He went out a weird, morbid old man, but John Diefenbaker was indisputably the biggest political sensation this country had ever produced. He won the biggest landslide in Canadian history. He walked through screaming, adoring crowds where tearful fans would kneel and kiss his coat. Sit back and listen to the heartbreaking tale of what it’s like to achieve the absolute pinnacle of political success … only to have it all stripped away, bit by excruciating bit. (Featuring special guests, diehard Diefenbaker buffs Jason Kenney and John Baird.)
Canada Did What?! is a Postmedia podcast that digs into the untold, surprising political stories of the last few decades with host Tristin Hopper. From the metric wars to Morgentaler, from the October Crisis to the abortion debate, we’re unpacking all the wildest political moments you might think you remember — and giving you the real story you never knew. We talk to the politicians, journalists and newsmakers who were right there when history happened. And we have a lot of fun doing it.
From March 4 until April 1, National Post will release one episode every Tuesday. Each episode tackles a misunderstood moment in recent Canadian history.
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Canada Did What?! Episode 3 transcript
Tristin Hopper: Here’s something you might not know about John Diefenbaker: You can’t dig up his corpse. As a rule, you’re generally not allowed to dig up dead prime ministers. But you physically cannot dig up Diefenbaker even if you wanted to, because he’s buried under several tonnes of concrete. And that’s by specific request of John Diefenbaker himself. Diefenbaker is buried on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan, next to an institution named for him: The Diefenbaker Canada Centre (whose address, by the way, is 101 Diefenbaker Place).
He was consigned to the earth in August, 1979. Accompanied by an honour guard of Mounties in red serge, he was lowered into the ground next to the recently exhumed casket of his wife Olive. She had died a few years before and had originally been buried in Ontario, before she was dug up and shipped across the country by request of her widowed husband. And then, both caskets were quietly covered with wet cement.
It was done because Diefenbaker was worried that people would steal his body, either to desecrate it or hold it for ransom. And this was the final act of the most elaborate and expensive funeral ever held for a Canadian first minister. In his final years, Diefenbaker had become obsessed by his funeral plans – to the point where it weirded out his aides. What’s more, the funeral Diefenbaker planned for himself was a deliberate copy of the funeral that Britain had held for Winston Churchill about 14 years prior. He even went with the same tombstone as Churchill; it’s just his and Olive’s full name, the date of birth and the date of death. As with Churchill, the idea was that he and Olive were so renowned that no more explanation was needed.
Awkwardly, Olive was his second wife. Diefenbaker’s first wife Edna died of leukemia in 1951, leaving him a widower. But she didn’t factor into this whole tomb plan; Edna is still in a conventional cemetery across the river where she’s buried next to her mother-in-law: John Diefenbaker’s mother Mary. So who the hell is this guy? What kind of maniac spends their golden years plotting out an obsessively detailed funeral for themselves, and then caps it off with a secretive entombment in concrete like some kind of Egyptian pharoah? I’ll tell you who: The most popular prime minister in Canadian history, and it’s not even close.
Welcome to Canada Did What?!, the show where we take the big Canadian political events you might think you remember and tell you the real stories you never knew. I’m Tristin Hopper, and in this episode, we’ll be delving into the incredibly bizarre and entertaining life of John Diefenbaker, and in so doing, we’re going to answer some of the deepest questions about Canada, the pursuit of power and of the meaning of life itself. Okay, maybe not that last one.
Diefenbaker – Prime Minister from 1957 until 1963, leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives for more than a decade — went out as a weird, morbid old man who had alienated basically all of his former allies. But 70 years ago, he was the biggest political sensation this country had ever produced. If you are an aspiring politician listening to this podcast, you could be a Wilfrid Laurier. You could be a Jean Chretien. You could even be a Pierre Trudeau. But you’ll never be John Diefenbaker.
Clip: In Canada, an upset election, ousted Prime Minister St. Laurent and his Liberal government had installed the conservative regime of John Diefenbaker.
Hopper: In the 1958 Canadian federal election, John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives won 208 of 265 seats in the House of Commons. It’s not only the biggest landslide in Canadian history, it’s one of the biggest ever in the entire commonwealth.
When MPs in Diefenbaker’s government went to work in the House of Commons, more than half of them looked across the aisle to opposition benches that were stuffed with more Progressive Conservative MPs. There weren’t nearly enough seats on the government side for all of them.
You ever heard about Trudeaumania? That period in the late 1960s when Pierre Trudeau was apparently so popular that girls were chasing him? Trudeau’s best-ever electoral showing was when he got 45 per cent of the popular vote. Diefenbaker destroyed that by nine points: In 1958, 54 per cent of every ballot cast was for Diefenbaker’s party; the highest ever.
He even swept Quebec. Which is amazing for any Canadian conservative, but particularly amazing for one whose French sounds like this (clip).
This prairie boy with a clunky German name had captured the hearts of the Canadian voter unlike anyone before or since. And if you know anything about him now, you probably know him mostly as the guy who cancelled the Avro Arrow. But there is so very much more to the Diefenbaker story. If you want to know what it’s like to achieve the absolute galactic pinnacle of political success, and then to have it all stripped away from you – bit by excruciating bit – then I suggest you buckle in for the rise and fall of John George Diefenbaker.
Here’s what happened in March, 1958 when Prime Minister Diefenbaker visited the small town of Essex, Ont., just outside Windsor. Crowds were described as so enthusiastic that police could not contain them as his small motorcade approached. As estimated 500 children surged past police, surrounded the prime minister’s car and mobbed him as he attempted to shake hands with local dignitaries. “The children would not be ignored,” reported the Windsor Daily Star. They demanded autographs. They pulled at his coat. They sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” 10 times. Some of them just stood there, dumbstruck and staring.
It was only supposed to be a routine 5-minute campaign stop. But it took Diefenbaker 20 minutes just to work his way through the crush of adoring children. This doesn’t really happen to Canadian leaders. You might get the occasional standing ovation from a Kiwanis Club, but you’re not going to be mobbed by throngs of near-hysterical children. You certainly wouldn’t be worshipped like some kind of messiah. But Diefenbaker being mobbed by children was just one of several surreal episodes from what was essentially a perfect campaign.
Here’s a witness describing the aftermath of a campaign speech that Diefenbaker gave in Winnipeg. “As he was walking to the door, I saw people kneel and kiss his coat. Not one, but many. People were in tears. People were delirious.” That comes from fellow Progressive Conservative MP and former cabinet minister Pierre Sevigny. Or there’s this account from Diefenbaker friend Eddie Goodman: “We were greeted by thousands who literally just wanted to touch the hem of Diefenbaker’s garment.” Goodman said that at one Diefenbaker campaign stop in the small town of Leamington, so many people had grabbed and shaken the Conservative leader’s hand that it was swollen and throbbing with pain by night’s end. Those anecdotes come from the Diefenbaker biography Rogue Tory by Denis Smith.
Jason Kenney: Isn’t it funny that everybody, I think, even kids who are taught — barely — no Canadian history now, have heard of Trudeau mania, but no one’s heard of Dief mania, which was very real. And of course, in that election, he ended up with the largest majority in Canadian history, still to this day, unbeaten, including by Mulroney super majority in 1984 and by anything that Pierre Trudeau did. So yeah, he was, he had this kind of weird anti charisma. He was certainly not a leader for the television age. He was an unhandsome man by objective standards, and he had this kind of jolly old-timey way of speaking. And yet he was a larger than life personality, and he was outside the mold. He broke the mold of the of the typical central Canadian, Laurentian politician, that staid sort of character like William Lyon Mackenzie King and and you couldn’t forget meeting John Diefenbaker. I think you could probably very quickly forget meeting Mackenzie King.
Hopper: That’s the voice of Jason Kenney. We’re talking to him because he actually met the guy. He’s also a former federal MP, former minister of Defence, immigration and a few other portfolios, and he was premier of Alberta for a while. Sixty-two-year-old John Diefenbaker was already the prime minister when the 1958 election kicked off. He’d won an upset victory the year before against Louis St. Laurent and the all-powerful Liberal machine, which had governed Canada for much of the century.
Diefenbaker had burst onto a mid-20th century Canadian political scene that was not particularly known for scenes of inspiration or human drama. He was also markedly different from what Canadians had come to expect from their politicians. Until then, Canadian politics was – and it sort of still is – an endeavour reserved for the Franco-British elite. People who came from political families who had family trees stretching deep into the colonial era.
Kenney: Perhaps an even bigger contrast to his old school Tory predecessors, like George Drew who were right out of Hollywood central casting, in terms of what you would imagine an old school Tories to be like the Tory party, you know, to coin a phrase, was a party of the Anglo, largely of the Anglo Canadian bourgeoisie and those working hard to join it.
Hopper: We’ve had 23 prime ministers as of this recording, and most of them have had some conventional surname from France or the British Isles: Laurier, King, Campbell, Macdonald, Thompson, Martin. And then John Diefenbaker comes right out of the blue with an obscure, four-syllable name originating in the hinterlands of Bavaria. Diefenbaker’s German immigrant grandfather probably would have pronounced it “TIEF-EN-BACH-ER.” And that’s an aspect of Diefenbaker that’s sort of lost on modern audiences. He was seen as a representative of the “new Canada.”
Up to this point, the country had basically been run by politicians whose family trees were filled with people who had been in Canada since the 18th century, if not before. People who often described the Canadian nation as a coming-together of French settlers, British settlers, and nobody else There was even a line from a 1949 campaign ad for Liberal Leader Louis St. Laurent that celebrated his pure Anglo-French pedigree, it said: “In blood, language and instincts he is the compact of our two great races.”
Kenney: He was an outsider, and he validated outsiders in a country that was very elite dominated. You know, there was the concept of the two founding nations, French and English. And Mackenzie King was literally a descendant of, sort of, the family compact era elites, St. Laurent, who succeeded Mackenzie King, was a French Canadian version of that. By the way, I’m a huge St. Laurent fan, that’s not criticism, but you had these very staid, gray members of the old elites, and then this charismatic prairie politician who was from neither British nor French backgrounds, who stylistically, he was populist and and connected with people and their aspirations. I think, in a way, he was a the first politician who personified the idea of equality of opportunity, born into poverty, born with no great pedigree, born outside the British French elites, grew up on the on the bald Canadian Prairies, became a defender of the underdog as a defense lawyer, was a great old, a classic style orator, and with a larger than life, personality.
Hopper: And in the 1958 election Diefenbaker didn’t spend the campaign talking about tariffs or division of power. He was whipping up swooning crowds with visions of a Northern utopia. And that’s vision with a capital “V” – that’s literally what his staffers called it: The Vision. The Vision was coming from a guy who had cut his political teeth giving unamplified speeches to audiences of rough-looking Prairie farmers. He was entertaining! He cracked jokes. He made sly innuendos. He levelled zingy insults. But he spoke of a Canada whose best days were ahead of it, and which hadn’t even begun to achieve the greatness of which it was capable.
Canada was going to develop its North the same way it had developed its West. In so doing the country was going to rapidly double in size; both economically and in terms of population. New provinces. A second Trans-Canada highway. Bottomless hydroelectric power. “Jobs for hundreds of thousands of Canadian people.” And we now introduce our second guest who hasn’t met Diefenbaker, but likes him very much.
John Baird: I’m John Baird, former conservative cabinet minister, and avid fan of John Diefenbaker.
Hopper: He even founded a human rights award in Diefenbaker’s name.
Baird: Dief was a populist. He actually, he was the, probably the first person to run against the Laurentian elite. As John Ibbitson phrased it, he genuinely cared about the little guy. Generally cared about the average Joe, and he was able to project that. And authenticity is the magic elixir in politics. It was the case in 1958 and still the case today. People thought it was authentic.
Hopper: What’s more, Diefenbaker’s Canada had room for all kinds of Canadians: “All races united in the concept of one Canada.” And that included native people. After centuries of Canada actively putting down “the Indian,” Diefenbaker said that native peoples would be welcomed as full citizens of this new pluralistic, unstoppable Canada.
MUSIC CUE
Clip: My creed as a Canadian is summed up in these words. I am a Canadian, a free Canadian; free to speak without fear; free to worship God in my own way; free to stand for what I think right; free to oppose what I believe wrong; free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind, for I am a Canadian.
Hopper: That was John Diefenbaker, from his album. Yes, an album. Unlike most of his peers, Diefenbaker recorded an LP. Released in 1967, it’s called I Am a Canadian.
There were a lot of trippy albums coming out in the late 1960s, but I Am a Canadian is up there. It’s a series of random spoken word musings by Diefenbaker, set against archival sound clips. You may have noticed that the clip we played was against a background of generic sounds from a railroad and the seashore – which is a little weird for a Saskatchewan politician. He reads the poem High Flight by American fighter pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr. He talks about the time he met the wife of former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Now, before we probe into the complex psyche of Canada’s most successful campaigner, let’s review all the best Diefenbaker lore. There is a very convoluted argument to be made that he helped cause the Kennedy assassination. President John F. Kennedy was wearing a back brace at the time he was shot, and this was a major reason he wasn’t able to duck before receiving a fatal shot to the head. JFK had long had a bad back, but it had been really badly tweaked during a 1961 visit to Ottawa when Diefenbaker compelled the U.S. president to plant a tree for the cameras (that tree is still there, by the way). The injury reawakened by the tree planting likely caused the need for the back brace JFK wore in Dallas.
Something that definitely did happen though: Diefenbaker’s life was once saved by another Prime Minister – a Liberal one. In 1965, the ex-prime minister Diefenbaker was taking a beach vacation to the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados. There, he discovers that one of the other guests is not only a fellow Canadian – but is a Liberal cabinet minister and future prime minister. A dashing 36-year-old John Turner. After trying their best to ignore each other, Diefenbaker goes for a swim in rough seas, gets caught by an undertow and starts to drown. Turner sees Diefenbaker’s waves for help, dives into the ocean, pulls the now-convulsing 70-year-old conservative to shore, and is just about to start CPR when Diefenbaker vomits up a bunch of seawater, sits up and says “thanks, John.” The two never speak of it again.
Baird: He was the last of his, of his generation of old style politicians, you know, brow cream, the jowls, and he was as a political cartoonist, said, a dream Prime Minister.
Kenney: The day after I met him in 1978 we had a lunch. My family had a lunch with him at the Royal Suite of Hotel Saskatchewan. And he was — he really loved sharing Ottawa gossip at the time. And somebody asked about Margaret Trudeau. This is ’78, I think she had just had her moment with the Rolling Stones, Studio 54 in New York, or something. And Diefenbaker sprung to her defense. And he said — because somebody said something critical about her at this lunch — and he said “That poor woman, if the world ever learns about how she has been wronged, she’ll be regarded as a saint.” I to this day, my mind spring is filled with trying to imagine what he meant by that.
And one last piece of Diefenbaker lore: There’s compelling evidence that he littered the country with illegitimate children. He never had any kids with either of his two wives.
But in the 2010s, Toronto man George Dryden – who really looked like John Diefenbaker – discovered that he wasn’t the biological son of his father, and suspected that it might have something to do with his mother spending a lot of time around a 72-year-old John Diefenbaker at the time of his conception. Around the same time, three brothers from Western Canada went public with family rumours that their father was an illegitimate Diefenbaker son – their grandmother had been Diefenbaker’s housekeeper.
The plot thickens when the three brothers ran genetic tests to find that they were closely related to George Dryden — the other guy whose mom had been spending a lot of time with Diefenbaker. No direct Diefenbaker relatives have ever given credence to the claims, and probably the only way we could know for sure is to exhume Diefenbaker to do a DNA test. But, as mentioned: He’s entombed in concrete.
Clip: Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds,— and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of.
Hopper: I’ll just do a quick aside here to address the one thing that most people know about John Diefenbaker: That he cancelled the project to build the Avro Arrow, a revolutionary made-in-Canada jet whose prototypes ranked as some of the world’s fastest objects at the time the feds axed the program.
Kenney: Let me say that it was a great tradition of Conservative campaigns to see how many times would you get a comment at the door, “I haven’t voted Tory since Diefenbaker scrapped the Avro Arrow.” Now, I think the last time I heard that was probably circa 2000 but that legend lived on in Canadian politics for several decades that you could talk to almost any Conservative candidate federally or provincially for the better part of the latter half of the 20th century, and they will have heard voters say right up into the late 90s, I’ve never voted Tory since Diefenbaker’s scrapped the Arrow.
Hopper: We could do a whole podcast about the Arrow but – without revealing my bias too much – it was an interceptor; an aircraft designed to go very fast in a straight line to shoot down incoming Soviet bombers over the Arctic. It couldn’t really do other things, as opposed to say – the F-35 – which can do all kinds of stuff. Anyways, modern militaries don’t really use interceptors anymore, mostly because there’s nothing for them to do. By the time Diefenbaker took office, the Soviet nuclear war plans were shifting from sending bombers over the Canadian arctic to sending missiles – and there’s very little the Arrow would have been able to do about incoming missiles. Also, the project was hideously plagued by cost overruns. Anyways, don’t take my word for it, here’s the man himself.
Clip: Having regard to the change in, in attitude of the USSR devoting itself more and more to missiles. And we found that the defense that would be available to Canada by 1962, when these aircraft would first be available, in general for the RCA, by that time, they would be ineffectual and (not operated.)
Hopper: At the absolute pinnacle of his triumph after that first, massive landslide election victory, Diefenbaker was battered and exhausted. As the election returns streamed into the Prince Albert hotel serving as his election headquarters on the night of March 31, 1958, press reports stated that Diefenbaker spent much of the evening in a hotel bed upstairs. The victory was so total, so overwhelming, that Diefenbaker was described as exhausted and even shaken. One correspondent wrote that Diefenbaker greeted the triumph by “resting a weary head on his hands … and asking for the nation’s prayers.” If that you were at that campaign headquarters in 1958, you would have been forgiven for assuming that this was the beginning of a transformational era not just in politics, but in Canadian history generally. That Diefenbaker would charge into Ottawa to finally subvert the old order.
And then, after a decade or so, he would step aside gracefully and be anointed as a demi-god by a grateful nation. Ottawa would be serviced by Diefenbaker Airport. Every major city would have a Diefenbaker Boulevard. A whole new generation of Canadians would view their country and their national identity through Diefenbaker’s eyes. Every July 1, we would all pledge allegiance to Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights and recite his “I am a Canadian” soliloquy.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, that 1958 victory party was about as good as it got.
Diefenbaker would be prime minister for just six years. And he would have policy accomplishments. One was broadening civil rights for Status Indians. Right up until 1960, native peoples could only vote if they surrendered their Indian status. You essentially had to “become white” if you wanted the franchise. You also couldn’t legally purchase alcohol. Until it was reformed by Diefenbaker, the Indian Act still held that intoxicating liquors were something that everybody else could buy, but not you.
Baird: (He) changed the political landscape in Canada, because the prairies is still — in the West — is still rock solid Conservative, and the, you know, rural Canada finally got into the halls of, of power. And, you know, for — for a center right Conservative leader, to do things like give Aboriginals the vote, to give, put a woman in cabinet. That really is remarkable. He put a woman in cabinet. And I think was 1960 you know. When Pierre Trudeau stepped down in 1984 he only had two women.
Hopper: Diefenbaker also passed the Canadian Bill of Rights. This was the first Canadian document to codify a set of rights and freedoms shielded from government. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, “the right of the individual to equality before the law.” Although it was overshadowed by the much more convoluted Charter of Rights and Freedoms passed two decades later by the government of Pierre Trudeau, Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights contained all of the same basic guarantees, but without all the exceptions, loopholes, equivocations and other froo-froo of the Trudeau charter. Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights is a concise 900 words, Trudeau’s Charter is three times longer.
Kenney: He did have this bold vision, and he achieved a lot of it. The idea of pluralism that you’ve developed is is a huge part of that, for example: little, it’s little known fact that the first non Caucasian MP of non-European origin, elected was Douglas Chung. You talk about Diefenbaker attracting and mentoring young people. Well, Douglas Chung, born in Vancouver the 1920s when China, at a time when Chinese could not obtain citizenship or immigrate to Canada, could not enlist in the Second World War, initially. Eventually, they let him in and some other Chinese Canadians to serve in Special Forces, but because of his service, and as kind of sort of early civil rights activism, Mackenzie King was finally humiliated into having to grant citizenship to Chinese Canadians, as a bizarre thing to even think was a controversy in 1947, but for whom does Doug Chung run in 1957? He runs for John Diefenbaker Vancouver center is elected.
Diefenbaker later appoints him to be a representative candidate at the United Nations. Trailblazers, the first women cabinet minister, Ellen Fairclough, who, by the way, brought in eliminated through a rewrite of the Immigration Act discrimination on the grounds of country of origin. Just yesterday, I was receiving an honorary chieftaincy from the Blood Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy, and I’m sitting there in this in the Chief’s teepee, and he starts talking about John Diefenbaker being a proud member of the Blackfoot chieftaincy because of his special connection to the Blackfoot and the indigenous people generally.
Hopper: Anyways, the coda to the Diefenbaker story is that he did not give up power gracefully. It all had to be forcibly stripped from him like so many pulled teeth. After just one term, he lost his commanding majority in the House of Commons and had to oversee a minority caucus. A year after that, in 1963, he lost power entirely to Lester Pearson’s Liberals. Two years later, he was still Opposition Leader, and he lost again to the Pearson Liberals. Despite this, Diefenbaker doesn’t resign as leader of the Progressive Conservatives – which put the party in an awkward situation that hadn’t really happened before. The typical rules of a Canadian political party were that you stayed leader until you died or resigned – and if you lost twice in a row you were supposed to do the honourable thing and step aside.
But Diefenbaker just … didn’t, prompting the party to take the unprecedented step of forcing a party convention in Toronto for the singular purpose of crowbarring Diefenbaker out of the leadership. Diefenbaker shows up, pretends everything is fine, and gives a finger-wagging speech chastising his fellow party members for their disloyalty.
Clip: I’ve followed this party when I didn’t agree with policies, and I gave loyalty to leader after leader ‘cause I believed that there is no other way.”
Hopper: He’s politely cheered by the assembled conservatives, and then abjectly humiliated in their subsequent leadership vote. On the first ballot, Diefenbaker gets a distant fifth place. And even then he refuses to admit defeat. Here’s how he reacted to the ballot results:
Clip: “I am wounded but I am not slain.”
Hopper: And Diefenbaker would remain the MP for Prince Albert right up until the day he died. The man who came closest of anyone to achieving absolute power over Canada would live out his days exiled to the opposition benches. He became a kind of living ghost haunting Parliament Hill. All throughout the 1970s, every fresh-faced, idealistic politician striding into the national capital had to go to work in the same building as the stooped portent of what they could become. It also meant that if you were on a family vacation to Ottawa in the 1970s, you could just go and see John Diefenbaker. Go to Centre Block, knock on his office door, and more than likely you could probably get an audience with an ex-prime minister.
Baird: Let’s face it, he was he had a big ego, and he loved that sort of post that adulation that came in his period of post-premiership. For all of the criticism he got from the smart people, the clever people, the Dalton Camps, the Peter C. Newmans, the Globe and Mail, for all of that mockery, derision and criticism, he continued to feel validated by his special connection with ordinary people. So the pilgrimages that tourists and others would pay to his office would, I think, validate for him that he still had this special connection.
And you know what he did, and the evidence of it is his famous funeral train across the country, and he and he wrote this into his will, he wanted to go back via train, I think, partly because he understood it was a chance to say a last farewell. And some of the most plaintive photographs, I think, in all of Canadian political history, are the — I get chills just thinking about them — are the the prairie farm families gathered on the side of the road as that railway car goes by and they wave the last farewell to the great chieftain.
Hopper: Diefenbaker obtained the highest highs of Canadian electoral politics in large part because of a near-sociopathic refusal to quit. And it’s this same trait that would torture him in his golden years. In all this, Diefenbaker is perhaps the most tragic illustration of a problem that occurs somewhat often in Canadian politics: The leader who refuses to leave.
In modern Canadian history, there are no examples of a prime minister leaving office on a high. This happens in the US all the time. Ronald Reagan. Barack Obama. Bill Clinton; all of them ended their political careers when a majority of voters still liked them. Part of this is due to term limits; U.S. presidents don’t have the same ability to overstay their welcome. but there’s also a psychological element at play. The life of an ex-Canadian prime minister can be very bleak.
There are no knighthoods or peerages like in the U.K. There are no lifelong security details or billion-dollar presidential libraries like in the United States.
One moment you’re attending NATO summits and galas with foreign monarchs. The next, you are plunged right back into civilian life. This is a transition from which many people never fully recover. And it means that any Canadian first minister approaching the end of their career has nothing to look forward to except a deep, ignominious abyss. John Diefenbaker is the one prime minister who tried hardest to resist the abyss, and in the end that abyss arguably came for him harder than any of the others.
Former Diefenbaker Sean O’Sullivan called this “the tragedy of John Diefenbaker.” O’Sullivan was Diefenbaker’s executive assistant in the early 1970s, and would briefly serve as a Progressive Conservative MP. In his memoirs, O’Sullivan noted that despite the grandeur of Diefenbaker’s intricately planned funeral, with its Mountie honour guard and ceremonial pouring of concrete, the man had died alone and lonely. He was a widower for the second time, and O’Sullivan noted that Diefenbaker had fans and hangers-on, but no real friends.
We’ll let O’Sullivan take it from here: “At the close of his life we were all more than a little sad that his final years were spent in such isolation. John Diefenbaker, our hero, had become both a prisoner and a victim of his own legend.”
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