Working the Dead Beat (20 page)

On January 1, 1967, Robichaud, who had campaigned to abolish a “discriminatory” premium tax on hospital services, introduced sweeping reform legislation. The program involved a massive shift of public services from local governments to the province, which took over services to the people while municipalities kept control of services to property. Thirty-four school districts replaced 422 feuding, ill-equipped bodies, centralized taxation assessments were instituted, and the government took control of essential services.

Municipal tax concessions to industry were wiped out, incurring the wrath of New Brunswick billionaire K. C. Irving. His newspapers campaigned against the reforms, coining the phrase “robbing Peter to pay Pierre”: a reference to the more prosperous English-speaking areas having to share their wealth with the mostly French-speaking poorer areas. The reforms required 131 bills and two years of sometimes bitter debate before they were passed into law. The rich-versus-poor and English-versus-French rancour, fanned by the Irving newspapers, led to such alarming threats against the premier and his family that armed guards were employed to protect them.

Besides the economic reforms, Robichaud also introduced fundamental language and educational changes, taking special pride in founding the French-language Université de Moncton in June 1963, adopting a provincial flag in 1965, and declaring New Brunswick a bilingual province in 1969. “Language rights are more than legal rights,” he said in 1969 when he introduced the legislation. “They are precious cultural rights, going deep into the revered past and touching the historic traditions of all our people.”

Both Robichaud and Roblin were touted as federal leaders. While he was still premier, Robichaud was regarded in some Liberal circles as the “little Laurier,” a reference not only to his small stature but to his outsize reputation as a successor to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, one of the legends of the Liberal Party. Many thought of him as heir apparent to Prime Minister Lester Pearson. Indeed, Pearson had offered him a choice of portfolios if he would run for the federal Liberals, but Robichaud wasn't interested in leaving New Brunswick just as his equal-opportunity program was netting results.

After Pierre Trudeau became Liberal prime minister in 1968, Robichaud hoped for an appointment to the judiciary to offer him a graceful way to step down as premier after a frenetic decade of political change. When it didn't materialize, he reluctantly called a provincial election for October 26, 1970. The timing was disastrous, not least because of the terrorist actions of two independent cells of the Front de libération du Québec in the midst of the campaign: the kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross and the abduction and murder of Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte. Even though Robichaud quickly endorsed Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act, the electorate wasn't about to give a mandate to a francophone premier in those seemingly treacherous days. Robichaud's Liberals lost to Richard Hatfield's Progressive Conservatives, 32 seats to 26.

Robichaud seemed exhausted. Years later he acknowledged that he hadn't campaigned hard enough. “I didn't fight the way I had fought previous elections,” he told the
Globe and Mail
in 1992. “I had reached my ambitions when I was too young and I was fed up. When I was fed up, people [my age, forty-five] were just starting in politics.”

Trudeau offered him an ambassadorship, which he declined because his son Jean-Claude had serious kidney disease and had to be close to a dialysis unit (Jean-Claude died of kidney failure in 1976, and Robichaud's wife, Lorraine, in 1980.) Instead he accepted an appointment as chair of the International Joint Commission in 1971 and a Senate seat in 1973. He was not yet fifty.

UNLIKE ROBICHAUD, ROBLIN
tippy-toed into federal politics while he was still premier of Manitoba. Proficiently bilingual, a believer in “many cultures, two languages, One Nation,” and Diefenbaker's preferred successor, he belatedly became a candidate when Diefenbaker, having refused to step down quietly, forced a publicly humiliating leadership contest at a party convention in September 1967.

Politicos still argue about Roblin's candidacy. Did he let his loyalty to Diefenbaker, whose electoral sweep in 1958 had bolstered Roblin's own success at the polls in Manitoba the following year, make him wait too long to enter the fray? Some say he was all set to declare on July 25, 1967, but was pre-empted by the political fallout and media scramble following Charles de Gaulle's reckless exhortation “
Vive le Québec libre
” to roaring
séparatiste
crowds from a balcony at City Hall in Montreal the day before.

Political organizer and Diefenbaker foe Dalton Camp, who had courted both Roblin and Stanfield as leadership candidates, had grown impatient with Roblin's dilly-dallying. “Duff wanted to wait until all the presents were under the tree,” he confided to cronies. By the time Roblin finally declared, Stanfield had already entered the contest with the backing, organizational commitment, and razzmatazz of the Camp organization. Although Stanfield's French was poor and his provincial accomplishments lacklustre, the Nova Scotia premier defeated Roblin on the fifth ballot at the leadership convention in Toronto in September 1967.

Having lost his bid for leadership of the federal party, Roblin resigned as Manitoba premier in November 1967. He ran federally in Winnipeg South, supposedly a PC stronghold, which included part of his old provincial riding of Wolseley, in June 1968. “He was the wrong man in the wrong party at the wrong time,” said victorious Liberal E. B. Osler on election night. In fact, Roblin was done in by the tsunami of Trudeaumania and local displeasure at a provincial sales tax his government had instituted the year before.

In 1970 Roblin joined the corporate world as director, executive vice-­president, and then president of Canadian Pacific Investments Ltd. in Montreal. Four years later he again made a run for political office, winning the PC nomination for the federal riding in Peterborough, Ontario. As a popular and distinguished former premier of Manitoba, Roblin failed to anticipate the opposition he would encounter, not only from the local Liberal candidate, Hugh Faulkner, but also from the
Peterborough Examiner
, the town newspaper, which took editorial exception to what it considered parachute tactics by the Progressive Conservatives.

As Roblin admitted in his memoirs, running in an Ontario riding was a huge mistake. He was roundly defeated, but he returned to public life when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau appointed him to the Senate in 1978. Brian Mulroney named him leader of the government in the Senate in 1984, which gave him a seat at the Cabinet table.

A progressive to the core, Roblin was a vocal supporter of Senate reform even while sitting as a member of the upper chamber. In 1987 he wrote a letter to the
Globe and Mail
arguing in favour of an elected Senate because “the present body is responsible in no parliamentary sense and representative in no democratic sense.” He stepped down from the Senate in 1992 when he reached seventy-five, the mandatory retirement age.

Among the tributes was one from Robichaud, who rose in the Senate chamber and said: “I want to tell Duff Roblin . . . how proud I was of him, and I want to tell [his family] that Duff Roblin is a great Canadian . . . He consistently talked about the Metis, because they were of special interest to him. He was an honest, dedicated, sincere politician, but above all he was a great Canadian and still is.”

Robichaud, who was eight years younger than Roblin, continued to serve in the Senate, but he admitted in the late 1990s that he had grown “bored with the shenanigans.” After twenty years' service, he stepped down in 2000, when he turned seventy-five. He moved to a modest house on the Acadian shore of the Northumberland Strait near Bouctouche, N.B., with his second wife, Jacqueline Grignon, whom he had married in 1998.

As Frank McKenna, another visionary premier of New Brunswick, said after Robichaud died at seventy-nine of cancer, on January 6, 2005, “Diminutive in appearance, [he] was a giant in action. . . . He set a fire under New Brunswick that continues to rage. . . . He made us believe in ourselves. He firmly established us as a province that could punch above its weight at the national level.”

After retiring from the Senate, in 1993 Roblin accepted an appointment as chairman of a provincial commission into post-secondary education in Manitoba. After that he largely retired from public life, although he continued to play squash, play the bagpipes, and enjoy vigorous but not partisan discussions about politics, history, and contemporary events. He lived in good health into old age and had the pleasure of seeing himself proclaimed the “greatest Manitoban of all time” by the
Winnipeg Free Press
in 2008. He died, aged ninety-two, on May 30, 2010.

 

J. M. S. Careless

Historian

February 17, 1919 – April 6, 2009

I
F EVER A
person soared above the inherent liabilities of his name, it was historian J. M. S. (Maurice) Careless. As a scholar, writer, teacher, and family man he was the antithesis of negligence. Of course, that didn't mean that his moniker escaped titters and jokes, some of them made by the man himself. He liked to tell his students at the University of Toronto that having a professor named Careless shouldn't alarm them, because an earlier generation had been taught by a man named Wrong.

Careless was a triple-hitter as a historian: he was a diligent scholar who delved deeply into primary documents, he was a visionary who could discern patterns and develop theories to explain the past, and he was a compelling writer and an engaging stylist who could communicate his historical passions both in the seminar room and beyond to people who were curious about their country and how it had developed. Such was his prowess that he spawned a generation of enterprising scholars who built on his pioneering ideas in intellectual, urban, and regional history and went on to teach these emerging scholarly fields at universities across the country.

An undergraduate student of Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Frank Underhill, Careless taught at U of T for nearly four decades, attaining the rarefied rank of university professor and helping to build the history department into a pre-eminent centre of Canadian studies. He taught survey courses and undergraduate seminars, supervised doctoral students, and served as chairman of the department from 1959 to 1967. The Careless era represented an enormous expansion in hiring, a broadening of subject areas, and a democratization of the curriculum, including the controversial abandonment of the four-year honours program.

He was not as well known outside the profession as the previous chair, Donald Creighton, an early biographer of John A. Macdonald and proponent of the Laurentian thesis, which argues that Canada, a supplier of staples to European economies, developed economically and politically along the St. Lawrence River and other transportation routes. Among historians and students, however, Careless was every bit as revered as a teacher, researcher, theorist, literary stylist, and scholar.

In a way, Careless is the affable yin to Creighton's crusty yang. His metropolitan thesis — that cities grow as regional nodules because they harness, dominate, and then service the commercial, political, and cultural activities in their hinterlands — is both the counterpoint to and a refinement of Creighton's Laurentian thesis and Innis's staples theory. In an era when nationalist history dominated, Careless demonstrated that the study of local and regional history was key to understanding Canada and how it developed into a modern nation.

Like Creighton, Careless wrote a pioneering monograph on an icon of Canadian history; both studies are foundation blocks for scholars and buffs. However, Careless's monumental two-volume biography of George Brown — reformer, founding editor of the Toronto
Globe
(now the
Globe and Mail
), and father of Confederation — is a more complete picture of the human being behind the politician than is Creighton's magisterial biography of Brown's political rival Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada. Partly that's because Careless uncovered a trove of family letters and papers in Scotland that predated Brown's arrival in this country in 1843. They now reside at Library and Archives Canada for others to consult.

Compared to the often imperious Creighton, he was more approachable as a colleague and supervisor, although no less demanding of his students. He had trained as an intellectual historian by working on mid-Victorian values and beliefs, picking up on theories developed by his predecessor, the great political historian Frank Underhill. But his approach was different. Instead of looking at attitudes and political movements as rationalizations emerging from economic interests, Careless looked at ideas and intellectual history in social and cultural contexts, arguing that it was important to understand what people believed at a particular time, even though those ideas might be dismissed as irrelevant or nonsensical by subsequent generations.

He twice won the Governor General's Literary Award, for
Canada: A Story of Challenge
in 1953 and a decade later for the second volume of
Brown of the Globe
,
titled
Statesman of Confederation
. He wrote at least half a dozen other pivotal works, including
The Union of the Canadas
;
The Rise of Cities in Canada before 1914
;
Toronto to 1918: An Illustrated History
, which won the City of Toronto Book Award in 1985; and
Frontier and Metropolis
. Careless also co-edited the
Canadian Historical Review
and served as historical consultant on several films and television shows. He was duly honoured for these achievements, receiving, among other awards, the Order of Canada, the J. B. Tyrrell medal, membership in the Royal Society of Canada, and at least six honorary degrees.

Careless's life was not without stress. When he was twelve, he collided with a bus while riding his bicycle; after the accident, doctors had to amputate his right arm. Within the year he was writing so smoothly with his left hand that a teacher observed that his penmanship, then a highly prized skill, was now equally as bad as it had been before the accident. He didn't dwell on his infirmity. Instead, he coped by keeping his shoelaces done up, his neckties knotted, and his empty right sleeve tucked into his jacket pocket.

He disarmed strangers with his deft left-handed greeting and impressed his good friend Freeman Tovell with his one-handed typing when they were graduate students at Harvard in the early 1940s. As for his children, they later attested to their father's capacity to spank, build model trains, and carve a turkey single-handed. He also worked prodigiously. While everybody else would go to bed, he typically stayed up until three a.m. writing. Early the next morning he was off to the university to teach his courses, run his seminars, and conduct the business of the department and the university — just another day in a busy life.

JAMES MAURICE STOCKFORD
Careless was born in Toronto on February 17, 1919, three months after the end of the First World War. The younger son by nearly a decade of William Roy Careless, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Ada de Rees, he was essentially an only child. After elementary school he attended North Toronto Collegiate and then transferred to University of Toronto Schools, an academically elite boys' school. That's where he became interested in cultural history, according to a biographical article by Frederick H. Armstrong in
Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J. M. S. Careless
.

In 1936 he entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto. By the time he graduated with a history degree in 1940, Canada and Britain were at war. The Armed Forces weren't interested in sending a one-armed combatant overseas, so he enrolled at Harvard to do graduate work in medieval British intellectual history. Fascinated by ideas — the way they germinate in dense and diverse populations, how cities and regions develop independently of major centres, and how newspapers can disseminate political attitudes and theories — he settled on the convergence of Victorian liberalism and the proliferation of daily newspapers as a thesis topic.

Thwarted from doing primary research in English repositories because of the war, he pondered the problem with Underhill when he was back in Toronto for Christmas. Underhill directed him to the plentiful newspaper documentation on George Brown in Toronto. Fortuitously, Careless's Harvard professor, David Owen, agreed to supervise his thesis on Victorian liberalism in the Canadian colonial environment, even though the subject was technically outside Owen's own field of expertise. Later Careless showed the same leniency and openness to his own graduate students, never expecting them to “write footnotes to his work,” according to intellectual historian Carl Berger. “He was one of those people for whom you could do virtually anything you wanted as long as you had a lot of evidence and you were pursuing a serious line of enquiry.”

In the summer of 1939 Careless had met Betty Robinson, the daughter of industrialist Gordon Robinson, at Jackson's Point on Lake Simcoe. They were married on New Year's Eve 1941 in the chapel of Hart House at the University of Toronto. Careless's Harvard roommate Tovell acted as best man while the Robinson family chauffeur waited outside to rush the newlyweds to the registry office to obtain a visa for the new Mrs. Careless so that she could return to Boston with her husband.

Careless was seconded to the Naval History Office in Ottawa in 1943 and then to External Affairs, where he often worked with Hume Wrong, son of historian George M. Wrong, preparing briefings for the Parliamentary press gallery. The official reports, which were always released under the heading “Wrong and Careless,” gave wartime information bulletins an unlikely twist.

Near the end of the war Careless became an assistant to diplomat Saul Rae, dealing with prisoner exchanges with the enemy as the war approached its inevitable conclusion. A Swedish liner, the
Gripsholm
, transported Axis and Allied exchange candidates under a safe-conduct agreement, with the result that Careless was nicknamed “the Cruise Kid” because of his frequent sailings across the Atlantic.

After the German and Japanese capitulations in 1945, Careless was hired as a lecturer in the history department of the University of Toronto, simultaneously writing lectures and completing his dissertation. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1949, the year before he was granted his doctorate from Harvard. The next two decades were an incredibly busy time as the Careless family grew to include five children and he embarked on a bruising teaching and writing schedule. In the early years his wife typed manuscript pages for him after she put the children down for naps.

Careless succeeded Creighton as chair of the history department in 1959. He broadened, deepened, and expanded the department, which nearly doubled in the early 1960s and introduced Asian and immigration history, among other new fields. Those were the years when the baby boomers entered university, creating a huge demand for space and for academics to teach them.

When Careless retired in 1984, he was appointed professor emeritus. Of course,
retirement
was merely a word. He continued to write prolifically, to sit on committees, to serve the profession, and to expand the idea of history by serving as an advisor to regional history groups and documentary film units. He died on April 6, 2009, two days
after suffering a stroke. He was ninety.