COLUMN: Carillon Flashback – October 14, 1965 – ‘Dief’ hammers at Liberals but the 1958 punch is missing

In a speech that covered every plank in the Conservative platform, plus a chapter of his own family history, Conservative leader John Diefenbaker wooed 700 Provencher voters during his first appearance in Steinbach since his triumphant 1958 campaign, seven years earlier.

For a full hour and 17 minutes, “Dief the Chief” used all the devices of the famous Diefenbaker rhetoric to show the Liberals up in the worst possible light, to an appreciative Steinbach audience during this, the 1965 campaign.

For those present, however, who remembered the triumphant Diefenbaker rally in 1958, the Steinbach meeting this time paled by comparison.

At that time, 3,000 people came to hear Diefenbaker when he spoke in the old Steinbach tabernacle building. Of these, 1,500 had to stand outside and the thunderous applause on that occasion formed the subject of press dispatches all across the country.

For the former Canadian prime minister, Friday’s stop here was the last of the day in a 200-mile hand-shaking tour that took him to coffee parties and receptions at Selkirk, Beausejour, Transcona and St Boniface.

For the Conservatives of Provencher, it was the highlight of the 1965 election campaign, and the biggest political rally east of the Red River since the politicians took to the hustings, four weeks earlier.

For non-committed voters and the public in general, it was an interesting meeting with a man who is recognized as one of the biggest platform attractions in Canadian politics.

In Friday’s speech, the former prime minister reached deep into the verbal grab bag for words to castigate his enemies and win the approval of his audience.

He opened up with a blast at reporters and news writers whose writings, he said, were filled with “untruthfulness and vituperation.” He likened them to the enemies faced by “that great Canadian statesman, Sir John A. Macdonald.”

Diefenbaker went back to his boyhood days near Fort Carleton, Saskatchewan, as he recalled the many racial origins of the people who were his neighbors during his youth. He told the audience he had resolved that if he ever got a chance, he’d do something to take away the taint of “second-class citizenship” experienced by people who were of neither English nor French descent. The Bill of Rights passed by the Diefenbaker government, he said, had succeeded in abolishing this discrimination.

Then there were flashes of an earlier Diefenbaker, as he launched into the connections between the Quebec scandals last year and the government, a theme which has been central to all his campaign speeches in this election so far. There has been a conspiracy of silence in the Liberal Party, Diefenbaker said, they believe that if they keep quiet about it, it’s going to go away.

“If the decent people of Canada, on November 8, were to return this government, it is frightful to think of what will be the result?”

Prior to Diefenbaker’s speech, Warner Jorgenson, MP for Provencher, spoke of the “calculated campaign of vilification” carried on against the Conservative leader by the Liberal Party.

Jorgenson also referred briefly to the split in the Tory party last year, when some people complained Diefenbaker ran a “one-man show.”

He also referred to various reports in the media that the 70-year-old Conservative leader was getting old and slow. Many of the reporters who spread these stories, Jorgenson said, had a hard time keeping up with Diefenbaker during his whirlwind tour of Provencher.