Blacklock's Reporter

Near Ottawa City Hall at the corner of Cooper and Cartier Streets lived an unforgettable prime minister, Charles Tupper. His grand home like so much of the city’s architectural heritage is gone. Yet Tupper is oddly immortal.

His autograph lists on eBay for $4,950. In Parliament his portrait peered down over the main entrance to the Commons foyer. Across the country there are Tupper schools in Halifax and Vancouver where the basketball team is called the Tupper Tigers. There is a Tupper icebreaker in the Coast Guard, a Tupper township in Ontario, a Tupper Mountain in British Columbia.

The post office designed a Tupper stamp in 1955 and printed up 50,000,000 copies. The National Film Board once produced a Tupper movie, The Big Man. In painter Robert Harris’ famous composite portrait of the Fathers of Confederation the mutton-chopped Tupper stands as the most prominent figure in the foreground. Interestingly, he was prime minister only two months.

Tupper bought the house at 123 Cooper Street in the spring of 1896. It was an exclusive address. The home was built for the manager of the Bank of Ottawa.

Tupper became prime minister in May that year. On Cooper Street he plotted a disastrous election campaign in June that cost the Conservatives 35 seats including Tupper’s own Cape Breton riding, and here he sulked until resigning as prime minister in July.

“It was a hopeless task,” recalled Hector Charlesworth, a newspaperman who covered the ’96 campaign. Tupper assumed the premiership in the twilight days of a creaking Conservative dynasty 18 years in office. No Tory could have won that election, Charlesworth recalled: “Tupper was one of the greatest and most farseeing statesmen this continent has produced.”

Tupper was the nation’s sixth prime minister and the most fearsome. He once punched a man who interrupted his Bible reading. He was the first prime minister to speak Greek and Italian, the first to publish his memoirs, Recollections of Sixty Years in Canada, the first to use lapel buttons in an election campaign.

As a self-made millionaire he was founding president of Crown Life. As a gynecologist he was founding president of the Canadian Medical Association which annually sponsored a Charles Tupper Award for Political Action.

As public works minister Tupper oversaw construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was said he accepted $100,000 in payoffs. “They were a hungry lot in Ottawa then,” as one railway promoter put it.

In Tupper’s old hometown of Amherst, N.S., the Cumberland County Museum and Archives reported 5,000 visitors a year came to see Tupper’s desk. There is no such shrine at the corner of Cooper and Cartier Streets in Ottawa. Instead they put up a Holiday Inn.

By Andrew Elliott

Lost to history is the state funeral of Generalissimo Trujillo, strongman of the Dominican Republic, shot by assassins in 1961. Canadian diplomat John Graham attended the mass. “The only people in the entire church without guns were the clergy and the diplomatic corps,” he recalls.

Fearful that rebels would seize the corpse for public display, Trujillo’s henchmen hoisted it from the church by helicopter winch. “The Generalissimo’s coffin swinging in the air was a moment of unbearable, transcendent mystery for the dazed and credulous mourners below,” writes Graham. Only later did diplomats learn Trujillo wasn’t in the coffin. They’d stuffed it with an unknown corpse while preserving El Presidente in a freezer for quiet burial.

So goes Whose Man In Havana?, the memoirs of a man who served a lifetime in the foreign ministry. Graham’s writing is warm and personable with anecdotes from an era when Canada briefly walked on the world stage.

“When I first joined the foreign service in the late Fifties I caught the tail end of the much-ballyhooed Pearsonian golden age,” says Graham. “Although not always golden, it was a good time to be in External Affairs. The good times dipped a few times, but they did not come to an end with Mr. Pearson’s departure.”

Canada in the Fifties had a Nobel Peace Prize, the fourth largest air force on earth and an aircraft carrier, HMCS Magnificent. The British Empire was bankrupt, Europe was in ruins and America was desperate for Cold War friends. “In the post-war period, Canadians entered a time of prosperity that their forebears and indeed, most of the fellow inhabitants of the world had never dreamed of,” historian Craig Brown wrote in his 1987 Illustrated History of Canada.

Parliament thought nothing of buying Avro Arrow jets at $6.6 million a pop and driving defence spending to 40 percent of the federal budget. This was the heyday of Canadian diplomacy, Graham writes: “It is a term that invites abuse and is best avoided, but seen from the second decade of the twenty-first century, those years appear bathed in gilded light.”

It was an era when Canadian diplomats on the Latin beat packed pistols for safety. Graham recalls the assistant trade commissioner’s Chevrolet Impala was burned by Dominican street rioters in 1961. In Cuba, Graham spied for the CIA by sketching suspicious Soviet military installations: “When the mission was over I sometimes wondered whether I had reported anything significant in the acutely nervous Cold War context,” he writes. “I don’t know – Langley never told me – but I doubt it.”

Whose Man In Havana? is not a lament for a bygone era. It is a collection of reminiscences by a talented storyteller that leaves readers with indelible images like the massacre of black dogs in Haiti on rumours a Vodou spell had been cast over a corrupt local official named Duval. “A Priestess declared she had used her sacred Vodou powers to transform Duval into a dog, a black dog,” Graham explains; “The gardener told me no black dog is safe in all Port-au-Prince.”

By Holly Doan

Whose Man In Havana? Adventures from the Far Side of Diplomacy, by John W. Graham; University of Calgary Press; 328 pages; ISBN 9781-5523-8242; $34.95