The Big Blue Machine: How Tory Campaign Backrooms Changed Canadian Politics Forever

By J. Patrick Boyer

An inside account of the Progressive Conservative’s campaign organization.

The Progressive Conservative Party’s “big blue machine” pioneered electoral techniques of centralized control, communications, campaign advertising, polling, policy-presentation, and fund-raising. Inspired by Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins, its widespread yet close-knit network of organizers and specialists changed how Canadian campaigns were fought, even as their “political machine” transformed Canadian public life itself.

J. Patrick Boyer’s behind-the-scenes account reveals how and why the blue machine’s campaign innovations (most imported from the U.S.) transformed Canadian politics forever. Boyer’s direct experience in these changes, and interviews with key players from Tory backrooms, enrich his authentic and timely account. This saga of the formidable campaign organization operating inside the Progressive Conservative Party for more than four decades shows why the big blue machine deservedly became a Canadian political legend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Oct 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781459724518

J. Patrick Boyer

J. Patrick Boyer studied law at the International Court of Justice in The Netherlands, served as Canada’s Parliamentary Secretary for External Affairs, and works for democratic development overseas. The author of twenty-three books on Canadian history, law, politics, and governance, Patrick lives with wife, Elise, in Muskoka and Toronto.

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Bibliography

Preface

The Human Face of Machine Politics

The Big Blue Machine is about the struggle for political power in Canada during the second half of the twentieth century by those attached to the Progressive Conservative Party, both at the federal level and in many provinces. But, rather than focusing on the politicians whose names and faces are known to the public, this book presents the perspective of individuals in the campaign backrooms.

Political parties and their election campaigns have changed beyond recognition from what one would have found even a few decades ago. Those responsible for this transformation operated in tandem with the advent of television, the emergence of opinion pollsters, and advertising agencies that could shape and manipulate election outcomes. Paralleling these changes came three others: campaign publicity to brand the party and emphasize its leader to the exclusion of others; election finance reforms that broke the corrupt link between money and power and replaced it with an entirely new system for campaign funding; and the centralization of control over political operations that diminished local autonomy and reduced individuality. These new approaches abetted the rise of professional campaign organizers. All the while, new sources for public policy replaced traditional party-developed programs. The pace of electioneering accelerated with computers, fax machines, and mobile phones. This overall transformation set the stage for the second revolution in Canadian campaigns that would arrive with the digital age and politics in cyberspace.

In the decades covered by this book, even ordinary events like a party leader’s tour became transformed beyond recognition. John Diefenbaker’s stately election travels aboard a special train morphed into media-focused campaign caravans with chartered airplanes, fully equipped buses, the Dirty Dozen shock-troop advance men, and the Tories’ in-house band, Jalopy. New campaign characteristics appeared: televised leaders’ debates; the use of direct mail to solicit campaign funds; and more permissive rules for political commercials that led to attack ads. Both the nature and context of these changes cumulatively reinvented public affairs as we now experience them, altering people’s expectations and changing Canada’s political culture.

———

The story begins with one man, Dalton Camp, whose career and motivations became absorbed in the unique role of his disciple, Norman Atkins. Out of that team, a legendary campaign organization was born. Their machine was no campaign organization assembled for just a single election or a one-off leadership race, but, rather, it was a juggernaut, one that came closer to being institutionalized — within the Albany Club and the Camp Agency, through the Spades and Rough-Ins, fused within the Tory party — than any political formation in Canadian history. The course of their lives became inextricably meshed with the roller-coaster fortunes of the Progressive Conservative Party itself, to whose cause they devoted themselves. It consumed their best efforts, produced government advertising contracts to sustain them, and required remarkable personal sacrifice.

No one person was responsible for all that took place during the period of the big blue machine, emphasized Ross DeGeer, himself a dynamo in the Camp-Atkins campaign organization, but Norman empowered his team to strive for the best, and our best was punctuated with innovation.

Ontario’s premier Bill Davis was explicit about the larger nature of the big blue machine. You have to make clear that Norman was key, he told me, but you have to go beyond Norman.

This legendary Tory campaign organization was not just an Ontario-based operation during the Bill Davis era of the 1970s, although that is when and where the Camp-Atkins apparatus most tellingly broke through the walls of the backrooms to become part of the conscious operation of government itself, and when journalist Claire Hoy hung that big blue machine name on it, which is why many think of the entity in those narrower terms of time and place.

The Camp-Atkins organization operated across Canada, emerging in stages, learning from its mistakes, each phase building upon the one before. It arose initially out of hardball New Brunswick politics in the late 1940s, and developed in the national electioneering that took place during the booming 1950s and counter-culture ’60s, whose new style was reflected in the political campaigns in the provinces also. The blue machine really took off with a surge of technical innovations and political psychology introduced and experimented with in PC campaigns throughout the 1970s.

By the mid-1980s, the organization was at its zenith. Looking back, one of its insiders, Brian Armstrong, said the unprecedented Mulroney sweep in 1984 was pretty much the big blue machine’s last hurrah. Another, John Laschinger, however, argues that the machine is still operating today, his view no doubt influenced by the fact this former blue machinist continues to run campaigns as a business, the way he’d first learned from Norman Atkins.

Still another contends the operation was always a bit of a fiction. The big blue machine did not exist, except in people’s minds, asserted Clare Westcott, who worked at the right hand of Ontario premiers Les Frost and Bill Davis. It was just a bunch of guys, he said, trying to burst an illusion. Can you imagine the mystique of having something like that? It’s like owning the name Coke or Ford.

Clearly, when something becomes a legend, it exceeds the bounds of reality. Atkins himself knew this. Addressing top organizers assembled in the Albany Club on the eve of the 1984 national election campaign he was chairing for Brian Mulroney, Norman said, Remember, we have a reputation to live up to.

———

Imprecision about the big blue machine’s real nature was also fostered by the fact its activities were secretive, often to the point of being covert.

Its operatives sometimes signed into obscure hotels under assumed names. The cover identities by which some of these campaign organizers identified themselves — the Eglinton Mafia, the Spades, the Dirty Dozen, or attendees at the Rough-In — changed over time, reflecting the shifting roles they were playing in various power struggles. Using such terms to cloak, rather than reveal, what they were up to was a precaution against discovery by both journalists and Liberals, to be sure. But such cover also provided a buffer during the Progressive Conservative Party’s long-running factional warfare between supporters and opponents of Camp’s challenge to John Diefenbaker’s leadership.

Their use of code names — calling Camp Mother and Bob Stanfield Father when communicating over walkie-talkies at a 1967 leadership convention — resembled the practices of a security detail or spy cell. Private lingo became part of big blue machine’s modus operendi: vague phrases like research and the agency, the war room and the bunker meant, to them, quite specific activities and venues.

Adding more fog was the name itself. The term big blue machine first had currency in the early 1940s, when Ontario PC leader George Drew and his chief organizer, A.D. Mckenzie, used it to describe the new Progressive Conservative election force they were marshalling across Ontario. A speech Drew made in Windsor in 1943, using this very term, was reported in dozens of newspapers. From the 1970s onward, after the big blue machine label was re-popularized by Toronto Star reporter Hoy, this political shorthand came into wider use with many politicians and journalists, even though few really knew who was in the organization, what it did, or how it operated. Understandably, Wikipedia’s entry for big blue machine is a sorry mash-up of confusing disinformation.

———

The nature of any political machine is inevitably enriched by legend, its mystique enlarged by tales of patronage-fed campaign organizations controlling elections and directing government operations.

Jimmy Gardiner’s Big Red Machine of the Saskatchewan Liberals had been as effective a political operation as the Prairies ever knew. The Union Nationale political machine of Premier Maurice Duplessis in Quebec was a seamless operation that turned out political results as effectively as Montreal’s packing houses made sausages. When Dalton Camp in New Brunswick spoke of the awesome power of the Liberal machine of Premier John McNair in the 1940s, he was acknowledging the legend of an invincible Grit organization that had become a Maritime model for predetermined election results.

Even within a single constituency, this potent machine imagery could sometimes attach itself to certain candidates’ partisan squads. At municipal levels, too, such well-oiled operations became renowned. All replicated as best they could the entrenched power networks that ran government and society in colonial times, such as the Château Clique in Lower Canada, the Family Compact in Upper Canada, the Council of Twelve in Nova Scotia, and the Legislative Council members on Vancouver Island.

In twentieth-century Canadian political life, machine politics fascinated those aspiring to be players, drew the resentment of vanquished opponents, inspired exposés by journalists, and prompted study by political scientists.

Use of such a term as big blue machine to describe the PC’s political operation fostered the impression of a single, powerful, well-defined, entrenched entity, further enhancing its intimidating psychological impact as a campaign juggernaut so good it was virtually unbeatable. This reputation often exceeded reality. A fundraising initiative using Canadian art failed. Party leaders arrived late and without having been briefed for momentous public meetings. Sometimes even its most brilliant campaigns failed, unable to overcome the charisma of an especially attractive opponent, the perverse electoral roulette of Canada’s voting system, or public fatigue with a spent government.

———

Dalton Camp started life as a Liberal, which contributed a convert’s zealousness in fighting Grits for the rest of his days. Many whom he and Norman Atkins drew into the blue machine had also been Liberal-inclined. Roy McMurtry voted for Liberal Mitchell Sharp in Eglinton in 1963 before working for PC candidate Camp against Sharp in 1965. Paul Curley voted for Pierre Trudeau in 1968 before he worked at senior party levels for PC leader Bob Stanfield in the 1972 election against Trudeau. Tom Kierans, a blue machine insider in Ontario who was a close policy adviser to Bill Davis from the 1970s on, attended the PC leadership convention at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1967 as an observer rather than a delegate because he was, at the time, organizing a leadership campaign for his Cabinet-minister father, Liberal Eric Kierans, who within months would seek to replace Lester Pearson as party leader and prime minister. Dozens of blue machinists came from families with Liberal lineages. Many others had been apolitical before being recruited.

Quite apart from these personal migrations, which served to confuse the distinctions that existed between the parties, it was hard even at the best of times to differentiate between Conservatives and Liberals. When Camp was president of the Progressive Conservative Association of Canada in the 1960s, a dinner discussion with a number of caucus members about party ideology and doctrine led to a conclusion that the PCs simply had to have a clearer enunciation of the party’s fundamental principles. Camp excused himself, saying he had a document they might wish to consider. When he returned and handed out copies, the Tory MPs were unanimous in approving the concise statement of support for the monarchy, the rule of law, the primacy of Parliament, the importance of free enterprise as the engine of Canada’s economy, the value of the historic partnership between Canada’s two founding peoples, the dignity of the individual, and respect for civil rights including freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Great work, Dalton, said one, as others nodded in agreement. That’s exactly nailed it!

It’s a direct lift from the constitution of the Liberal Party of Canada, he replied evenly, looking around the table at the rarely quiet MPs, suddenly silenced.

Conservatives and Liberals embrace the country’s foundational institutions and seek a moderating balance on issues of the day because each wants to maximize electoral support across the country’s diverse regions. As a result, trying to tell the story of Canadian public affairs by looking only at fundamental principles of these two parties is futile. In one election covered in this book — the PC come-from-behind 1988 win in a campaign battle over free trade — Tories and Grits even swapped each other’s defining, century-old policies.

Instead of dealing much with party platforms and political ideology, this book, instead, concentrates on the three elements that mostly determine the fate of a Canadian party: the character of its leader, the appeal of its specific platform in a particular election, and the strength of its campaign organization. Each is a phenomenon unto itself, but all three interact to produce a singular combined effect. Weakness in one can sometimes be offset by strength in the others, but seldom are electoral triumphs achieved without leader, platform, and campaign organization operating in harmony.

To such elements are added, of course, prevailing economic and social conditions, and Canada’s political culture itself, all blending as specific determinants of a particular election campaign. Sometimes quirks of fate also add unexpected good or bad luck that can propel a dismal effort to unexpected victory, or stall an apparently winning romp somewhere short of the finish line. These surprises of democracy help keep anxious campaign organizers awake nights. Norman Atkins, in particular, was a constant fretter.

As well as side-stepping political philosophy, The Big Blue Machine also leaves aside the campaigns of parties competing against the PCs. The interacting campaigns of different parties significantly determine the outcome of elections, of course. Keith Davey’s Rainmaker memoirs make clear how the disastrous 1984 Liberal campaign under Prime Minister John Turner contributed to victory for Mulroney-led Progressive Conservatives. But because well-rounded accounts of past elections have already been written by others, the focus in this book is instead on how the blue machinists, working behind the scenes, indelibly changed Canadian politics and public affairs through dozens of federal and provincial elections.

Attention to the backrooms does not mean the public side of political life is ignored. Performances by those in office sometimes created issues campaign organizers had to respond to: the Diefenbaker government’s indecision over nuclear weapons; Bob Stanfield’s fateful decision to campaign on price-and-wage controls; Bill Davis’s dramatic cancellation of Toronto’s Spadina expressway because cities are for people, not cars; and the Mulroney government’s contentious free trade treaty with the United States.

Finally, the impact of Canada’s electoral system on politics and political campaigns is assuredly considered here. The difference between historic landslide victories and humiliating defeats was sometimes a shift of only eight or ten percentage points in popular support, as translated through the iron determinism of an electoral system lacking proportionality between how citizens vote and are represented in legislative assemblies. The electoral system’s distorting impact caused backroom strategists to engineer vote-splitting among rivals, and to exploit the vagaries of a two-party electoral system still being used for multi-party elections.

———

Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins were at the forefront of those who developed new techniques to benefit from Canada’s imprecise electoral system — in their case for the partisan advantage of the PC Party.

For years, the two men were at the very core of the inner circle of the Progressive Conservative Party, wielding power thanks to all the campaigns they ran, party offices they held, and control at Toronto’s Albany Club. But they were equally at home in the universe of commercial advertising, thanks to their Toronto-based agency with its impressive roster of clients. This nexus placed them in crossover positions, pivotal players with a transformative role in Canadian public life.

With a cadre of other backroom players, such as Malcolm Wickson, Ross DeGeer, and John Thompson, they pioneered new methods for campaigning that included techniques lifted from the American political campaigns of Republicans and Democrats. When applied to Canadian elections, their advances set precedents other parties followed, as soon as they could figure out how.

Tories traditionally looked to Britain for best practices, but both Camp and Atkins were openly sympathetic to, and inspired by, American ways, which they found far more relevant to North American society. The same outlook was shared by those recruited to the blue machine, such as Phil Lind and Allan Gregg, who imported the latest fundraising and opinion polling arts from the United States. Their adoptive adeptness between the 1950s and the 1980s changed campaigns, reconfigured the nature of parties and, by extension, transformed public affairs.

———

Parties are to election campaigns what an ice surface is to hockey; without the two together, there’s not much of a game.

Although Dalton Camp first skated with the Liberals, he became a free agent and traded himself to the Conservatives, which is how our country’s longest running political formation, dating from the mid-1800s, became intrinsic to this saga. At the time, ironically, the Conservatives’ future was so dark many believed the party had run its course. Its dismal plight and the deep pessimism of the Tories were forces Dalton had to contend with, in the era when this story of his unique campaign organization began to take shape.

Over ensuing decades, Camp worked hard to change the party’s fortunes. Many others joined him in this quest. Despite many operational and personality changes in the organization, one constant imperative energized the blue machine: winning. Camp distinguished three types among the political throng: gentlemen, players, and politicians. The individuals he and Atkins hand-picked for campaign positions were players.

The blue machinists bonded into a cohesive force at the Albany Club of Toronto, in private homes and smoky hotel rooms, at relaxing weekend retreats in the countryside, intense elections at urban campaign headquarters, and Atkins’s renowned campaign meetings at the back of a restaurant or in his war room. He transformed disparate yet talented individuals into an enthusiastic and unified team that came to treasure winning an election as the biggest prize in the most competitive sport of all. They were, as Tom Kierans observed, a band of happy warriors who loved what they were doing, who were part of an organization with well-defined roles, and who carried out those roles with remarkable success.

As the blue machine’s organization kept getting deeper, stronger, and more innovative through the 1960s and 1970s, the enterprise gradually transferred from Camp’s hands into those of his understudy brother-in-law. Brian Armstrong, who’d started as a student volunteer and ended up a Tory éminence grise, described Atkins as the gold standard for campaign managers.

There is no shortage of testimonials. Another recruit who became a close friend and political partner of Atkins, Paul Curley, concluded, He was the best organizer up to that time, and probably since.

Ross DeGeer said, Norman was outstanding at putting a campaign together, and developing personal relationships with people across the country was probably his strongest suit.

Bill Saunderson, who started into politics filling ice buckets in hospitality suites, then helped the blue machine keep track of money, and went on to become an Ontario Cabinet minister, said Norman and Dalton really democratized Canadian political parties.

Pollster Allan Gregg, after working in over fifty far-flung campaigns, was unequivocal about those run by Norman: they were the best because there was no one else like him in Canadian politics. Atkins, added Gregg, was the only person who could get the best of the best — be it a strategist, adman, or policy analyst — into the same room and have all of them accept his leadership without question.

Yet behind Norman’s emergence as Canada’s most durable campaign organizer was his unbreakable connection to his brother-in-law’s tortured evolution. In some respects, Atkins resembled a clone of the older man, who, from first encounter, became his hero. Camp’s complex personality — alternating between brilliant, brazen, and baffling — was a central presence throughout Norman’s own life.

This rare relationship accounted for how Camp remained a luminous presence, even after he withdrew from direct campaign operations and daily operations of his advertising agency for other pursuits. The continuity and cohesiveness displayed in the multi-purpose advertising and campaigning organ-ization that Dalton had first launched in the 1950s were the direct results of Norman’s unshakable embrace of his mentor’s values; he remained deferential to him, even in absentia. Many who became part of the big blue machine through the 1970s and 1980s never saw Camp in action and only knew of him by reputation, with Norman the zealous keeper of his flame.

Across the board, blue machinists were driven by a passion for adapting new technology and innovative techniques to achieve more effective political results, believing their actions important for Canadian democratic politics and for the country itself.

If public service fused with politics was their religion, an election campaign was its most hallowed sacrament.

J. Patrick Boyer

July 1, 2015

Bracebridge, Ontario

Chapter 1

Campaign Artistry

Uncertainty hung in the morning autumn air around Parliament Hill. Converging toward the Gothic Revival splendour of the West Block, 210 members of Parliament, most elected for the first time, some forty of them now Cabinet ministers, gathered in the cavernous Room 200.

Seeming confident and unsure in about equal measure, they introduced themselves to each other, all the while glancing around, looking for someone more important. The rising din of nervous chatter added to the morning’s heady excitement, reminding some of a first day back at school. When they heard cheers erupting from the long entrance corridor, the MPs began crowding into the rows of green leather chairs, keen as theatre-goers to get the best available seat, straining for a sightline to witness the arrival of the most famous of them all, the 211th member of Canada’s Thirty-Third Parliament, the first among equals, the new prime minister.

Exuding smooth confidence, Brian Mulroney made his ceremonial entrance, floating into Parliament Hill’s largest meeting room upon a cushion of sustained clapping and cheers. He relished his slow progression up the centre aisle amidst his caucus multitude, shaking this hand, touching that elbow, pointing with acknowledging smile to someone, whether real or virtual, further away. Mulroney rode the unrelenting tide of lusty emotion. Cheers morphed into a mantra-like rhythmic chant: "Bri-an! Bri-an! Bri-an!"

The MPs were replicating what they’d witnessed only weeks before in their far-flung ridings, when thronging supporters had transformed the leader’s campaign visit into a ritual of celebrity adulation. Although this morning’s jubilation was spontaneous, it was equally a manifestation of an artful campaigner’s shrewd calibration. In achieving this feisty spirit, Mulroney was melding even this huge and diverse Tory caucus into single-minded group, and extracting from it a unified emotional response.

Other leaders might have arrived on time, walked to their place, merely smiling, or waving, or nodding a brief acknowledgement before taking their seat to conclude the standing ovation. Not this prime minister. A master at milking maximum effect from an anticipated appearance, Mulroney stood, soaking it all in, before finally taking his place at the front table, flanked by a half-dozen prominent Progressive Conservative personalities who’d been waiting, despite their venerable seniority, like primed altar boys. He continued standing, prolonging the ovation, pointing to individuals, smiling and waving, radiating companionable warmth.

At last, with his signal nod, everyone sat down. A chairman began speaking. Some MPs fumbled to plug in unfamiliar earpieces for simultaneous translation. Most just drank in the raw immediacy of a scene they still could not believe themselves part of. The chamber’s high, vaulted ceiling and its walls bearing oversized foggy mirrors only heightened their dreamy sense of occupying a front-row seat for history in the making.

Like at an orchestrated stadium concert, several performers had warm-up roles, to pump the atmosphere before the star himself would rock them all. One of those was Norman Atkins. Heavy-set, like a cop, with brown hair cut trim and brown shoes polished to glistening, he seemed strangely shy. The man’s awkwardness appeared to telegraph a thought that, perhaps, he should not even be taking this role in these Parliament Hill proceedings.

As he reached the podium, Atkins pulled nervously at the microphone. It emitted a loud scrunching noise that required no translation. The little smile he managed, while making a hasty glance at the wall-to-wall assembly of MPs and senators, hinted that perhaps feelings of pride were beginning to overpower his nervousness, that he was even enjoying an adrenalin rush from this energy-emitting assembly.

I’m here to tell you that we are all very lucky people, he began.

For many caucus members who’d never heard or even seen the Progressive Conservative Party’s national campaign chairman before, the man’s voice seemed strange — thinner and higher than expected, given Atkins’s stolid appearance.

After a further look across the now hushed assembly, he elaborated, We’re lucky because we have Canada’s most exceptional leader at the head of our party.

Cheering erupted.

As Atkins continued, it became clear the man who’d assiduously built and painstakingly operated a state-of-the-art political machine for the 1984 election had a unique role at this first caucus meeting of the largest group of a party’s MPs ever elected in Canada.

Norman transformed the vast space of Room 200 into a hybrid venue, somewhere between a religious confessional, where closer truth is revealed, and a military debriefing room, where accounts are rendered after a tumultuous battlefield engagement. With quiet voice and matter-of-fact manner, he shifted the mood from sensational to secretive.

In the palpable silence, the Tory organizer selectively shared what had transpired in the election headquarters’ secret inner sanctum, the war room as insiders called it. He spoke in the flat tone of a sincere man spilling secrets. To this audience of zealous believers, Atkins imparted no mere report on campaign details but, rather, a revelation of true character.

You all need to know, he said, "just how strenuous were the demands I, as national campaign chairman, and others on the team placed, day after day, week after week, on this man who’s now been overwhelmingly elected prime minister of Canada. I’ve been in this business a long time, a very long time, and I’ve never seen anyone come close to his level of dedication, energy, and leadership performance."

All eyes turned to drink in a new view of Brian Mulroney, sitting neat and erect. The communion was complete as he humbly soaked up the homage, looking down at his hands.

Atkins had artfully turned the spotlight onto the star himself, and the prime minister innately knew how to bathe in such illumination.

Building from this solemn moment of respect and insight, the campaign chairman described how the leader delivered flawlessly, and without cessation, throughout the unrelenting schedule of an intense campaign — whether addressing pulsating crowds, answering hostile journalists, or making a stream of flawless television commercials in French and in English.

Did he need a break? No, Brian Mulroney just kept going. He was focused, determined, and inexhaustible.

Winding up his cameo performance, Atkins made the essential connection: the leader had campaigned with such stamina, skill, and polish that the result was the largest landslide victory in Canada, ever.

Cheering and applause enwrapped self-effacing Norman Kempton Atkins, chief engineer of the big blue machine, as he quietly resumed his seat, looking relieved. The astute backroom organizer had directed everyone’s attention away from his campaign machinery to the leader.

Others of power and influence came to the microphone for brief performances at this opening caucus concert, which culminated at last in a galvanizing, humorous, and moving performance by the prime minister himself, Brian Mulroney addressing the most receptive audience of his entire life.

———

Everyone in this triumphant Progressive Conservative caucus understood that a new chapter in the country’s political history was beginning.

Some recent recruits, especially those from Quebec, last-minute candidates stunned to find themselves in Ottawa as MPs, were wide-eyed learners. Surrounding and amongst them were legendary Canadian political figures, prominent characters from prior chapters of national public affairs. Here was George Hees, there Flora MacDonald and Erik Nielsen, and over there, Marcel Masse, Jacques Flynn, and even Joe Clark.

Who is George Hees? one puzzled newcomer asked an MP beside her, after his name had been mentioned. Venerable party personalities were strangers to many of these fresh, young Tory MPs, as, indeed, was the history of the PC Party itself, the brand under which they’d come to public office. If neophytes seemed perplexed, others in Room 200, long-time Tories who knew all too well the personalities and plights of their party’s past, felt triumphal vindication. They’d soldiered on for years — for many, most of their lifetimes — through bitter campaigns and dismal defeats to finally reach this pinnacle in triumph.

A quarter-century had passed since the previous record high in Canadian electoral politics, now exceeded, had been set in 1958, when the Progressive Conservatives led by John Diefenbaker claimed the greatest number of seats ever in the Commons. For that campaign, Norman Atkins’s brother-in-law, Dalton Camp, had worked harmoniously with Diefenbaker to fashion a stunning campaign that ousted the deeply entrenched Liberals. Both record-setting victories displayed an uncommon degree of campaign innovation, professionalism, and wily determination.

The landmark victories of 1958 and 1984 also shared, thanks to a behind-the-scenes connection linking Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins, if not a common paternity, certainly a lot of the same political DNA.

———

Seven months later, Saturday Night magazine sought to make sense of the political tornado that had swept through Canada’s landscape and turned Ottawa upside down because, for many Canadians, having Tories in office running the country was an aberration. A front-cover feature by Ron Graham told about the campaign organization that brought these Progressive Conservatives to power, the so-called big blue machine, and profiled its chief engineer, Norman Atkins. When describing this powerhouse campaign organization and its greatest achievement, the long-running Progressive Conservative government in Ontario, by then in power for over four decades, Graham called the whole enterprise the most successful democratic institution in the Western world.

The claim struck humble Canadians as outlandish. Surely Graham didn’t mean the whole Western world, did he? Prideful Liberals recoiled from the notion anyone but their own beloved Rainmaker, Senator Keith Davey, could be Canada’s master campaign organizer. Brian Mulroney took umbrage over the magazine giving Atkins unfiltered accolades for his massive election victory. Readers would get the impression the PM’s success was the product of political puppetry, that he was on strings pulled by others. Emphasis on Norman diminished Brian’s own prowess as an accomplished campaign organizer — especially in Quebec, which had been key to the big win and where Mulroney himself, certainly not Atkins, made all the difference.

Mulroney had been around political backrooms himself and organized enough campaigns to know credit for victory goes to a team and never the leader alone. But the man’s instincts also made him want the backrooms of politics to stay that way — in the back and out of sight. Yes, he’d asked Atkins to be national campaign chairman, partly on the urging of Ontario’s powerful premier, Bill Davis, on whose support Mulroney depended in the seat-rich province, partly knowing himself the talented team that Norman had helped assemble across Canada when Robert Stanfield led the party and Dalton Camp was national PC president. If public credit was to go to backroom organizers at all, the PM felt it should be shared with the veteran campaigners who’d been with him through two leadership races and the Quebec section of the 1984 election. And beside these stalwart loyalists in his personal political base, Mulroney was also fully aware of his debt to the provincial Liberal organization of his friend Premier Robert Bourassa, which had given such a huge boost and helped him to win a majority of Quebec’s seats. Atkins could take no credit for that either. The national PC campaign that Norman organized in 1984 was more decentralized, at least in Quebec, than Ron Graham publicly credited.

These sentiments of modest Canadians, proud Liberals, and a sensitive prime minister were really beside the point, however, as were the unbelievable bungles of the Liberal campaign under John Turner that helped the Tories win. Even the brutal determinism of Canada’s outdated voting system, which translated the Progressive Conservative’s 50 percent support in popular vote nationwide into 75 percent of the Commons’ 282 seats, though significant, was not the main story.

What counted, and what political observer Ron Graham’s article, The Unlikely Godfather, about quiet Norman Atkins and the big blue machine sought to show, was the deeper story about Canadian elections: the importance of backroom strategy in setting the context for the public show, and the increasing primacy of those whose names did not appear on any ballots.

The big blue machine, a constantly evolving campaign juggernaut pioneered by Dalton Camp and continued by Norman Atkins, both of them assisted by many well-chosen allies across Canada for over four decades, had become so interwoven with the Progressive Conservative Party that it was often impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

Chapter 2

Requiem for Tories

By the Second World War, the Liberal-Conservative Party, as Canada’s Tories called themselves at that time, was an endangered entity languishing in a political wasteland. Parties had gone extinct before. Revival of the poorly adapting Liberal-Conservatives seemed unlikely.

In all the country’s provinces, the party had virtually vanished. In Ottawa, the Tories’ dire state paralleled how they’d faded provincially. The party’s MPs, few in number, were deeply pessimistic.

Ottawa itself was abuzz with the urgency of war. The quietest place in the whole city was the darkened Parliament Hill office of New Brunswick’s R.B. Hanson, latest in a succession of hard-luck Conservative Party leaders. With the war’s outcome in doubt, the bleak prospects of Canada’s Conservatives were of scant interest even to men like Hanson, who had a duty to feel responsible.

A lawyer who’d been mayor of Fredericton and then a minister in R.B. Bennett’s Conservative government before its crushing defeat in the 1935 election, Hanson managed to get re-elected in 1940. Having no ambition for higher office, the Maritimer seemed safe to the shell-shocked Tory caucus who solemnly named him interim leader. Somebody had to hold the vacant job. Party leader Bob Manion, deeply disillusioned, had quit within weeks of losing the disastrous wartime general election.

In that March 1940 contest, the Conservatives elected only thirty-nine members to Parliament, the party’s 30 percent of the popular vote producing 16 percent of the Commons’ seats, making Tory support appear even less than it was. Apart from being woefully outnumbered, the party’s MPs felt unable to match the overarching psychological power of the supremely confident — some said smug — Grits.

The summer before war started, in July 1938, Conservative delegates had convened to replace R.B. Bennett, whose government, its life drained by the Depression’s ravages and its supporters split into competing factions, had been flung from office three years earlier. By the second round of balloting, the convention had chosen Dr. Robert Manion as the new leader and, on the surface, things looked promising.

A reassuring man, Manion appealed to Canada’s moderates, including Liberals weary of William Lyon Mackenzie King, an incrementalist whose success came from never doing by halves anything he could do by quarters. Bob Manion had even started out as a Liberal, asked by Sir Wilfrid Laurier himself to run for Parliament. But when war came in 1914, Dr. Manion volunteered with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. As war devoured soldiers and pressure grew to force un-enlisted men to the front, the country divided. Conservatives, and Liberals supporting conscription, rallied behind Prime Minister Borden’s Union Government for the 1917 election. Manion, advocating forced enlistment, was elected from his hometown, Fort William, as a Liberal-Unionist candidate. In subsequent elections, he was re-elected as a Conservative, gaining experience in the Cabinets of Arthur Meighen and Richard Bennett.

Manion’s balanced focus on social justice and better measures for unemployed Canadians made him an attractive moderate amidst the political extremists with radical solutions to the Depression. The new Conservative leader had specific appeal in Quebec, where the party had not won a majority of Commons seats since 1892. A Roman Catholic, Manion shared the faith of a majority of voters in the province. His wife was French-Canadian, and their children were fully bilingual.

Since the Tories lacked any party structure in the province, however, Manion’s only hope lay in striking a deal with Quebec’s new Union Nationale premier. Maurice Duplessis had formed his party by absorbing the remnants of the Conservative Party in the province while retaining its robust antagonism towards all things Liberal. Each of Duplessis’s elected members, now constituting a large majority in Quebec’s assembly following his party’s 1936 electoral victory, would work in close collaboration only with the Conservative candidate in their riding whenever the next federal election was called.

The federal Tories believed that they’d been handed the keys to the highly effective electoral machine of their bleu confreres. The national Conservatives, their excitement incubated by electoral desperation, believed they now miraculously possessed a vehicle of great power, ready and waiting to carry them into office.

But one week after Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, triggered another world war, Canada’s parliamentarians voted to declare war on Germany. In the sombre light of this changed situation, Prime Minister King announced that no wartime election would take place. If need be, Parliament would extend its five-year life, as a number of parliaments and legislatures had done during the 1914–1918 war. Under King’s plan, any Commons seat becoming vacant would be filled by whichever party held the riding when the vacancy occurred simply designating a replacement MP.

The Conservatives accepted at face value King’s commitment to hold no election during the war. Manion personally agreed to the partisan cease-fire. Conservative organizers and fundraisers, knowing what dismal shape they were in, heaved a sigh of relief. No Tory Party workers at any level made preparations for a general election. Across the country, none of the constituencies lined up candidates. Bagmen ceased trying to raise campaign funds. There were few events even to keep core loyalists together. Toronto Tories shut down their recently opened party office, and in Ottawa the leadership decided to close down the Conservative’s national office, fully dismantling the remaining vestiges of organization.

The party that was only a ghost in the provinces had become a phantom nationally.

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Then, to the Conservatives’ dismay, a wartime election did occur — in Quebec.

The federal Tories watched helplessly as the provincial campaign heated up. They listened to Liberals portray the Conservatives as the party of conscription — a claim based on the introduction of mandatory military service in the prior world war by a Union Government of both Conservatives and Liberals. To answer the Liberals’ fear-mongering among Quebec’s voters, Manion emphatically stated there would be no forced enlistment for military service. Quebec Liberals gave a shrug, expressed disbelief, and claimed to voters that if elected the Conservatives would certainly bring in conscription even though they said they would not. Provincial Liberal leader Adélard Godbout, for his part, categorically pledged that no Liberal government would ever impose conscription. Then, for extra measure, he added that should even one single French Canadian ever be conscripted under Ottawa’s Liberal government, he would quit his party and personally fight against the Liberals.

Stoking conscription fears among French-Canadian voters, the Liberals connected the dots for voters: Union Nationale support for the Conservatives in Quebec would lead to a national Conservative government in Ottawa; the Conservatives would impose conscription; thus, the only way to prevent conscription was to defeat the Union Nationale.

In the previous election, Quebec’s voters had given a huge majority to the Union Nationale. This time they rewarded the Godbout-led Liberals with seventy seats, a crushing surplus over the Union Nationale’s remnant fifteen. Across Quebec, the Union Nationale was decimated. Bob Manion’s election prospects in the province lay in smouldering ruins.

How fortunate for the Conservatives, mused Manion, that he’d agreed with the prime minister there’d be no federal election until the war was over.

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Having gained an upper hand in Quebec, however, the Liberals in Ottawa smiled, broke their promise, and called a wartime election.

Surprising voters and his political opponents alike by launching a general election, King brazenly made a fresh promise to replace his broken one. He now solemnly committed that there would be no military conscription. This line had worked in Quebec, after all, for Godbout’s Liberals.

The snap 1940 election caught the Conservatives unprepared, with no candidates recruited, the campaign organization in complete disarray, and the bank account empty. King had six Liberal premiers backing him, Manion none. There were no Conservative lieutenants of stature in the federal caucus, nor even any politically appealing leaders in the remaining provincial Conservative parties. In Ontario, the largest base of the national party, Conservative leader George Drew refused to help Manion and his Ottawa counterparts, repaying the federal party’s establishment for its aggressive efforts to thwart his rise in the provincial party.

In desperation, Manion sought to replicate Borden’s successful 1917 strategy of forming a coalition Union Government with the Liberals, by re-naming the Conservatives the National Government Party. But this was cosmetic. In 1917 Borden had the benefit of a fully revamped Election Act that ran roughshod over the political rights of opponents and gave advantage to anyone supporting the war effort and conscription. Manion, in opposition, lacked Borden’s ability to change election laws to predetermine the outcome.

The Conservative Party of Canada no longer existed even in name. There was little support for Manion’s National Government gambit. Newspapers remained neutral. Dyed-in-the-wool Tories felt abandoned.

As ballots were tallied, political opportunism was seen to pay off. The King-led Liberals won a large majority, with plenty of seats in Quebec, in French-speaking communities elsewhere across Canada, and in farming ridings on the Prairies and southwestern Ontario where voters had bought the solemn Liberal promise of no conscription.

Shattered Conservatives were desperate. Nobody was willing to contribute money to the party. The Commons, in this era, had no budget for caucus support. The only stopgap was an appeal to the remnant caucus members themselves. Manion asked for at least $50 from each MP and senator to cover immediate needs. This raised $3,350.61, which enabled the party to exist a little longer.

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Two years later, in April 1942, King instituted a wartime national plebiscite asking Canadian voters to release the government from its no-conscription mandate.

The plebiscite carried with a majority yes vote in all provinces except Quebec, where the answer from four out of every five voters, feeling deeply betrayed, was an angry "non." The Liberals brought in conscription, despite having twice committed to voters they would never do so. Adélard Godbout did not resign as Liberal premier of Quebec over the issue as pledged, nor did he campaign against the Ottawa Grits as promised.

Canadian Conservatives were thoroughly disillusioned by politics and embittered by the Liberals’ shining success practising electoral dishonesty. The people of Canada, for their part, no longer looked to the Conservative Party for anything. Its death throes had landed the venerable party at the abyss’s edge. Few could see any future at all for Canadian political conservatism.

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The Conservative’s most irrepressible warrior, Grattan O’Leary, who’d run for the party in his Quebec home district of Gaspé in 1925 and since become editor of the Ottawa Journal, wrote on December 1, 1942, in Maclean’s Magazine, what read like the party’s obituary.

The Liberal-Conservative Party was at the lowest ebb in its fortunes since Sir John A. Macdonald created it eighty-nine years ago, he lamented. Orphaned of leadership, unrecovered from shattering defeat in two successive elections, holding power in no single province, nudged into oblivion by the direction of the war, its decline and fall from its once proud eminence of historic achievement is one of the strange tales of politics. O’Leary pondered the cause for such demise. Is it that the Conservative Party has become a spent force, its philosophy and policies unsuited to our day?

This seemed to be the case. If Britain’s once-great Liberal Party could be destroyed by historic transformations, so, too, could Canada’s grand old Liberal-Conservative Party. In Quebec, its formal remains disappeared in 1936 when the Quebec Conservative Party and Action Libérale Nationale merged to form the new Union Nationale of French-Canadian nationalists. For the 1940 federal election, Conservative leader Manion’s manoeuvre to hide his party under the name National Government Party seemed a last-ditch effort. The party was so far gone that the Conservatives were doing what, in historian Jack Granatstein’s words, amounted to little more than dynamiting the wreckage.

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Yet, if a wrecked classic automobile can tempt a young mechanic to dream about making it roadworthy again, the remnants of an abandoned political party may likewise appeal to ambitious individuals who envisage someday riding the restored vehicle back into power. And that was how the idea of rebuilding Canada’s Conservative Party from the ground up began.

This enterprise engaged a small number of true believers at first; against the backdrop of war, these never-say-die partisans, dreaming to rejuvenate Canadian political conservatism, began to discuss bold new directions for the party. Initial gatherings were spontaneous, the groups small. Soon, their efforts became more organized and better defined.

Taking account of both their party’s bleak electoral experience and the radical changes sweeping Canadian society, they knew the party’s ideology had to be revamped. If society changed, so must a democratic political party that hoped to serve it. To be relevant to citizens, Conservatives had to embrace Canada’s contemporary needs, reflect people’s core aspirations, and set a specific course toward the future. The more they talked, the clearer the sequence of these steps became. Only a revivified philosophy of political conservatism could generate relevant policies and programs that, in turn, could reconnect the party to the wider public and, eventually, gain enough electoral support to win power, control government, and implement the program.

They decided to gather in central Canada, convenient to like-minded party modernizers from east and west, and chose Port Hope, a town on Lake Ontario’s shore east of Toronto, whose name seemed apt in light of their purpose. Wanting frank discussion and open appraisals, they did not invite incumbent party leaders, who’d be more intent on preserving their positions than making bold changes. On September 7, 1942, these aspiring Conservatives, some 115 in number, began arriving for their Conservative Forum and soon dubbed themselves the Port Hopefuls.

Assembled in the precincts of the town’s classic Trinity College, a mood of tentative optimism began taking hold. These Conservatives heard policies advocated by others whose thinking was similar to their own. They felt a liberating spirit of camaraderie. In coming decades these forward-looking Conservatives would hold some of the highest offices in their provinces and nationally: governor general, minister of finance, attorney general, party leader, campaign organizer, and election fundraiser. Yet in this history-making moment, the focus was not on the personal careers of individuals, but on the future of the Conservative Party itself.

Galvanized by time and place, the Port Hopefuls unanimously agreed on proposals that were, in a word, progressive. Rather than tinkering with details, their broad-stroke resolutions defined a new stage in the evolution of Canadian political conservatism, with a stronger human focus and confident embrace of affirmative government action.

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Philosophy and policy were fundamental, but the party’s organizational structure was just as important.

The gathering at Port Hope was a forum of like-minded individuals. They’d stepped apart from Tory traditionalists, whom they feared would resist change, to revamp the philosophic framework of Conservative Party programs. To effect change, however, the Port Hopefuls knew they could not remain a satellite to the party, but had to engage the Tory organization itself.

The opportunity came just months later, in December 1942, when Conservative delegates converged on Winnipeg for a national convention to debate policy resolutions and elect a new leader. The Port Hopefuls, knowing their next task was to engage voting delegates and fill party offices, arrived resolved to continue their resuscitation operation. Helping their cause was the fact almost every delegate had read Grattan O’Leary’s article on the bleak state of the party. To save it, he’d urged Conservatives to avoid extinction by reinventing the party. O’Leary sensed that the resolutions adopted at Port Hope, and the spirit they invoked, offered the only glimmer for political revival.

As the policy debates took place, the efforts by the Port Hopefuls turned the tide for political conservatism. The progressives prevailed, getting enough delegates to adopt most of their resolutions so the party could strike a new course.

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Reorienting the party still required one thing more: choosing the right leader.

The last time the party had been led by someone from the Prairies, back in 1930, Calgary’s R.B. Bennett won a majority government. Since then, three successive leaders from central and eastern Canada had failed: Ontario’s Bob Manion, who’d resigned in May 1940; New Brunswick’s Richard Hanson; and succeeding him in November 1941, Ontario’s Arthur Meighen. When Meighen failed to even gain a seat in the House, Hanson remained interim leader, giving detail to O’Leary’s portrait of a party at its lowest ebb since inception. A western Canadian would be refreshing.

There were choices. Saskatchewan MP John Diefenbaker, a lawyer from Prince Albert, finally elected in 1940 after many failed efforts, was already in the national caucus. Also in the Commons was British Columbia MP Howard Green, a Vancouver lawyer. A third westerner, M.A. MacPherson, had been a member of Saskatchewan’s legislature and attorney general in the province’s Conservative government until 1932. H.H. Stevens, a Vancouver businessman who’d been a minister in Bennett’s Cabinet, was back in the Tory fold after an ill-fated bolt to lead the Reconstruction Party of Canada, whose only accomplishment had been to draw away enough Tory votes in 1935 to help the