OttawaWatch: The legacy of the two Roberts -- Stanfield and Thompson

By Lloyd Mackey

THIS PAST month, Robert Lorne Stanfield, widely described as "the best prime minister Canada never had", died at the age of 89.

In the media coverage of his death, the 1972 federal election was frequently mentioned, but without reference to the involvement of Robert Thompson, about whom I wrote in October, in this space. At that time, I was talking about what the newly-merged Conservative party could learn from Canadian history.

Here is a brief synopsis of what I wrote at the time, followed by some new material taken from my coverage of Stanfield's funeral:

* * *

In the late sixties, after an effective run as a balance of power party in a "house of minorities" governed respectively by John Diefenbaker's Tories and Lester Pearson's Liberals, the national Social Credit party rolled itself over into the Progressive Conservatives, by then led by Nova Scotian Robert Stanfield. The rollover followed a Socred split along regional lines.

National Socred leader Robert Thompson became Stanfield's national campaign chair in the 1972 election, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory for the Tories. The Liberals won the election 109-107. Thompson lost his own attempt at re-election.

While he retired from the political scene, the groundwork laid by Thompson contributed to a resurgence of the Tories in the west, fed by the Socreds who followed him into the bigger tent. The Tories built on that resurgence, in time forming Joe Clark's short-lived government in 1979 and the two Mulroney sweeps in the 80s.

Robert Thompson was a small, stubby man who, by contrast, was a somewhat larger-than-life figure in the evangelical Christian communities of British Columbia and Alberta. When he died, six years ago, Franklin Graham, son of Billy, preached his funeral. Graham talked about how, when he founded Samaritan's Purse (of Christmas shoebox fame), his advisors told him to get "that Canadian, Thompson" to mentor him. Thompson, they suggested, knew the Christian relief and development field backward and forward.

Before he entered politics, Thompson was both an educator and a pilot. He put both skills to use in Ethiopia during and after World War II, as Emperor Haile Selassie's de facto minister of education. It is an understatement to say that the emperor's school system was badly in need of rebuilding after the war.

Thompson's role as an air force pilot took him into the Ethiopian battle theatre: His teacher background kept him there, seconded from what was then known as Sudan Interior Mission, to the Ethiopian government.

Returning to Canada, he entered politics as an MP from Red Deer, Alberta. He soon became leader of the national Social Credit party, which enjoyed considerable popularity in the West. That came somewhat on the coat tails of Ernest C. Manning's long-running Alberta Socred provincial government and its somewhat-similar British Columbia spinoff, presided over by W. A. C. Bennett.

Thompson's glory days are recounted in his book, House of Minorities. Suffice, for the moment, to note that the four major players in that house, were all, to a greater or lesser extent, men of faith and adherents to an evangelical form of Christianity. Besides Thompson, Diefenbaker and Pearson there was the NDP's Tommy Douglas, Baptist cleric-turned-social democratic pioneer.

Intriguingly, Thompson and Diefenbaker did not get along, particularly, but the Socred leader formed a fast friendship with Pearson, a peace-maker extraordinaire. They were known to pray together with some regularity, in Pearson's office, and the Liberal prime minister occasionally sent him on problem-solving missions to specific African countries.

Just a few days before his death, Thompson told me that the reason for Pearson's trust came out of their common wartime friendship with and respect for Emperor Selassie.

After Thompson retired from politics, he became an elder of sorts to those people in the evangelical community who had an interest in federal politics. While he did not play a prominent role in events that led to the Mulroney sweep, he was in the background, there, mentoring many in his own faith community who had political interests and aspirations. Among them were names like Benno Friesen, Jake Epp, Ross Belsher (also recently deceased), John Reimer and the late Jim Jepson -- all Conservative MPs who were part of what Mulroney affectionately referred to as his parliamentary "God squad".

* * * Stanfield, like Thompson, was a man of great integrity. But he never particularly wore his faith on his sleeve. He expressed himself thoughtfully and carefully and did not attempt to cultivate the dramatic flair that became an essential part of the style of his chief competitor, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Even in death, Stanfield's personal and political family chose to make his faith statement a carefully-guarded private matter. His funeral was held at St. Bartholomew's, a small stone Anglican church located two kilometres east of Parliament Hill. It is a church attended with some regularity by such as Governor-general Adrienne Clarkson and Environment Minister David Anderson.

Media were not permitted to intrude on the funeral itself. The family did allow the release of the order of service, which told us that two hymns, 'All People that on Earth do Dwell' and 'O Come all ye Faithful', were sung. And we know that St. Bartholomew's rector, Canon James Beall, based his homily on Revelation 21, which is the prophetic account of the new heaven and new earth that marks the establishing of Christ's kingdom.

Senator Lowell Murray, who delivered the eulogy, told some good stories that shone light on Stanfield's fine character. Opposed as he is to the current Conservative merger, Murray made one fleeting reference to Stanfield's support of official bilingualism, over the protests of some of his own western MPs. The message seemed to be that western conservatives are different from those in the east, making the management of the conservative option difficult at times.

But one sensed that the various political parents to the present Conservative merger wanted to ensure that the Stanfield death did not become a political football. They were probably both ethical and polite in so doing.

But we would not be faithful to the Stanfield legacy if we did not explore, as I have done above, the Stanfield-Thompson partnership and the legacy it produced for the Clark and Mulroney years. The newly merged party -- and their further-left competitors -- can learn much from that legacy. There are some strong parallels between what Stanfield and Thompson accomplished together and what is currently happening in the Conservative merger -- and some interesting contrasts.

Stanfield, from the east, was the stronger partner in the coming together of the Socreds and the Tories. The reverse is true in the present merger: the western-based Canadian Alliance is the stronger, although without the depth of history embedded in the Progressive Conservative Party. And the Socreds did not actually merge with the Conservatives, but merely rolled their caucus over. The federal Social Credit party still exists on paper, but has never regained even a shadow of its former self.

And it took another decade and two more leadership changes for the Stanfield/Thompson legacy to produce its fruit in terms of substantive Conservative success. Some are predicting that it might take that long at least to peel away the Liberal grip on governance. But they are arguing from the experience of the 1972 near-hit.

* * *

Having said what I have about Stanfield's careful and thoughtful approach, I will conclude by drawing on a March 1972 interview of Stanfield, which appeared in the United Church Observer. The magazine's then-editor, A. C. Forrest, for whom I was then working as a staff writer, did the interview as part of a series of the three major federal leaders of the day, Trudeau, Stanfield and David Lewis of the NDP.

Forrest, after some preamble, asked Stanfield if he believed in God. His answer was as follows:

Yes. I think there's an order and a purpose in the universe. I don't pretend to understand what that purpose is. There's a great deal beyond my comprehension and beyond the comprehension of mortal man but I'm not uneasy or uncomfortable about this. There is reason, and order, and there is sense. Although I can't understand it. I remember when I must have been very small and was reading one of these books of Bible stories that every youngster used to have, and was trying to conceive of God having always existed and not being able to conceive that. On the other hand, I couldn't imagine God having started from nothing, and I guess that was my first experience of accepting what, according to my intelligence, was a contradiction that I couldn't hope to understand. I suppose you'd call that faith.

When Forrest asked him if, in Canada, there was a corrosion of moral standards, Stanfield responded: