 With PETER BLACK Think Twice Before Standing Thrice
I'm kind of partial to Louis St. Laurent, for several reasons.
We signed the mortgage for our Quebec City house in a notary's office in a building on Grande Allée that was the former prime minister's family home. It's now a heritage site surrounded by office and apartment towers.
We have visited the place Louis was born in Compton, in the Eastern Townships; in fact, the J.B.M. St. Laurent general store, founded in 1879, is the big attraction in this particularly pleasant little village. Little Louis' mother was Mary Ann Broderick, a young Irish-Canadian school teacher, which partly explains the future PM's comfort in both language groups.
One of my friends and colleagues is a member of the St. Laurent clan and he, in many ways, embodies Uncle Louis' strong intellect, eloquent bilingualism, and innate understanding of how anglos and francos can get along if given half a chance.
And lastly, I was born during St. Laurent's nine-year reign, from 1948 to 1957, that weird post-war era where smokers in grey suits ruled, and the great North American dream was to have a car as big as a house, a house stocked with space-age appliances, and nuclear appliances aimed everywhere the Godless communists of the world turned.
St. Laurent was the last Liberal leader to lead his party to two consecutive majorities, in 1949 and 1953. Now Jean Chrétien is saying he wants to best Uncle Louis, and go for the triple crown, the hat trick of politics, a third straight majority government.
The only prime minister to pull that off since 1921 when the two-party era more or less ended, was Willie King (1935, 1940, 1945), and he almost lost the last one, even though he'd led the country to victory in the Second World War.
This is why suddenly Uncle Louis, as dull as he was gentle in life, is such an interesting subject.
St. Laurent was 75 years old when he went into the June, 1957 campaign. His Liberal government, boasting one of the strongest cabinets every assembled, was efficiently managing a booming post-war economy. Polls showed the Liberals well ahead in all parts of the country, even in the West, the base of the newly elected Conservative leader, John Diefenbaker.
The Liberals didn't consider Diefenbaker, 61 years old when he was elected Tory leader in 1956, much of a threat. He had been kicking around federal and provincial politics long enough to not be seen as presenting a credible alternative to the dream team managed by Uncle Louis. Polls showed an exceptionally high rating for St. Laurent's performance, 75 percent, going into the 1957 election.
A popular leader of a party high in the polls, a robust economy, a government surplus, dormant nationalism in a Quebec under Duplessis, these, plus any number of ready rationalizations led Liberal party strategists to believe they were invincible, that the party might lose some of the flab of its majority, but it would be re-elected easily. And so St. Laurent, never the most vigorous nor exciting individual, even in his youth, hit the campaign trail in pursuit of majority number three.
As they say, the Liberals didn't know what hit them. When the votes were counted the Grits had lost 65 of their 170 seats and Diefenbaker, scoring big in the Maritimes and Ontario (thanks to the help of Premier Leslie Frost), and with a nine-seat beachhead in Quebec, was the prime minister-elect with 112 seats.
Virtually all analyses of the 1957 upset point to the Liberals as a party too long in power, having had a grip on Ottawa since the return of King in 1935, and lacking in a vision that stirred the imagination of an electorate craving something more inspiring than efficient management and balanced books.
To enough voters in enough key seats, Diefenbaker may have been a bit of a wild card, but, by gosh, he sure was fired up about Canada.
There may be some lessons for Jean Chrétien in the St. Laurent experience.
Chrétien has parlayed his unbridled passion for Canada into a remarkable political career and two majority governments.
Now he says he wants to lead the Liberals into the next election because he runs a good government with a nice surplus.
Uncle Louis might advise Jean to think twice before going thrice.
Copyright © 1999 Peter Black/Log Cabin Chronicles/8.99 |
