“Which would you rather be, rich or famous?” “Rich”, the guests, several young middle-aged couples, replied.” My father, the host, argued that he would much rather be famous. He certainly didn’t end up rich although he’d started out in life the son of a relatively rich man. He did succeed in achieving something between fame and notoriety, at least in the circles he travelled in.
In 1958, we moved to Haney, B.C. after Dad bought a fuel oil business, with the help of his parents. Dad, a natural salesman, always enjoyed talking to people more than bookkeeping or other necessary desk jobs to manage a business. One day, a local guy came into his office and timidly asked him if the rumour going around the small town were true. Was he really an English Lord hiding incognito in Canada? The rumour mill had even come up with a title for Dad, who had no trace of an English accent. Did his denials just make people believe it more, or did he not try very hard to quell small-town gossip? It occurs to me now that Dad might have been spreading his story around town of dancing with Lady Mountbatten during the War.
You might say that Dad’s first attempt to be famous, was when he got involved in electoral politics in 1948 although it was very brief. This happened the very day after I was born. In the excitement of going around town in rowboat rescuing people during the great spring flood of 1948, and his enthusiasm at becoming a father for the first time, he ended up at the nominating meeting of the Drumheller, Alberta Liberal party. Maybe he won the nomination because he was a small-town boy returned from the War, maybe his oratorical powers swayed them, or perhaps it wasn’t that easy to recruit a candidate in that rural Alberta Social Credit constituency. I doubt very much that he consulted his new wife about his decision to go into politics.
My grandfather, who had not been consulted either, when told about the nomination exploded, “You god damned fool! You don’t even have enough money to bring your wife and baby home from the hospital! How are you going to pay the deposit to run?” That quickly ended Dad’s first attempt at electoral politics.
When I was four years old, Dad took me to Vancouver City Hall. “Someone” at the Lions’ Club had suggested that getting a photograph of a cute little girl selling a carnation to the mayor would be good for their mothers’ day fundraising publicity. It was right up Dad’s alley. I remember holding a little box of carnations around my neck and some secretaries saying I was cute dressed in my little McDonald tartan kilt and tam. I remember offering Mayor Fred Hulme a carnation – red if your mother was living, white if not and pink for I don’t know what . I’m not sure I remember the mayor saying, “And I have a little something for the father” as he opened a cabinet and offered my Dad a drink of Scotch, or whether I just remember Dad telling that part of the story. I wouldn’t describe the photo that was in the Vancouver Sun as that “cute”. The expression on my face suggests I was born with a distrust of establishment political figures. It’s not quite Greta Thunberg runs into Trump, but it’s at the beginning of that spectrum.
Dad’s second attempt at being a candidate came in 1965 in Fraser Valley East, never a promising riding for a Liberal. The north with its mill towns was CCF/NDP territory; the bible-belt south was the fiefdom of the Reverend Alex B Patterson, who had some mega-church in Chilliwack. Dad’s fuel oil business had gone broke by then and he was between jobs. Dad and his younger brother, Uncle Pete, smoked cigars together and strategized about politics, modelling themselves on Dad’s heroes, the Kennedy brothers (Dad was JFK; Pete was RFK). Dad organized friends and business associates to come to the nomination meeting and even persuaded some of the clients that he volunteered with at the Mental Health Association to sign up for Liberal party membership to vote for him.
That didn’t seem to be a problem in those days, or if it was, the local newspaper editor wouldn’t have printed an ill report of the Liberal candidate. The editor wrote a memorably gushing article about the nomination meeting in which Harold McDonald is described “as a charismatic personality, as one who possesses those undefinable qualities of extra-ordinary powers.” (The Haney Gazette 1965)
We have a picture of Dad shaking hands with Prime Minister Lester Pearson at a party fundraiser in Vancouver, an event I also attended. Dad was on a political panel on the radio and when asked what his job was, he answered that he was unemployed. My grandfather, never known for long telephone conversations called up after and shouted, “You god damned fool! Why did you say you were unemployed?” That didn’t put Dad off much. He had begun to dare hope that he would be cabinet material.
I was in grade 11 and having taken typing, was seconded to type his speeches. My father was not someone you said no to. Sitting in my room typing away in between homework assignments, I started to ask myself, “What is he talking about?” I found the speeches long on lofty vague rhetoric and short on policy. Tommy Douglas and the NDP’s policy of no US nuclear arms on Bowmarc missiles and of a Canadian wide universal medical coverage sounded a lot more appealing to me. I was also naively shocked to hear stories of people who would come up to Dad and after telling him what good party members they were, would ask, “could you get my son a job at the Post Office when you get elected?”
I got the day off school on Election Day to scrutineer at a polling site in Hammond. One of the first polls that came in voted almost one hundred percent Liberal, but the campaign soon realized that the poll was from the Katzie Indian Band, who were voting for the first time since the Pearson’s Government had given them the right to vote. The results got worse and worse for “McDonald Liberal” and not unexpectedly, he lost. Pearson’s majority was reduced to a minority.
Life when back to some sort of normal. Dad got a job doing bookkeeping for the Hotel and Barman’s Association although it didn’t last long. My Social Studies Teacher Mr. Cowan, President of the local Conservatives, told me as he handed back my paper with a lower than usual mark. “Now, tell your father that this mark is not because he is a Liberal,” he joked.
But the McDonald brothers were not through with politics. In the fall of 1966, it was Uncle Pete’s turn, this time to run in a provincial election from the North Fraser Valley. I was home from UBC for the weekend when the conversation at the dinner table turned to the upcoming nomination meeting.
“You are coming out next Friday for your uncle’s nomination meeting, aren’t you?” Dad asked me.
“No,” I answered.
“Why not?” he asked alarmed.
“I’m not a member of the Liberal Party.”
“Yes, you are. We signed you up.”
“What kind of party is that that signs people up without their permission? I didn’t sign anything! I have no desire to belong to a party like that!” I raged.
“What? You wouldn’t help your Uncle Petie after all he’s done for you?” Dad was great at emotional manipulation.
“I’m not going.”
That didn’t work, so he tried another tact.
“Your uncle may be bad, but he is not as bad as the other guy who is running against him. The other guy is a fascist! Would you rather have a fascist win than your uncle?”
I would not relent. I didn’t live there any longer and I was paying my own way to university with my life-time savings and some money that my grandfather had given me.
It was Mom who got me to relent. When I was in the kitchen helping her with the dishes, she asked me nicely, “You know how much this means to your father, dear. Please do it for my (or his?) sake.” So, I thought I had gone back in the dining room and reported that I had decided to go after all.
The next Friday, I left UBC and went downtown to the old bus depot on Dunsmuir Street to take the Greyhound to Mission, where the nominating meeting was being held. Uncle Pete was at the door greeting his supporters. I guess Dad had not trusted my word. “Oh, it’s okay, Anne,” Uncle Pete said to me, “We’ve done a count. We’ve got the numbers. You don’t have to stay.” I had just come on a two- hour bus trip and I didn’t have anything else to do in Mission. I stayed.
Uncle Pete won the nomination, but he lost the election. It was an NDP riding.
Dad’s electoral attempts were over, but he continued to cultivate his connections in the Liberal Party. Over a lunch at the Hotel Vancouver the following summer, I told him I had some concern about getting a student loan for my second year of university because his income might be too high for me to qualify. I thought he had a good income because we had a nice house and he always had new cars.
He responded in outrage, “What! (or damn it!) After all I’ve done for the Liberal Party, they would turn down my daughter for a loan? I’m going to call Senator Ray Perrault about that!” I persuaded him that he should at least wait until I applied, and that I hoped that it didn’t work that way. Little did I know that I would have no problem qualifying for the loan, and that the house he bought in Vancouver the following year would be foreclosed on before he’d even lived in it for a year.
Three years later, I was living briefly with Dad, then divorced, in his house in Kerrisdale when I got to vote in my first election – the 1969 provincial.
“Who did you vote for? “Dad asked when I came home from the polling station.”
“The NDP”, I said.
“But, but our family has voted Liberal since Confederation!” Dad exclaimed, less in criticism than astonishment.
“Well, that just ended,” I replied.
But the story doesn’t end there. About 1977, Dad took me to lunch somewhere out on West Tenth. By that time, disillusioned with the corruption of insider trading at his stockbroker job, he had quit and was attending Theology School at UBC to become a United Church minister. The conversation turned as it often did, to politics and the state of the world. Dad started on a talking spree about the injustices of the world.
“The gap between the rich and the poor is getting too great. You know, Grandaddy always said that there was going to be a revolution in this country if people didn’t share the wealth more!” That struck me as out of character for my grandfather. Uncle Sandy, who’d been a Communist in his youth, maybe, but Grandad, the coal mine owner? I looked at Dad kind of quizzically trying to figure out where this speech was going.
“And no one should be allowed to inherit wealth! It just perpetuates inequality!”
It was only after he’d paid the bill and we were heading out to the parking lot, that he got to the crux of the matter. Grandad’s estate, held up for several years in probate, had finally been settled. “Peggy got all the money!” the money that Dad had thought for years was going to finally relieve him of financial stress. Yes, well, she was Grandad’s second wife and that’s how inheritance usually works, but I too had gotten a little taken in by Dad’s constant flights of fantasy about all the money we were going to have. I had thought about how I could donate part of my soon to be wealth, that surplus extracted from the labour of coal miners, to progressive causes. It never came to that. What I got was just enough to pay off my remaining student debt. The small amount Dad got paid down some of his debts, but by no means all.
After that, he voted NDP provincially, or at least he told me he did. Dad may even have voted NDP federally when Broadbent was leader. I don’t know if he talked about that much to Uncle “Petey”, who continued to be active in the Liberal Party.
He was ordained as a United Church Minister, had two churches in rural Alberta, a posting in Burnaby and then was on the verge of getting the big pulpit he’d dreamed of in Vancouver when the hiring committee found out that he’d left his second wife and was living with the woman who was to become his third wife. That was too much even for the United Church in the 1980’s. The posting was withdrawn, and he was relegated to the fringes along with the gay and left-wing ministers. He had a small East Vancouver church, the Longhouse Native Ministry. He occasionally used my name for cred in the East Van left-wing circles he came in contact with.
When Dad was quite a bit older, he did finally get to Ottawa to speak inside the halls of Parliament. In 1992, he testified at a Senate Subcommittee to defend the documentary series about the Canadian military in World War II, “The Valor and the Horror”. After writing to the film makers commending the segment on bomber Command, “Death by Moonlight”, he had agreed to take the stand in defense of the films. The Canadian Legion and Air Crew Veterans Association, both of which he belonged to, had condemned the films claiming that they as defamed the military because it said they knew they were bombing civilians. Dad argued passionately that from his experience in the RCAF/RAF, every word about the horrors was true. He was quoted and his picture was in Macleans Magazine , but his intervention did little good. The films were officially censured as being inaccurate.
In his final years, we realized that the father we knew was on the way out when a nurse at the hospital asked him who the president of the United States was, one of a series of orientation questions and he couldn’t answer.
I owe a lot to Dad. I owe him for my interest in politics. No matter how far I may have travelled to the left of the Liberal party, watching the Kennedy-Nixon debates with him nurtured my interest at a young age. I owe him wholly for my anxiety, my heart and lung issues, my temper, my need to always be early, and the fact that I always gravitated to drama-filled workplaces. But I also totally owe him for my appreciation of storytelling and of characters, my learned ability to hold my own with men on the other side of a negotiating table, and most of all for my ability to sometimes rise to the occasion and step up and speak out.. I owe him for a lot of my idealism and pretty much all my ability to be consumed by causes that many other people find unrealistic or hopeless. I owe him a lot for my sense of humour. He, himself, might have found this account funny – well, in his later more mellow years perhaps.
But when it comes to practicality, common sense and budgeting skills, I owe everything to Mom.
I hesitated on this one for a little because it is fairly personal about my family, specifically, my father and I, but I vetted this with some of them first, and it has gotten a good response. It only scratches the surface of stories by or about my father and in some ways it elaborates on things I only hinted at in the eulogy i wrote for his memorial in 2003.
I do recall our minister, James McNair, denouncing Haney (or was it Mission?) as the headquarters of Communism in BC.
Alex Patterson was the MP I recall for many years as I grew up. If I ever laid eyes on him, I have no recollection of it. I do recall being in church one Sunday during an election (1957? 1958?) when Rev. McNair asked those in attendance to vote for Patterson since he was a Christian.
An older cousin commented on this at dinner late that day.
I’m inclined to think we did not have megachurches in Chilliwack in those days. If memory serves, Patterson was the minister at the Nazarene Church, but I have been unable to find anything to back that up.
Yes, it would have been either Haney or Mission, not Chilliwack or Abbotsford! I think there may have been a fairly left-wing Finnish community in Websters Corners – between Haney and Mission. There was a rumour, and as you would know, rumours are big in small towns, that when they announced at the high school that JFK had been shot, some kids from Websters Corner, who came from “Communist” homes cheered. I wasn’t at school that afternoon, so I don’t know. I think I heard that from adults, not kids at school. I was with Dad on my way to get new glasses in New Westminster when we heard about the assasination the radio (or just as we left). To say my Dad was upset would be an understatement.
Mega-church was an anachronism then. I am continuing to collect historical corrections. My Dad could have argued that he was also a Christian, United Church.
Thanks for this story. You have really showed how our love for our fathers gets mixed in with our understand of the reality of who they were. My father also ran for the NDP when Ed Broadbent was the leader. His wife showed me the leaflet they used. My mother told me she wanted to show up with a sign at All-Candidates meeting with a sign saying ‘This man left his wife and 4 children.” Luckily, as a loyal NDP member, she refrained from doing that.
Also, when we reach a certain age and we look back at how young ( and crazy in some cases) our parents were at the time. It helps us look from a different perspective.
A wonderful story. Being a little younger than Ken my first memory of politics in church was the minister’s horror at the possible election of a Catholic. Thanks Anne for taking the time to write this.