wide-open eyes. “The election had a profound influence on me, and perhaps more than anything else made me a Conservative,” Diefenbaker wrote many years later. “I attended all the meetings in Saskatoon. The Tories had a marvellous campaign. They didn’t have any arguments but they raised the flag and we’d sing… ’We’re soldiers of the King.’ The result was a tremendous revelation of Canadian determination to be Canadian. This impressed me greatly.” The impression would last a lifetime.
John had done exceedingly well in the mock parliaments during his university years, but the first real test of his speaking skill came when he was elected to city council in Wakaw, by a slim margin of twelve votes.
People began to notice this brash upstart, and the Liberal party tried to enlist John in 1921. He declined. They were flabbergasted. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to join the Liberal party? So one day when John was out of town the Wakaw Liberal Association elected him secretary, sneaked into his office, and left their minute books and pamphlets on his desk. When he got back and discovered this, he immediately marched to the Liberal president and gave the books back.
On June 19, 1925, Diefenbaker let the world know he was a Conservative. Well, actually he addressed a small group of Conservatives at an organizing meeting in a tiny room in Prince Albert, but it felt like he was telling the whole world. It was his first official act as a Conservative. His feet were wet, so he dived in and two months later was declared the party’s federal candidate by acclamation.
He might as well have been invisible. The Liberals were already in power both federally and provincially, and the Conservatives were at the bottom of the political heap, with no real hope of a victory in Saskatchewan.
The election was called for October 29, 1925. Diefenbaker squared off against Charles Macdonald, the Liberal candidate. The war of words was fast and furious, and at one point John was described by his opponents as a “Hun.” This was an attempt to identify Diefenbaker with the German forces who had been the enemy in the First World War. “Matters were made little better when I was simply called a German,” John later recalled, “I was not a German, not a German-Canadian, but a Canadian.” Diefenbaker, as he would repeat throughout his lifetime, was always a Canadian first. During a speech at the Orpheum Theatre in Prince Albert he attacked his opponents by saying: “Am I German? My great-grandfather left Germany to seek liberty. My grandfather and my father were born in Canada. It is true, however, that my grandmother and my grandfather on my mother’s side spoke no English: being Scottish, they spoke Gaelic. If there is no hope for me to be Canadian, then who is there hope for?”
It was a rousing reply, though he had slightly stretched the truth: his Diefenbaker grandfather was born in Germany and his Bannerman grandparents spoke English. The point was still the same.
But just as Diefenbaker was fighting off his opponents’ claims, he was sideswiped by the leader of his own party. Arthur Meighen was a hard-minded, steely-eyed man who had briefly been prime minister (he succeeded Robert Borden in 1920 and was voted out of office in 1921). Meighen declared he would alter the Crow’s Nest Pass freight rate, which was subsidized to keep the grain flowing to the West Coast cheaply. Meighen also opposed the completion of a Hudson Bay railway, which would give farmers in Saskatchewan another outlet for their grain.
Diefenbaker publicly disagreed with his own leader, and it didn’t win him any points with his party. x201C;My position was difficult,” Diefenbaker later wrote. “It need not have been. But I chose to speak for myself.” This wouldn’t be the last time he would follow his own path instead of toeing the party line.
He campaigned tirelessly through every small town and hall in his constituency, but there was no hope. Even though the Conservatives won the most seats in Parliament, they did not get a clear majority and Mackenzie King remained prime minister. The news was even worse for Diefenbaker: not one Conservative was elected in Saskatchewan.
But party supporters who witnessed his valiant battle wouldn’t forget the name of John G. Diefenbaker anytime soon. Diefenbaker was soon invited to speak at other conventions, always making an impression. Bruce Hutchinson, a reporter covering a convention of the British Columbia Conservative party, wrote: “From this frail, wraith-like person, so deceptive in his look of physical infirmity, a voice of vehement power and rude health blared like a trombone.” If Diefenbaker was a trombone, the song he was playing was one of frustration. He would play quite a few sad tunes before he could blast away in the House of Commons.
Almost a year later, Mackenzie King was hit with a scandal over corruption in the customs department. He asked for the dissolution of Parliament, but the Governor General refused and Conservative leader Arthur Meighen became the next prime minister. He was promptly defeated and the next day the headlines announced a new election.
If the fight was hard last time for Diefenbaker, this time he was up against the political heavyweight champion of Canada. William Lyon Mackenzie King himself ran in Diefenbaker’s riding because in the previous election King had lost in his home riding. King, who had been groomed by Laurier, was a wily opponent well versed in political sparring. Stocky and intelligent, he had been prime minister since 1921, except for Meighen’s brief interlude.
Diefenbaker geared himself up for another battle but was blindsided once again by his own party. Arthur Meighen was completely opposed to the Liberals’ old age pension plan, which was something voters wanted. Diefenbaker thought the pension was just a matter of plain, honest decency. Meighen also continued spouting out his views on the Crow’s Nest Pass rates and the Hudson Bay Railway.
By constant touring, Diefenbaker overcame these problems. He even gained ground on the prime minister. Could the impossible happen? Could Diefenbaker actually defeat Mackenzie King?
Chances for such an upset were dashed when the Toronto Telegram reported that a top Conservative in the east, R.J. Manion, claimed that 99 per cent of Prince Albert voters were immigrants with hard-to-pronounce names: “Mackenzie King has gone to Prince Albert, has left North York. He doesn’t like the smell of native-born Canadians. He prefers the stench of garlic-stinking continentals, Eskimos, bohunks, and Indians.”
His statement hit the papers across the country. For Diefenbaker, who had one of those hard-to-pronounce last names, this was a terrible blow. Liberal pamphlets flooded Prince Albert saying: “Citizens of Prince Albert: Mark your ballot for Mackenzie King and reject this insult!” The final tally of votes in Prince Albert was Mackenzie King 4,838, Diefenbaker 3,933. The Liberals won a majority of seats, and only one Conservative was returned to power in the western provinces – R.B. Bennett, a rich tycoon. Meighen lost his seat.
On a cool October night in 1928 a thin stranger slinks into the rear of a hall in Hawarden, Saskatchewan and seats himself in a dimly lit corner. The place is packed with Liberals. They’re edgy because in two days a provincial by-election vote will be held in Arm River constituency, and it has been a drop-kick, drag-’em-out battle – a sign that the upcoming provincial election will be even tougher. The Conservatives are pressing the Liberals to explain their patronage practices and the presence of Catholic nuns and teachings in public schools.
This meeting is intended to bring the Liberal ranks together. Premier Jimmy Gardiner and his Minister of Agriculture, CM. Hamilton, are there to speak. The crowd of three hundred waits in anticipation.
Mr. Hamilton walks to the front of the stage. He extols the virtue of his government’s record, but the stranger interrupts him part way through the speech, then again a few minutes later. And again and again.
This is too much for Premier Gardiner, a relentless Liberal, who had served as a member of the legislative assembly in Saskatchewan since 1914. He gathers up all his political
