The late Canadian Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker’s state funeral was held on August 19, 1979. As dignitaries gathered, a bomb threat was called in and police advised then-Prime Minister Joe Clark to evacuate the cathedral. As John Ibbitson notes in his new book, The Duel, Clark took the opportunity to crack a joke about Diefenbaker: “He pointed to the casket. ‘The only one who wants us all dead is lying right there. Let’s carry on.’”

Why would Clark joke about a Conservative prime minister like Diefenbaker wishing for a bomb to go off? Like Diefenbaker, Clark was a Progressive Conservative and a Westerner. Why would Diefenbaker want Canada’s political elite, including members of his own party from his home region, destroyed? Americans may wonder why this anecdote matters at all, unaware of how the drama of Diefenbaker’s political life might hold lessons for the populist convulsions of modern American conservatism. Canadians with longer memories may recall myths that stand in for answers to these questions. At a time when conservatism is surging in Canada under the banner of Pierre Poilievre, Diefenbaker’s story may also hold lessons for future Tory governments.

Ibbitson’s book skillfully tells the story of Diefenbaker’s life alongside his Liberal archrival, former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. Like Diefenbaker, Pearson was a veteran of World War I, where he was given the nickname “Mike” because “Lester” was too “sissified” for the pilots flying canvas falcons. Diefenbaker would earn his nickname “the Chief” in politics after the war. Both Diefenbaker and Pearson had somewhat mysterious discharge stories that become less awkward when one considers the enormous casualty rates for Canadian infantry officers and pilots on French and Flemish soil.

Whereas Diefenbaker worked as a defence lawyer in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Pearson worked in London as a diplomat, as a professor of history at the University of Toronto, and then in Ottawa as secretary of external affairs under Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King. In this last role, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to resolve the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. Diefenbaker was the gruff Westerner who thrived when speaking in court, in parliament, or when addressing crowds from his railcar. Pearson was tactfully uncomfortable and uncharismatic in public but charming in person.

If Pearson had not died seven years prior, he might have been sitting affably in the audience at Diefenbaker’s funeral, at ease and unaware of the bomb threat. Ibbitson tells Pearson’s story just as deftly as Diefenbaker’s, but Pearson’s side of the duel is more important for explaining Diefenbaker because only the Chief’s life still remains clouded in mythic smoke.

The Myth of the Avro Arrow

My own Diefenbaker myth was introduced in childhood. I lived in the United States for two years as a young boy and I remember my American friends mocking Canada (and me) for its (our) lack of military prowess. My brothers and I asked our dad about Canada’s military and he bought us books about Juno Beach and the Royal Canadian Air Force’s bombing campaigns over occupied Europe. He also found a CBC docudrama on the Avro CF-105 Arrow, a delta-wing interceptor jet designed and tested in Canada in the late 1950s. The Avro Arrow was supposed to be one of the most advanced interceptor jets of its time, perfect for shooting down Soviet bombers over the North Pole. Eventually, the Arrow was cancelled by Prime Minister Diefenbaker due to high costs and the lack of a market for the plane among Canada’s allies.

My boyish brain latched on to Arrow’s myth to defend Canada’s honour from my Yankee pals: Canada could have had the best jet in the world if not for that jerk Diefenbaker. The myth is that Diefenbaker incompetently betrayed his own nation’s claim to military greatness with this glorious plane.

Ibbitson’s book helps debunk this myth of anti-nationalist incompetence. The myth of the Avro Arrow is probably one of the most prominent reasons why some Canadians associate Diefenbaker with incompetence, but it was a competent and necessary decision to end the program. In his book, Ibbitson clearly outlines how the high cost of the plane combined with the flooded market for interceptors (the United States and the United Kingdom developed their own rival models) and advances in surface-to-air missiles made the Arrow an economic and strategic dead-end.

The Liberals too had planned to cancel the program before Diefenbaker’s Tories won the 1957 election and a super-majority in 1958. Diefenbaker gained that historic majority by winning the old Tory heartland of Southern Ontario, the Chief’s homeland of Western Canada, and Catholic nationalist Quebec.

When Diefenbaker cancelled the Arrow program in 1959, though, the Avro Company collapsed and fifteen thousand Ontarians lost their jobs. Many moved to California to become part of the nascent NASA Apollo program. Pearson attacked the government for its “fumbling, confusion, and delay” on a decision that had already been approved by the previous Liberal cabinet (which included Pearson). Although the Arrow cannot be singly blamed, Pearson’s Liberals would make major inroads into the Southern Ontario ridings where those jobs were lost in the 1962 election that reduced Diefenbaker’s government to a minority. Diefenbaker would not win them back in the 1963 election that kicked his Tories out of power. 

The Myth of Nationalist Tragedy

It is somewhat ironic that Diefenbaker was best known by schoolboys for betraying Canada’s national military interests. He is still celebrated among literary types, foreign policy wonks, and philosophers for defending Canadian nationalism in his refusal to bow to US President John F. Kennedy’s wish for Canada to equip its interceptor jets and missiles with tactical nuclear warheads under American control.

The second nationalist myth is that Diefenbaker was the last prime minister to stand up for Canadian sovereignty. The myth is telling, since Diefenbaker lost the 1963 election to Pearson while campaigning on the issue of the nuclear warheads and American meddling with Canadian sovereignty. The political theorist George Grant has even claimed that Diefenbaker’s defeat in 1963 signaled “the disappearance of Canada.” 

Ibbitson complicates the story by explaining how in the background of the struggle over the nuclear warheads lay intense personal hatred between Diefenbaker and Kennedy. Diefenbaker got along well with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a fellow veteran and skeptic of interventionist foreign policy. He did not get along with Kennedy. If readers thirst for political drama in a supposedly more civilized era of high statesmanship, then this part of The Duel will quench.

At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, while US forces had gone to Defcon 3, Diefenbaker (“Diefenbawker” in Kennedy’s infuriating mispronunciation) refused to raise Canadian forces to the same level. Kennedy hadn’t consulted Diefenbaker on the crisis, despite Canada’s membership in NORAD, and when Diefenbaker responded by refusing to raise the alert, his own Minister of Defence Douglas Harkness ordered Canadian forces on full alert without authorization. When the Americans raised their Strategic Air Command and certain naval units to Defcon 2, the highest level short of war, Diefenbaker “reluctantly agreed to a state of military readiness that, through insubordination, already existed.”

Kennedy then ratcheted up pressure for Canada to accept nuclear warheads that would remain under American control, and by all-but-openly supported Pearson’s bid to become prime minister. The Americans were able to exploit divisions within Diefenbaker’s own cabinet—Harkness supported the American plan while the Minister of External Affairs Howard Green opposed it in the name of disarmament and multilateralism. Ibbitson surveys anecdotal evidence suggesting that the Americans may have deliberately helped create a diplomatic crisis when an American general publicly announced that Canada had “committed some of its force” to use the American warheads.

When an enraged Diefenbaker chose Green’s side, after attempting to resign as prime minister in the face of a cabinet revolt, Harkness resigned in protest. Diefenbaker then fought the 1963 election on the issue of national sovereignty against American domination. He opened his campaign saying, “It’s me against the Americans, fighting for the little guy.”

This all played to Mike Pearson’s advantage. Pearson enjoyed excellent relations with Kennedy. Even before the Cuban Missile Crisis, in the midst of the 1962 election, Kennedy invited Pearson to the White House for an event honouring Nobel Laureates. Diefenbaker excoriated the American ambassador about this and Kennedy reportedly called the Prime Minister a “prick,” a “fucker,” and threatened to “cut his balls off.” Although Pearson had at one point opposed Canada obtaining nuclear warheads, he shrewdly changed his mind as public opinion shifted against Diefenbaker’s stand in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This may have made him a bit too popular in Washington.

Kennedy went so far as to use a journalist intermediary to call Pearson’s campaign and offer him assistance in the 1963 election. A janitor at the campaign event answered the phone and managed to get Pearson on the phone. Pearson replied to the journalist’s message from the president in a very telling way: “For God’s sake tell the President to keep his mouth shut.”

The janitor was sworn to secrecy and Pearson noted in his memoirs that “this was a narrow escape.” Pearson won a minority government and Canada accepted the warheads. His political protégé, Pierre Trudeau, would later have them removed.

What remains admirable about Diefenbaker is that he didn’t just try to respond to public opinion: he tried to shape it by directly appealing to Canadians.

In Ibbitson’s telling, Diefenbaker does not really come across as the doomed nationalist of mythic legend. A more complicated portrait emerges. Pearson appears to have won the 1963 election because of Diefenbaker’s policy competence in the Avro affair, and incompetent political management of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Diefenbaker is unfairly derided for competence and lionized for incompetence.

Attempts at contrasting Diefenbaker’s nationalism and what Grant referred to as Pearson’s “continentalism” become hollower still once Ibbitson outlines their shared Keynesian economic nationalism. Whereas Diefenbaker unsuccessfully tried to shift Canada’s trade balance away from the Americans towards the Commonwealth, Pearson’s first budget included a 30 percent tax on the sale of Canadian firms to foreign firms and required 25 percent Canadian interest in foreign-owned subsidiaries. Pearson’s initial foray into such nationalism withered under pressure from his friend in Washington, but Grant’s “continentalist” would not have approved that budget.

What remains admirable about Diefenbaker in all this mess is that, unlike Pearson, as a leader he didn’t just try to respond to public opinion: he tried to shape it by directly appealing to Canadians.

The Myth of “One Canada”

The era of Diefenbaker and Pearson featured the first rumblings of the national unity crisis that would consume Canadian politics throughout the last third of the twentieth century. In the last week of the 1963 election, two bombs exploded in Montreal, and a third was disarmed just before Diefenbaker’s railway car could pass over it. The bombs were likely planted by the newly formed Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ)—a separatist terrorist cell that would eventually be responsible for 200 bombings, the kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross, and the murder of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. When informed about the bomb on his railway line, Diefenbaker growled: “Is this Ireland?”

Quebec has always been nationalist in some fashion, but during this time it transitioned from Catholic nationalism to secular cultural nationalism (or ethnonationalism in the eyes of critics). Diefenbaker’s electoral victory in 1957 was assisted by the Catholic nationalism of Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale, who enlisted his party machine to help the federal Conservatives. But Duplessis died in 1959, and by the time Diefenbaker was defeated by Pearson in 1963, the Quiet Revolution (La révolution tranquille) was well underway. Rates of francophone church attendance (and fertility rates) began to plummet in urban areas.

Jean Lesage’s provincial Liberals were elected in 1960 and began to use the provincial state to displace the Catholic Church’s role in education and health care, while also building the provincial welfare-state and hydroelectric megaprojects. In the American vernacular, if you combined Duplessis’s Catholicism and Lesage’s dirigisme, the result would probably be the famous integralist Adrian Vermeule’s ideal regime.

Ibbitson does not admit it, but he appears to some extent to agree with Grant’s assessment of Diefenbaker’s mishandling of québécois nationalism. Grant argued that Diefenbaker’s failure to understand French Canada and to “respect the rights of French Canadians qua community” was “bewildering” and “his most tragic mistake.” Diefenbaker began and ended his political career by appealing to the idea of “One Canada,” the idea that Canada should be a place for citizens from every ethnicity and background. The idea informed several of his most progressive policies such as granting First Nations the right to vote in federal elections and ending de facto discriminatory immigration policy. He was clearly influenced by his upbringing as a boy who suffered discrimination due to his German heritage on the more ethnically diverse prairies of Saskatchewan. He was implacably hostile to the concept of Canada as a compact of “deux nations” (two nations), English and French.

Ibbitson shows how this “One Canada” concept did not hurt Diefenbaker in Quebec when he won a super-majority in 1958 because the Quiet Revolution had not yet swept aside Duplessis. In some ways, by winning in Quebec in a supermajority, he was the first Tory prime minister to experience the difficult task of appealing to both Western Canadian and Québécois concerns.

But Diefenbaker did not reward Quebec voters or Duplessis: his first cabinet featured only one francophone from Quebec. He also clearly failed to cultivate a way to reconcile his concept of One Canada with his attachment to Canada’s British heritage, at least not in a way that appealed to the changing concerns of Quebec. This became all the more obvious after the Conservative’s defeat in 1963. The Chief hung on to power and vigorously opposed Pearson’s proposal to change the Canadian flag from the old Red Ensign to a new Maple Leaf design. But this attachment to the Red Ensign was hard to square with the idea that Canada is “One Nation” for citizens of all ethnicities because the Red Ensign prominently featured the Union Jack. For many, it symbolized Canadians of British descent, and most francophones were indifferent or hostile to it.

Diefenbaker’s own Quebec caucus revolted against him during the flag debates. His highest profile Quebec MP, Léon Balcer, would sit as an independent in the 1965 election and state, “There is no place for a French Canadian in the party of John Diefenbaker.” Pearson’s victory in the flag debate showcased how he was the savvier politician and comparatively more sensitive to the shifting attitudes of la belle province.

However, Ibbitson also qualifies these criticisms. Diefenbaker established the principle of rotating French and English Governors General (though this principle has since been broken by Justin Trudeau’s appointment of Mary Simon). He also brought simultaneous translation in both languages to the House of Commons, which greatly helped francophone MPs follow debates. Ibbitson also rightly points out that Diefenbaker’s vision of One Canada was not far off from Pierre Trudeau’s ideal of a unified bilingual nation, and both men were hostile to the deux nations idea of Canada as a French-English compact.

Diefenbaker fought the idea that Canada was “two nations” to the bitter end. He even (unsuccessfully) entered the 1967 Tory leadership race to succeed himself because he felt that none of the candidates sufficiently opposed the deux nations theory. Ibbitson notes that Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper would eventually reject Diefenbaker’s ideal of One Canada by recognizing Quebec as “a nation within a united Canada.”

Ibbitson could have been kinder to Diefenbaker by noting how, notwithstanding Harper’s comparative success, previous attempts to wrangle Western and Quebec conservatives under “two nations” proved catastrophic for the governments of Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney. In contemporary politics, Pierre Poilievre, a Westerner who prizes civil liberties like Diefenbaker, has been courting Quebec voters with praise for their nationalism, but so far they appear relatively resistant to his charms. That may prove a blessing for him and allow him to channel more Diefenbaker-style messaging.

The People’s Chief

Why did Joe Clark joke about Diefenbaker wanting the bomb to go off at the Chief’s funeral? Diefenbaker loathed politicians even as he became one. He hated the Americans, above all Kennedy, for supporting Pearson. He hated the members of his own cabinet for betraying him in the fight for Canadian sovereignty. He hated the bien pensant members of his own party, including Clark, who revolted against his leadership and were willing to play ball with Quebec nationalism. That is not to say, however, that he exhibited personal animosity for all of his political rivals—Ibbitson shows a photo of Diefenbaker and Pearson sharing a laugh together after their political battles had ended.

Diefenbaker the defence lawyer was an unparalleled parliamentarian and critic of government incompetence, but he then became part of Ottawa’s incompetent machine. The Duel is meant to raise Diefenbaker back up from the myths of the Avro Arrow and his tragic defence of sovereignty for One Nation. Alongside his criticisms, Ibbitson lays praise on Diefenbaker for introducing Canada’s federal statutory bill of rights, ending European-focused immigration policy, expanding Canada’s welfare state, and attending to provincial concerns about the state of Canadian federalism.

Some of this acclaim would not sit well with Diefenbaker. For example, Ibbitson notes how Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights was not an effective measure for empowering judges to strike down violations of rights, but glowingly praises this reform for laying the groundwork for Pierre Trudeau’s 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But the Canadian Supreme Court has used the Charter in ways that would make Diefenbaker’s jowls quiver with fury.

Its most recent controversial decision in Attorney General of Canada v. Power held that Canadian legislatures can be held liable for acts committed within the legislative process. The decision is judicial vandalism against Diefenbaker’s ideal of parliamentary government. The Charter has also been used to enable the right to government-assisted suicide, the right to strike, the right for ethnic minority teachers to avoid tests for grade 7 math, and more. Ibbitson writes cruel history with this kind of praise.

Diefenbaker needs no rehabilitation in one respect. The book ends with Ibbitson recalling his mom and grandma in distress watching Diefenbaker’s defenestration at the 1967 Tory leadership convention. They told him Diefenbaker was a “great leader” being betrayed by “awful men.” Ibbitson reports that his family “were inspired by his vision of One Canada, who wept with him when the red ensign was lowered, who would have stood silently at a crossing had the funeral train rumbled through their town.”

That would sit better with the people’s Chief.