Last week Doug Ford became the first premier to win three consecutive majority governments since Leslie Frost accomplished the feat on June 11, 1959. That election featured a ruling PC party that felt secure about its odds of victory, the Liberals attempting to climb out of a long tailspin, and public apathy over an unexciting campaign. Sound familiar?
Since becoming premier in 1949, Frost had led a popular government that had guided Ontario’s post-Second World War economic boom and its accompanying prosperity. The government’s popularity was reinforced when the party swept four byelections scattered across the province in May 1958. Seeing little reason to change course and facing a weak opposition, the 1959 PC platform simply promised to continue the government’s existing policies. The 31-page document outlined every single accomplishment the Tories had made under Frost.
Though the pace of campaigning wore him out, Frost still connected with voters, relying on, as biographer Roger Graham observed, “his broad smile, his outstretched hand, his knack for greeting people with some remembered contact from the past or a gracious word of recognition. He played to the hilt his role as wise but humble guardian of the public interest.”
Illustrations of Leslie Frost, Donald MacDonald, and John Wintermeyer by Lewis Parker, which accompanied interviews with the leaders published by the Toronto Star during the campaign.
One issue that concerned Frost was the fallout from the federal government’s decision to cancel the Avro Arrow aircraft project in February 1959. He disassociated himself from the federal Tories’ actions without explicitly condemning them in public.
Privately, it was a different story.
The party’s candidate in Peel, a young lawyer who was running to succeed recently deceased former premier Thomas Kennedy, went to the legislature to consult with Frost over how to handle the situation. There he witnessed a shouting match during a phone call between Frost and Prime Minister John Diefenbaker over the Arrow. The candidate, who had family roots in Brampton, found that people he knew refused to shake his hand. His campaign team concentrated on areas of the riding further away from the A.V. Roe plant in Malton, such as Caledon and Port Credit.
On election day, the candidate won by 1,200 votes over his Liberal challenger — a victory that started Bill Davis on the road to the premier’s office.
Meanwhile, the Liberals hoped for a revival. Ever since the party’s collapse in 1943, no leader had survived more than one election, with none coming remotely close to toppling the Tories. The party was perceived as directionless and heading to the right of the PCs. This time out it was led by John Wintermeyer, a Kitchener lawyer first elected to the legislature in 1955 as part of an 11 MPP Liberal caucus. Shortly after becoming leader in April 1958, Wintermeyer wrote an article for the Globe and Mail on what liberalism meant to him. “A Liberal is a person prepared to make changes, but not in the sense of irresponsible changes as proposed by socialism. In making changes a Liberal must be guided by responsibility.”
CCF campaign ad, Kitchener-Waterloo Record, June 10, 1959.
The Liberal platform called for improved teacher training, low-cost housing (with downpayments as low as $500), finishing Highway 401, transferable pensions that carry over from one job to another, agricultural marketing associations, hospital insurance, compulsory auto insurance, small business assistance, and $300 grants to students attending university away from home. The party’s main problem in relaying this platform to the public was a lack of funds: it was forced to cut back on all forms of advertising a week-and-a-half before election day. The federal Liberals couldn’t help financially as the party’s reserves were likewise depleted.
The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation came into the campaign with only three seats. While its national and provincial branches were laying the groundwork for its transformation into the NDP, the process wasn’t far enough along to distract during the campaign. Its platform called for stronger economic planning, more equitable pensions, and rooting out corruption (or, as leader Donald MacDonald put it in an interview with the Toronto Star, “the more insidious undermining of the basic structure and principles of government”).
Editorial cartoon by Duncan Macpherson, Toronto Star, June 10, 1959
MacDonald almost accidentally knocked himself out of the race. Upon arriving at a campaign stop in Fort Frances, he realized he had forgotten to sign his nomination paperwork in York South, which had to be filed the next day. He was able to secure a notarized statement but still had to deliver it back to Toronto. A local CCF worker flew it to Winnipeg, and from there it was flown back to Toronto and handed to MacDonald’s campaign manager.
The CCF hoped to turn voters against the government by hammering away at an old scandal. During 1956 and 1957, several MPPs made small profits buying and selling shares of the Northern Ontario Natural Gas Company, despite Frost’s instructions to his cabinet to divest themselves of any stock they held in companies that supplied natural gas. When word leaked out, two cabinet ministers resigned. It was then discovered that Wintermeyer had also played with NONG stock.
On the campaign trail, MacDonald kept discussing the scandal as an example of government corruption. The CCF even tried to slip the scandal into its campaign song, whose lyrics were set to the tune of the recent hit song “Sixteen Tons.”
They’re in sixteen years and what have you got?
A heap of promises and Tory rot
Political morals in a gruesome mess
Of highway scandals and natural gas
But apart from the ridings where the two disgraced former cabinet ministers were defeated, the scandal never stoked public anger.
The dullness of the campaign and inability of the opposition parties to build excitement created apathy among voters and the press. Nearly every major paper supported the status quo. The Toronto Star, which had supported the Liberals through their revolving door of leaders, suggested that its readers vote for “the best of the opposition candidates” to “clean out Conservative deadwood and curb excessive power.” Aware Frost would be re-elected, the Star declared that “for the sake of better government, for the sake of responsible government, the Tories must be rebuffed at the polls…sufficiently hard to end their arrogance and smugness and to restore public affairs openly and honestly to the people.”
Progressive Conservative ad, Lindsay Daily Post, June 8, 1959.
The Globe and Mail believed 296 candidates across 98 ridings was too many, and that Ontario needed a two-party system where the opposition was united instead of splintered. The Hamilton Spectator felt the CCF might be worthy of a look once it evolved into its new form, while also believing Wintermeyer needed four more years to build an effective opposition.
The lack of public enthusiasm manifested itself on June 11, when 57 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls, down 3 per cent from 1955. The PCs kept a comfortable majority but fell from 83 to 71 seats. Nearly all the Tory losses were in urban areas, especially Metro Toronto. The Liberals doubled their seat count from 11 to 22, while the CCF gained official party status with five seats.
Wintermeyer was pleased with the doubling of Liberal representation, but felt the existence of the CCF harmed his chances for a full victory. He told the Toronto Star that the result demonstrated “the difficulty of winning against an entrenched government with two opposition parties in the running.” The press was generally satisfied to see a larger opposition and to see Frost carry on yet be slightly humbled. “It is more obvious than ever before that the people of Ontario have deep faith in Mr. Frost,” the Globe and Mail observed.
One of the most unusual victories occurred in Hamilton East, where Norman Davison began a long career as a CCF/NDP MPP. Campaign worker Bill Andrus grew a beard which made him resemble Fidel Castro, who took power in Cuba earlier that year. It reputedly helped both Davison’s campaign and his day job as a brush salesman. “The beard worked so well for Andrus,” Hamilton city councillor Dave Lawrence, who also worked on Davison’s campaign, told the Toronto Star, “I think I may grow one myself.”
Photo from Hamilton East, Toronto Star, June 12, 1959
Frost was upset by CBC’s election night television coverage. The network arranged feeds from Wintermeyer’s Kitchener home and MacDonald’s Toronto campaign office, but none from any site connected to the premier in Lindsay. When Frost’s victory speech aired, it was accompanied by a still photo. He was upset by the network’s suggestion that he travel to Toronto to appear on-air once the results were in, especially after having exhausted himself while campaigning during a heatwave. “I thought the suggestion was the height of insolence,” he told the Globe and Mail. When the network responded that it would have been too difficult to set up a link without disrupting programming originating from eastern Ontario and Montreal, Frost argued private stations could have done a better job and that governments had no business being in the broadcasting industry.
Liberal campaign ad, Kitchener-Waterloo Record, June 10, 1959
Frost continued as premier until he retired in 1961 and was succeeded by John Robarts. MacDonald continued to lead his party after its transformation into the NDP, remaining at the helm until 1970. He remained an MPP until 1982, when he resigned to allow Bob Rae to win a seat in the legislature. Wintermeyer became the first Liberal leader since Mitch Hepburn in the 1930s to lead the Liberals for two elections in a row but resigned after the party lost again in 1963.
Shortly before he died in 1993, Wintermeyer was honoured as Kitchener’s Citizen of the Year for his support for numerous community causes. John Sweeney, who served as a Liberal MPP in the Kitchener area in the 1970s and 1980s and viewed Wintermeyer as a mentor, summarized him as “a non-political politician” who “was in it purely because he thought he could do something, as opposed to being a politician for the sake of being a politician.”
Sources: Old Man Ontario by Roger Graham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); The Happy Warrior by Donald C. MacDonald (Markham: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1988); Secular Socialists by J.T. Morley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); Bill Davis by Steve Paikin (Toronto: Dundurn, 2016); the June 12, 1959 edition of the Brantford Expositor; the June 3, 1959 edition of the Georgetown Herald; the May 17, 1958, May 30, 1959, June 12, 1959, and June 13, 1959 editions of the Globe and Mail; the June 10, 1959 edition of the Hamilton Spectator; the June 3, 1959, June 10, 1959, and the April 17, 1993 editions of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record; and the June 2, 1959, June 10, 1959, and June 12, 1959 editions of the Toronto Star.
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