Show Notes
He went out a weird, morbid old man, but John Diefenbaker was indisputably the biggest political sensation this country had ever produced. He won the biggest landslide in Canadian history. He walked through screaming, adoring crowds where tearful fans would kneel and kiss his coat. Sit back and listen to the heartbreaking tale of what it’s like to achieve the absolute pinnacle of political success … only to have it all stripped away, bit by excruciating bit. (Featuring special guests, diehard Diefenbaker buffs Jason Kenney and John Baird.)
More from Canada Did What?!
There are layers within layers to the outlandish stories of Rob Ford, but one of the most bizarre is that of the “crack video” showing the late Toronto mayor smoking cocaine in a seedy suburban basement. The gangbanger who filmed it tried selling it in hopes of getting out of Toronto’s thug life but set off a circus that engulfed a city. It put police, gangsters and the mayor’s minions in hot pursuit of a tape everyone wanted, but everyone connected to would eventually suffer for.
He was an all-Canadian whiz kid, a celebrated rocket-engineering prodigy, who wanted to make this country a serious player in the 1960s space race. But when science sidestepped Gerald Bull’s plan to build gargantuan guns that could launch projectiles into orbit, he just … broke. He turned his brilliance in missile design to darker pursuits, building horrible weapons for sinister regimes. If it sounds like a spy novel, it ends like one too, with Bull meeting a violent, mysterious end of his own.
It’s lionized by politicians but, in the real world, Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms has proved less a symbol of democratic liberty than an agent of destruction. Since becoming constitutional law, the Charter has run roughshod over Canadian democracy, weaponized in the courts to overturn popular and vital policies. In 1982, there were plenty of people on the left and the right who tried to warn us of the coming devastation before it happened. It ended up being worse than they imagined.
Where can you slaughter hundreds of people and get away with it? Only in Canada, where authorities bungled the chance to stop an obvious plot to bomb Air India Flight 182 and then failed to bring a single one of the brazen terrorists to justice. It was the most preventable horror in our history, and we seem eager to forget it ever happened — even as more violence brews from the extremists behind the worst Canadian terrorist attack ever.
We all know how close Quebec came to voting for independence in the 1995 referendum. What most people never knew is the extent of the trickery behind the separatists’ undisclosed plan for the day after they won. It would have taken a difference of just a few thousand votes to unleash utter chaos on the country that could very well have culminated in bloodshed and possibly civil war.