Canadian at that.”104
Each of the three candidates took care to have one English-speaking and one French-speaking nominator; Diefenbaker’s seconder, Roger Roberge, drew attention in his speech to the candidate’s reputation as a “great champion of minority rights” who would protect Quebec’s language and religion despite his inability to speak French. Diefenbaker himself, in a twenty-minute speech, appeared typically “lean and earnest … occasionally wagging an admonitory finger.”105 He called for “a crusade to arouse our people to an eagerness to become the servants of Canada”; condemned “the pagan and diabolical advance of Communism” without favouring a ban on the Communist Party;106 and in one breathless sentence told the convention what kind of party he thought the people of Canada desired:
Canadians are asking for a party that will honestly try to end class warfare and hatred; that will regulate injustice and exploitation in enterprise while retaining an expanding free initiative; that will accept social security as a means not an end and will now launch a social security contributory plan while continuing to provide adequately for the aged and afflicted; that will arouse the creative and productive capacity of Canada by lifting the horizons of opportunity; that will push outward the frontiers of enterprise; that will assure the many young men and women in this country (who look with suspicion on us) that only under responsible free initiative is there opportunity to rise to the top however humble one’s origins; that will protect our people against unfairness.107
Diefenbaker’s speech seemed slightly strained, perhaps the result of campaigning so hard against the odds. By contrast, Drew conveyed “an impression of smoothness and power with still some to spare.”108
The last-minute contest for delegates spurred Diefenbaker’s hopes, but the result was crushing. Drew swept to victory on the first ballot, with 827 of 1242 votes, while Diefenbaker managed only 311, centred in the west and Ontario. Donald Fleming followed at a distance with 104.109 Dick Sanburn commented in the Ottawa Citizen that the convention had bowed “to unseen but crushing pressure from above, and the Man from Main Street who was going to vote for Diefenbaker switched his ballot to Drew.” Delegates played safe in the end; but Sanburn was convinced that the most popular candidate had lost. “No man, probably ever before in Canadian political history, had such a wealth of spontaneous loyalty and fierce support as John Diefenbaker. You could see it, you could hear it, and almost feel it among the hundreds of delegates. And non-delegates all across the nation were talking the same way.”110 Sanburn added that, “warranted or not,” many Conservatives believed that Drew was the man “with Montreal and Toronto financial interests behind him.” “One western Conservative told this writer that it would be a long, colossal task for Mr. Drew to break down that suspicion, whether it was true or not. And he feared the taunts and jibes the Liberals will fling.”111 The party, he concluded, had regained its pre-Bracken reputation.
John Diefenbaker was wounded again. And he suffered what looked like personal insult when he visited Drew’s suite in the Château Laurier that evening to offer congratulations. “I walked into that gathering,” he recalled a quarter century later, “and it was as if an animal not customarily admitted to homes had suddenly entered the place.”112 He left Ottawa the next day for Prince Albert.
Messages of support in defeat began to pour in. Diefenbaker’s friendly antagonist across the aisle of the House, Paul Martin, the minister of national health and welfare, wrote that he had deserved the leadership. “You, John, could have been the leader … You had a great body of supporters among the delegates but unfortunately there seemed to be adverse considerations which I can only suspect. I do know that the newspaper men were fully behind you and they are real friends to have.”113 One of many delegates who campaigned for Diefenbaker, Bill Archer, wrote from Montreal:
John, the leader is not always the best man, that is very important to note. The qualities desired in leadership are not necessarily those which make a man. You have such a depth of sincerity, such a brilliant mind, such an independence of spirit, that these very virtues are such as to take from you the other requisites of leadership…
Out of all this John, I hope you will realize that there is so much to be done - and so much that only you can do! George can’t win the next or any election without you by his side, fighting as valiantly, inwardly and outwardly, as though your positions were reversed…
John, don’t be despondent, be of good cheer, rest and relax for a while … remember there are many who labour without reward of any kind. It is more difficult, but then were you ever one to set aside a task because it was too difficult? Not from my knowledge of you!114
Most poignant of all were two letters from Davie Fulton in Kamloops, one handwritten to “Johnny,” the other formal and “more abstract.” The handwritten note said:
I should like briefly to try to say how my own personal feelings are.
It’s hard to express them adequately. My admiration & affection for you and for your conduct are quite unbounded. I know you have suffered a tremendous blow, and am heartsick - and believe me, I am hurt deeply for you. Under the circumstances, to write and ask you in a cool and dispassionate manner to continue your work just as though you hadn’t suffered a deep personal injury is difficult and may seem a little unreal.
But that is what I’m doing, because I believe it’s the thing you should do. I also believe it’s the thing that will make you happiest in the long run (I hope I don’t transgress). I know it will be the salvation of the Party, and, I believe, of the country. It would be a shame if your contribution were lost now.
I said before, however, you don’t owe the Party a thing: the obligation is all the other way. That’s why you can continue to do so much for it, and for the country. But you are, therefore, entitled to the most definite assurance that your position will be that of first lieutenant - any cabinet position you want, and that the new leader wants you and wants you to fill that position … I think he is a sufficiently big man, & sufficiently realistic, to take that position himself & make the offer. The genuine co-operation of the two of you will carry us over every difficulty…
My regards to your wonderful wife & my friend Edna.
Love from Pat too!
How’s about coming out for some shooting?115
The second letter insisted that “the vote does not reflect your Party’s feelings toward you,” and repeated Fulton’s urgings that Diefenbaker should take his place beside George Drew in order to make possible a “march forward across the whole breadth of the Dominion with a united party and people behind him. Without this I fear there is again the danger of sectionalism … I know that the whole nation feels the same way and I am confident that I speak for all your friends, both in and out of the House of Commons.”116
Diefenbaker’s campaign manager in Manitoba, G.S. Thorvaldson, found solace in the thought that “the leadership contest was a grand fight … there is general agreement on this point - that the convention would have been as dull as ditch water if a few of us had not created a contest between Drew and Diefenbaker … It is, of course, easy for us to say now that we are complete amateurs in a show of this kind. On the other hand it is well to recollect that we had against us the whole power of the Ontario political machine as well as the power of the Duplessis machine.”117
Diefenbaker nursed his wounds in private. He told Archer that he was not discouraged, and wrote to Arthur Lower that “things turned out much as I had expected but I have nothing to regret for having been a candidate for the leadership.”118 A letter to his old friend and constituency manager Jack Anderson hinted more openly at his resentments: “If the vote had taken place on the night of the speeches the vote that I received would have been very much larger than it was but during the night the pressure was applied and nothing could hold back the forces during the night. I reduced the number that I would have received 225 over night and the number I estimated on the day of the vote was 375. I wrote that number down so it is not after thought.”119
Similar suggestions about Diefenbaker’s “unexpectedly small” vote appeared in prairie newspapers, and on October 8 the Globe and Mail responded in an editorial titled “The One Sour Note.” The Globe suggested that “in all probability he would have obtained more votes had it not been for the inept and discreditable tactics by which his campaign manager, Mr. David Walker, sought to further his cause.”
While Mr. Diefenbaker at one point dissociated himself from the tactics, Mr. Walker persisted in them right down to the day of the vote. Workers acting under his generalship not only circulated rumours and innuendoes which could have caused deep personal acrimony, they adopted and gave currency to the malicious reports and disreputable slogans manufactured by hostile Liberal journalists in their campaign to discredit Mr. Drew. As events were to show, this was a great disservice to their candidate and to the party as a whole.
Delegates who came to the convention intent on getting the best possible leader for the party, according to their personal appraisal of the men, naturally viewed with suspicion the cloud of disparaging rumours circulated by Mr. Walker and his associates. They could not be expected to realize that it was generated, not by the candidate, but by partisans who were as politically ambitious as they were irresponsible and immature. But now that the facts have emerged, and responsibility for the only sour note clearly established, the men who produced it should be well marked and given a wide berth in future. They have nothing to contribute which is of value to the party.120
For John Diefenbaker those were fighting words. He replied on October 15 that he accepted his defeat “with equanimity and with malice to none,” because his aim was to assure the unity of the party under its new leader. But he could not ignore the unfair references in the editorial to David Walker “and associates.”
I know of nothing that Mr. Walker and “his associates” did that was not done in a spirit of fair and honorable competition and for that reason any suggestion that I at any time disassociated myself from him or them in what he or they did has no foundation.
…I am shocked that he should be singled out by you for exile from his party. Your proposal that the “associates” of Mr. Walker be purged from the party is startling for it places all who worked in my support under an unsupported suspicion of wrong-doing.
While fully realizing that unity above everything else is necessary if victory is to crown the magnificent work done by the convention any unjustified criticism of my friends and supporters at any time and in particular when such criticism endangers that unity will always bring me to their defence.121
WHEN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS RECONVENED IN JANUARY 1949 IT FACED BOTH A new prime minister and a new leader of the opposition. The session would probably be short, since Louis St Laurent was expected to go to the country for a mandate by early summer. In the meantime there were first impressions to be made and parliamentary housekeeping to complete. For the government, the most important measures were a budget, the resolution bringing Newfoundland formally into the federal union, and ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty. The prime minister was already a familiar and genial presence in the House. George Drew was known only by his Ontario reputation as a domineering premier, an aggressive debater, and a handsome patrician: “the Big Chief” to friends, “Gorgeous George” to his mocking Liberal critics.122 Drew was determined to establish himself as a forceful leader, and he quickly imposed unity on the previously fractious Conservative caucus. Grant Dexter of the Winnipeg Free Press commented: “To one sitting in the press gallery, the Conservative party often appears to be not unlike an orchestra with Mr. Drew as the conductor. At one wave of his hand, the sixty-eight are silent. At another, heckling and general uproar breaks out in such volume as to drown out an opponent. Yet even in the midst of such a demonstration, if Mr. Drew desires to hear what this opponent is saying, he merely raises his hand and the three score and more adult men hush up as if their wind pipes had been slit.”123 His maiden speech was an overbearing denunciation of government policy and the new prime minister, which gave his parliamentary career a bad start. The courtly Louis St Laurent did not seem to merit such treatment. Liberals took it as a personal affront, and even Conservatives were embarrassed.124
Drew’s domineering was not accompanied by any clarity in the party’s program. One of his first efforts - to link the Liberals with communist subversion and demand a ban on the Communist Party - was greeted with contempt from the government benches, and in March his own party conference rejected the policy.125 Diefenbaker was prominent among the opponents of banning. Through the winter of 1949 “heckling and general uproar” were the sum of Conservative policy, as the party confidently assumed that the Liberal government was heading for defeat under its new leader.126 Conservative gains in two by-elections - one of them in Quebec - sustained that hope.127
In April, St Laurent dissolved parliament for a June election and set out on a dignified progress by train across the country. The nation was prosperous as never before, and prosperity was the government’s message.128 The prime minister spoke colourlessly of the government’s record, but made up for dullness with his patrician charm. “He has the attitude,” wrote one reporter, “that sane people obviously must vote Liberal and it’s a waste of time to keep on telling them so.”129 The public responded with faith and personal affection. In Quebec he was a favourite son; elsewhere he was a kindly uncle. Other members of cabinet gave support in St Laurent’s benign campaign.
By contrast, Drew conducted a hectic individual crusade of abuse against ministers and civil servants. His most familiar complaint, that the engines on the North Star aircraft owned by Trans-Canada Airlines were too noisy, attracted more ridicule than respect. In Quebec, where he had hoped for strong support from Premier Duplessis, Drew was disappointed. St Laurent was too popular, and Drew’s old record too familiar, for the canny premier to risk his own credit openly. The Union Nationale machine was active in the Conservative cause, but Duplessis himself kept silent. His party could deliver candidates - more than twice as many as the Conservatives had nominated in 1945 - but few votes.130 In Ontario, on the other hand, the Toronto Star led a crude campaign to discredit Drew’s tenuous Quebec ties. Two days before the vote, the Star asked under photos of Maurice Duplessis and Camilien Houde: “Shall These Two Men Become Canada’s Real Rulers?” and proclaimed in a front-page banner: “Keep Canada British/Destroy Drew’s Houde/God Save The King.”131
Diefenbaker kept close to home in Lake Centre, where he had built his personal support well beyond that of the party. He was uncertain about CCF strength in the riding, which had grown by redistribution in 1947. That gave him the excuse (as though he needed it) to campaign hard in every village and township, venturing outside the constituency for only a few speeches elsewhere in the province. Under persistent pressure for support from other Tory candidates, he also made brief campaign visits to other provinces.132 When advertising material arrived in Lake Centre from party headquarters (“We must have had almost a ton of it”), Diefenbaker judged it useless. Late one night he and Arthur Pearson loaded it into a boat at Regina Beach on Last Mountain Lake and, in irreverent defiance, dumped it in the waters.133
Diefenbaker couldn’t resist a bit of modest red-baiting mischief when he suggested in a broadcast that “all the Communists in Lake Centre were going to vote for my CCF opponent.” The CCF premier, Tommy Douglas, challenged him to name them. The candidate - who claimed to have Communist Party membership lists in his hands - responded that doing so would consume too much costly radio time. Instead, he offered to read “a list of the Communists who were not going to vote CCF” if Douglas would supply that. The contretemps died in a standoff, while the Communist Party asked members to spoil their ballots.134
The opposition’s hopes were crushed on June 27, when Louis St Laurent was rewarded with overwhelming victory in 193 ridings. Conservative membership in the House fell from sixty-seven in 1945 to forty-one in 1949, while the CCF fell from twenty-eight to thirteen. In Quebec, Drew elected only two MPs. The Conservative Party lost votes in every province from Ontario west. In Saskatchewan, John Diefenbaker retained his lone Conservative seat with an increased majority of 3422: a rebuke, in his eyes, both to the Liberals who had gerrymandered his constituency and to the Tories who had chosen George Drew as party leader.135 On that bittersweet night, John and Edna looked ahead to four more years of demoralized opposition in Ottawa.
FOR TWO YEARS AFTER HER HARROWING INTERLUDE AT HOMEWOOD SANITARIUM IN 1945-46, Edna spent longer periods at home in Prince Albert than in Ottawa. Although John assured friends that she was in good health, that seemed to be a cover for worry and uncertainty. Perhaps he felt more comfortable alone in Ottawa during parliamentary sessions as long as Edna was unwell - although his own remaining letters give little indication of his feelings about such personal matters.136 Edna was undoubtedly troubled and unhappy in Prince Albert, despite the presence of her mother and friends like Lorne and Mabel Connell. Only a few undated letters from Edna to John remain from this period. In one, she confesses her loneliness and insecurity: “I wish I could fly down & see you I dont seem able to face that train trip alone so far.”137 In another, written in the spring of 1947, she expresses pleasure at a telephone conversation with him the previous day, reports on her illness, and pleads, “I love you John & want to be with you always.”
To-day my throat has been terrible & I get very discouraged when it is like this as Im desperately afraid it is some thing serious because if it was poisin it should be gone now.
I felt pretty good all week but this day has surely taken the pep out of me. Just pray for me Dear I want to get well & be with you this is no life for either of us.138
Shortly afterwards she tells her husband:
The papers & your letters have been grand its all there is to break a very monotonous life but that is not your fault. My throat has been very bad the last few days & I get very discouraged I wonder if I am right in my conclusion Im being patient & hoping the poisin is the cause & that it will eventually leave me…
Im lonesome for you & dont let myself think of how happy I was in Ottawa with you when I was well - if only this pain in my throat & head leaves Ill never ask for another thing.
I see how busy they are in Ottawa with gay parties & all & I dont envy them all I want is my health…
…Tomorrow is another day and Ill be like Scarlet & go on.139
Beside the dreams of Ottawa, small town Prince Albert paled. Edna appealed to John’s own memory in a desperate call for rescue: “You hated PA & longed to get east so you can’t wonder.”140
One of John’s responses was to suggest that they should look for a house larger than 22 Twentieth Street, and in the summer of 1947 he purchased 246 Nineteenth Street, a spacious dormer-windowed home on the ridge overlooking downtown Prince Albert. In October they moved, and Edna turned enthusiastically to the task of redecoration. A friend, Gertrude Cote, recalled an evening with Edna when, removing the last bits of storage from the basement of the old house, they discovered a dusty bottle of vintage wine. The two sat on the kitchen floor and drank themselves generously into a haze. “She told me afterwards,” reported Mrs Cote, “even John chuckled about it.”141
By 1948 Edna had regained her health and confidence, and she returned to Ottawa more regularly with John for sessions of the House. Their journalist friend Patrick Nicholson thought that “her husband gave her all the kind and loving care needed for recovery,”142 including the welcome prospect of living away from the Château Laurier Hotel. For the winter session of 1948 the Diefenbakers took an apartment at 61 Cartier Avenue, behind the defence department’s temporary wartime buildings.143 Here at last was a second home, a place to cook, and, on weekends, to entertain friends for dinner. Tom Van Dusen, then a young reporter with the Ottawa Journal, remembered that “members of the Press Gallery were familiar visitors in their downtown apartment. At such dinners John Diefenbaker was an animated host who kept us all entertained with anecdotes and inspired by his grasp of the problems of the day… at a time when the Liberal Party seemed to have secured a perpetual lease on power.”144 Aside from a few political friends like the Fultons, the Brunts, and the Walkers, gallery reporters and their wives were the most common visitors; with them the couple could indulge their irreverent wit and John’s great talent for mimicry.145 Edna was a vivacious hostess, “quite an extrovert, a very talkative person,” a companion who softened John’s aloofness with her instinctive and embracing warmth.146 Her meals were “delectable,” and “drinks were in plentiful supply, including several brands of imported wine.”147
By this time Edna was once more, as Diefenbaker told a broadcaster in 1948, “his right hand man,” assisting in his parliamentary office, watching his interventions in the House from the gallery above, sitting on the platform and “looking most decorative” at his meetings.148 She still longed for a different life, but did not expect it. Diefenbaker occasionally toyed with offers of a business appointment or a lucrative legal partnership in Toronto or Vancouver, but Edna knew he could not forsake his vocation. She was in it with him, for better or for worse.149
Edna’s desire to be at his side reflected a certain sense of sexual jealousy - a jealousy that was probably mutual. John was aware of Edna’s old flirtatiousness and desire for affection; Edna was aware of John’s magnetic appeal to women, both as a man of arresting appearance and as a prominent politician who was often on his own. In 1947 she wanted to know whether Diefenbaker had been assigned a male secretary, John Gratrix, for his parliamentary office. That happened, and Gratrix accompanied Diefenbaker on his campaign for the party leadership in the summer of 1948 - no doubt a safer companion, in Edna’s eyes, than another woman.150 Following one further reference to his secretary, Edna added: “Be good dear & keep me from worrying as you know the things I fear”; and again: “I’m trying not to worry you & you know I’m ill & can’t help but imagining things.” She wanted to be in Ottawa “with you if you want me,” “if only I thought I was well enough & looked presentable.”151 This marriage of twenty years had become, for them both, a necessary bondage, a common commitment to John’s ambition that both appeased and fed their separate insecurities.
Reassuring appearances were kept up, but all was not well for long. In February 1950 Diefenbaker wrote to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, the fashionable rest-cure centre founded by Dr John Harvey Kellogg of breakfast cereal fame, apparently seeking treatment for his wife. The sanitarium promised a “cheerful, wholesome atmosphere” in “the congenial company of guests … from all parts of the world and all walks of life … Our physicians, dietitians and physical directors arrange a plan of health reconstruction including treatment, diet, exercise and rest according to each patient’s individual requirements. There is also arranged for the pleasure of our guests a varied and enjoyable daily program of lectures, demonstrations, concerts, health question-box talks, and a variety of indoor and outdoor sports.”152
This was nothing like Homewood, but neither was it home. It was a place of “health reconstruction” for wealthy neurasthenics - or as one writer has described it, “a temple of positive thinking, abstention and wise eating.”153 If John was planning a sojourn there for Edna, his judgment (and perhaps his medical advice) must have pointed, as in 1945, to depressive or psychosomatic ailments rather than physical ones.
For three months the record reveals nothing of Edna’s life. Was she a patient at Battle Creek, more distant and secret even than Homewood had been? In April, in a letter to John, Mary Diefenbaker mentioned receiving a letter, a news clipping about the Royal Family, and a gift from “Ollie” - the nickname of Diefenbaker’s youthful friend Olive Freeman, then a widow living in Toronto. “I knew where you would be last week end,” Mary tells her son, “when she told me where she was.”154 Had the MP, so dependent on womanly support, sought out the comfort of his old Saskatoon acquaintance when Edna again needed hospital care? Diefenbaker’s mother, who was privy to most of his secrets, wrote familiarly of a friendship he would not easily reveal to anyone else, least of all to his possessive wife. Edna’s very clinging possessiveness might have been part of the problem, as he struggled to diagnose it and cultivated another attachment.
By early June, Edna was certainly in Ottawa again with John. Mary Diefenbaker offered hope that Edna “is feeling better.”155 The parliamentary session stretched out through the summer, and the couple were together only briefly during July and August in their Prince Albert house. Edna entertained and travelled with John to constituency meetings as though nothing had changed, but friends noticed that she tired easily and that there were signs of swelling in her face and neck.156 By early September they had returned to Ottawa. Diefenbaker wrote to Herbert Bruce: “Both of us are in the best of health. In fact, as far as she is concerned, she has never been better throughout her entire life.”157 In retrospect, that reassurance looks more like gentle deception, or self-deception. The couple looked forward to visiting Washington, DC, at mid-month, where the first joint meetings of the Canadian and American Bar Associations were to take place. Superficially, the trip was a success: for John, as an annual chance to cultivate his widespread legal-political network; for Edna, as a happy autumnal jaunt to the eastern seaboard and beyond the limits of her Prince Albert-Ottawa life.158
But privately, Washington marked a point of anguish that called forth all of Edna’s stoical reserves. There she sought a second medical opinion about her illness, which was confirmed during her brief return to Ottawa. She was suffering from acute and untreatable leukemia. She confided this to her friend Patricia Fulton, but perhaps not to her husband, who was about to depart on a major overseas journey to Australia and New Zealand as a delegate to the conference of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.159 On November 11 Diefenbaker left Vancouver by plane, professing to believe that Edna was still in good health.160 There were doubts, however, about his mother’s condition, and he assured her from Auckland that he could return within two days “if you are not feeling too well.”161 (That could have been, too, his tacit signal that he worried about Edna and would return at short notice if necessary.) Before his departure, John and Edna exchanged fantasies about a rendezvous in Hawaii in December. But immediately on his arrival in New Zealand, John told his mother that he had arranged to return directly to Saskatoon before Christmas.162 There was no plan for a Hawaiian vacation.
For four weeks Diefenbaker hobnobbed timorously with the mighty, taking care to instruct Elmer and Edna to supply the Saskatoon and Prince Albert newspapers with the details. He had two speeches to make, and it was all a little heady: “I am (as you will see) the only non Honorable in the group. I hope that I do all right. I will try … It is amazing all the peoples that are here - colors and races.”163 He reported smugly that the Quebec delegates (René Beaudouin, Adélard Raymond, and Daniel Johnson) were “ill-treated” and resultingly “annoyed,” apparently because they missed out on some of his own privileged invitations.164
Despite rising at four in the morning to write one speech, Diefenbaker was mostly indulging himself: “I think this is going to be a real vacation … Too much playing around and eating. (I have gained … 7 (Yes, seven) pounds! I will have to diet soon.)…I am so fat that I cannot even bend down.”165
On December 22 he returned to Prince Albert to find Edna “most critically ill” in the advanced stages of acute lymphatic leukemia.166 The doctors advised immediate entry into St Paul’s Hospital in Saskatoon; instead, the family spent Christmas at Mary Diefenbaker’s, and on Boxing Day John took Edna to hospital to begin a six-week vigil at her bedside. No one expected her to leave; since there was no acceptable treatment, the hospital could provide no more than palliative care. John booked an adjoining room, while Edna’s mother, Maren, boarded close to the hospital.167 This time John had no wish to conceal the seriousness of Edna’s disease, and word of her illness spread quickly. Diefenbaker was missing from his seat on the front bench when the House reopened late in January.
Edna’s friends rallied with an extraordinary and spontaneous flow of encouraging cards, letters, flowers, visits, and telephone messages. Members of the small parliamentary press gallery set up a message centre for Edna, and one reporter wrote to her: “As I walked into my place in the Gallery today I instinctively - or automatically - turned my head to see if you were in the public gallery behind us. And I know that others here also missed you. Please get well and come back to us. We are all rooting for you.”168 David Walker, like others, could not conceal the sadness in his praise:
So Johnny will miss those de luxe home cooked meals for the time being. What a housekeeper you are! What a cook you turned out to be! Edna, my dear, I couldn’t have believed you were such a mistress of the culinary art! To see is to believe! And after sampling your cooking at Ottawa, I wasn’t too surprised at the delectable morsels produced at Prince Albert. What a wonderful time we all had last July, didn’t we? How you shine in your own home! What a grand crowd of friends you have in P.A.! How well-liked you are by them! And why shouldn’t you be? For you in your heart are kindly disposed to nearly everyone. Yes, Edna, you are doing a good job out there. You are a great wife for John.169
Both of them knew that this was a letter of affectionate farewell.
When Paul Martin, the minister of health and welfare, learned of Edna’s illness, he inquired of medical friends about treatments for leukemia and arranged to import supplies of an experimental drug from New York for use by Edna’s doctors. The treatment was unsuccessful, but Diefenbaker was everlastingly grateful for this act of kindness. “Diefenbaker’s gratitude rather embarrassed me,” Martin wrote. “I had done very little, but he seemed to handle me a little more gently thereafter.”170
While Diefenbaker was in New Zealand, a Canadian troop train carrying soldiers on their way to the Korean War had collided head on with a CN passenger train at Canoe River, British Columbia. Several wooden railway cars had telescoped between newer steel cars, and twenty-one passengers, most of them troops, had been killed. The railway soon pointed to human error as the cause, and attention centred on a young telegrapher, Jack Atherton. In early January, 1951, he was formally charged with manslaughter in the death of an engine fireman, on the allegation that he had omitted two words from the dispatcher’s order to the troop train, thus misdirecting it into the path of the passenger train.
Atherton had grown up in the village of Zealandia in Lake Centre riding. With charges pending, his father turned for support to his member of parliament, the renowned criminal defender John Diefenbaker. Diefenbaker was inclined to accept Alfred Atherton’s claim that his son had sent the dispatch correctly, but he would not take the case. Edna was too ill to leave; parliament had the next call on his time; and he was not a member of the British Columbia bar where the case would be tried.
Atherton knew Edna’s reputation as a persuasive influence on her husband, and in desperation he talked his way to her room in St Paul’s Hospital at the end of December. She sympathized, was convinced, and promised to intercede. When she told John, he protested that he would have to pass the BC bar exams and pay his bar admission fee. Edna pleaded that the telegrapher was an innocent victim and a scapegoat. She asked John to take the case for her sake, and he could not resist this last claim of sentiment. He made a promise to Edna, met with Jack Atherton, and agreed to act in his defence.171
In early February 1951 Edna Diefenbaker died, with John at her bedside. The outpouring of tribute was unique. Arthur Laing, Howard Green, and Jimmy Gardiner broke precedent in the House of Commons with eulogies to an MP’s wife; press gallery reporters and columnists spilled out affection for this “unelected member of parliament,” this “gay and lovable personality”; the Prince Albert Daily Herald spoke of her “quick instinct” for friendship towards “those who were in desperate need of its qualities.”
In the press gallery, and in the ranks of those who work on the fringe of parliament rather than as members, there are many who remember the friendship of Mrs. Diefenbaker as the force which brought meaning back to the lives that were becoming badly mangled - had gone badly astray.
For the bruised spirit, there is no healing agent so wonderful as understanding which grows naturally out of an undemanding impulse to friendship…
There are other things to be remembered, too. She was, of course, a partner in and contributor to all those attributes of greatness that have found expression in her husband’s career - helped shape them and give them effect in senses that can be recalled by every Ottawa observer.
Still, those were not things apart. They came, too, out of the same inner loveliness, recognized by all who knew her best, which gave Mrs. Diefenbaker the greatness that was her own.172
The First Baptist Church in Saskatoon overflowed with mourners for Edna’s funeral service, which was conducted by three ministers from Saskatoon, Prince Albert, and Calgary. The congregation included several railway porters, friends of Edna in the companionship of long Canadian rail journeys east and west. When she was buried in the Diefenbaker family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in northwest Saskatoon, an engine and caboose waited on the line beside the graveyard, the crew standing, heads bared, for the burial service. They too knew Edna and the Brower family from years of travel. Perhaps they had heard as well of her dying intercession in the Atherton case. This was a rare kind of recognition typical of pioneering Saskatchewan.173
John Diefenbaker was stricken and unbalanced in his grief. At First Baptist Church he insisted that Edna’s coffin should lie open in the entranceway. When he entered the church with Edna’s brother and sister-in-law, Jack and Susan Brower, he approached the body and “ran his fingers through her hair as she lay in the coffin,” lamenting that it had been parted on the wrong side and that he had been abandoned.174
John had promised Edna that he would eventually rest with her at Woodlawn, so her coffin was lowered four feet deeper than normal to allow space for a second coffin to lie above.175 The deep grave was filled with earth and mounded with flowers that froze in the February snows.