bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, p. 38
Alvin: A Biography of the Hon. Alvin
Hamilton, P.C. by Patrick Kyba, Regina:
Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1989,
390 pp., $30.00.
As Patrick Kyba notes in the introduction to his recent biography of Alvin Hamilton, the craft of Canadian political biography has focused almost exclusively on national and provincial political leaders. Individuals like Alvin Hamilton, whose contribution as a cabinet minister was critical to the success of the Diefenbaker government, have been consistently ignored and shunted aside. Kyba’s work is a laudable effort to correct this imbalance and examine the career of a politician, who was credited with being a driving force behind the development of Conservative Party policy in the 1950s and 1960s and who was the author of Diefenbaker’s “northern vision”.
Though primarily concerned with Hamilton’s political life, Kyba begins with a brief sketch of his subject’s early life in small-town Ontario and Saskatchewan. Unlike many young people of his generation, Hamilton turned, not to the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, but to the individualist Conservative Party of R.B. Bennett for the solutions to the Great Depression. An indefatigable campaigner and an incurable optimist, Hamilton committed himself wholeheartedly to the waning fortunes of a third party in an intensely competitive two-party province. By 1948 he had become the Conservative Party’s federal organizer in Saskatchewan, where he also became leader of the small provincial party in 1949.
During the 1940s and 1950s, these were undoubtedly two of the most thankless jobs in Canadian politics. In 1957, however, after unsuccessfully contesting a total of six federal and provincial elections, Hamilton was elected to the House of Commons. Soon after, he was named Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources in Diefenbaker’s first cabinet. There, drawing upon a set of ideas that had preoccupied him since first campaigning for J.T.M. Anderson’s Saskatchewan Conservative party in 1929, Hamilton helped author the program of national and northern development that Diefenbaker used to ignite the country’s imagination in 1958. Once implemented, Hamilton’s program for developing Canada’s energy, transportation and agricultural resources constituted one of the most enduring legislative achievements of the Diefenbaker government.
Appointed Minister of Agriculture in 1961, Hamilton remained in that portfolio until the Liberal victory in the spring of 1963. Drawing upon the records of the Department of External Affairs, Kyba presents the most complete account available of Hamilton’s role in Canada’s first major wheat sale to China, a country in which Hamilton has since retained a major interest. In the work’s concluding chapters, Kyba charts Hamilton’s declining influence on the direction of later Conservative policy under Stanfield, Clark and Mulroney.
With its emphasis on Hamilton’s contribution to the development of Conservative Party policy between 1952 and 1968, Kyba’s biography shatters the view that Hamilton, whose wheat sales to China in the 1960s tended to obscure his other achievements, was interested only in prairie agriculture. Unfortunately, the attention accorded policy development leaves the reader without a real sense of Hamilton’s political life. Hamilton’s relationship with Diefenbaker, for example, which stretched back to the late 1930s and which Kyba describes as “a rather strange relationship”, is shrouded in a discreet silence. Similarly, Kyba declines to examine seriously the relationship between Hamilton and his senior civil servants, a question of considerable interest to students of the Diefenbaker period. The author’s reluctance to deal with these difficult and contentious topics is perhaps due in part to his ambiguous relationship with his subject. Kyba relies heavily on Hamilton’s own reminiscences for much of his material and, it seems, for much of his inspiration. All too frequently, the reader is left wondering whose views and conclusions are presented in this work.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, p. 38. Read the rest of this issue →
