By Gregory Clark, March 1, 1952.
To offset the rigors of civic life, Ontario’s Premier Frost1 holds sessions of his Kitchen Cabinet in a country cabin
An Old Ontario Expression
Premier and Mrs. Frost were in Port Arthur and Fort William not long ago in connection with a civic function. At the reception, a little old lady came up and, after a few minutes conversation, said to Gertrude Frost:
“Everybody told me how plain you were. I’m so happy to find it is true.”
Mrs. Frost patted her hairdo, and, at the first opportunity, looked at herself in her compact. For down around Lindsay, “plain” means only one thing. It means “homely.”
A few minutes later, the little old lady’s husband presented himself to Mrs. Frost.
“When my wife told me how plain you are,” he confided to the prime minister’s wife, “I knew you wouldn’t mind me coming up and speaking to you.”
It then dawned on Mrs. Frost, who is a highly personable woman, that in the Port Arthur and Fort William idiom, “plain” means “unaffected.”
With a large wicker market basket on his arm, the Prime Minister of Ontario2 reaches into his pocket for his keys.
The contents of the basket are discreetly hidden under a green cloth.
The prime minister is a big, strongly-built, long-legged man who walks with a barely perceptible limp. He is wearing old hunting clothes – canvas pants, a hip-length quilted hunting jacket, red-lined cap and lumberman’s rubbers. All nicely worn.
He finds the keys and selects one. With it, he opens the back door of the log cabin, set deep in the snow. It is not one of these fancy imitation log cabins; its timbers are more than a century old and they are chinked roughly, in the old fashion.
Inside, it is icy cold. But the prime minister lets out a hearty yell, and the two or three men coming through the snow behind him echo the cheer.
They are what is called his Kitchen Cabinet. They stamp into the room.
The log cabin consists of three rooms. In the far-end one are two double beds, with homemade quilts on them. This middle room we are in has three rocking chairs in it, a bench, a couple of less noble chairs and a Quebec heater3, which the prime minister immediately attacks, with kindling in his hand.
The other end room of cabin is the kitchen, small because of the largeness of the cook stove.
The No. 1 man of the prime minister’s Kitchen Cabinet the Minister, let us say, of Cuisine – is Col. George Weeks, manager of the Victoria and Grey Trust Co., of Lindsay, Ont., a 30-year chum of the prime minister. The others in the party might be Jack Deyell, who owns a printing business in Lindsay, or Judge McGibbon, or Ernie Fee, of Fee Motors, Ltd., Lindsay. They dump down their parcels and haversacks. The minister of cuisine takes the prime minister’s wicker basket off the table and carts it into the kitchen, along with his own packages. He whips off the green cloth.
Four steaks, maybe, or a large hunk of peameal bacon: chops maybe, thick; loaves of bread, pickles, potatoes, onions.
“Wow!” says the prime minister, looking in from the middle room, where the fire is now hustling.
“Aaaah!” says the minister of cuisine, unwrapping his own contribution to the kitchen table, which may be more steaks, or a hoarded roast of venison. And he attacks the big stove with kindling.
The weekly meeting of the Kitchen Cabinet is now in session. To this log cabin, with one or two or three of his oldest friends. Leslie Frost, landslide prime minister of Canada’s richest and most industrialized province, comes every weekend from the capital city of Toronto, where he has no home but only a hotel room.
You might suppose this log cabin is away in the wilderness. It is only 10 miles from Lindsay, which is the Frost home, and Lindsay is 78 miles from Toronto. Not merely is it only 10 miles from Lindsay, it is only 100 yards from the Frost summer cottage on Pleasant Point, Sturgeon Lake. Some miles away in the Haliburton backwoods, Leslie Frost found an old pioneer log house, built of broad-axed square timbers. He had the timbers brought down to the open field behind his summer home, and the cabin was erected. It is his hideaway. And unless the business before the Ontario Legislature is really desperate, every weekend of the year, session or no session, and no matter how cold the winter, Leslie Frost, in his fishing clothes or his hunting clothes, in season, beats it away from the great world in which, almost unwillingly but certainly without any great intention, he finds himself enormously involved.
Not every weekend does he take his friends. Often it is his wife, Gertrude, who goes with him to the sanctuary of the log cabin. Whatever it is that Frost has got which so attracted the Old Man Ontario spirit of the Ontario voters last November that they returned his government to power with the overwhelming majority of 81 seats out of the 92, it is here in the quiet that he keeps it alive and unimpaired.
And it was here, in one of the three big rocking chairs of the middle room, that I talked to him, sitting in his mother’s old rocker, in an attempt to get a sort of profile of this small-town lawyer who guides, if he does not indeed control, the destiny of an enormously wealthy and tremendously expanding industrial province.
In the first place. he is not a small-town lawyer. That is one of those handy newspaper phrases that are entirely misleading. More misleading though enthusiastic descriptions have been uttered of Leslie Frost than of most contemporary public men. They say he is a great, good-natured, easy-going character. But he can get as mad as a hornet. And no less easy-going man ever chased an elusive phrase through 40 pounds of legal volumes. He is an insatiably curious and tireless man.
As for being a small-town lawyer, he and his brother, the late Cecil Frost, KC, who was his partner in Lindsay ever since they graduated together from Osgoode Hall in 1921, were two of the best-known lawyers in Canada – in courts of all degrees, in city and town – and built up a law practice and an insurance business that was so lucrative that everybody in politics knows it was a great personal sacrifice for him to enter politics at all
Sitting there in his old hunting clothes in the big rocking chair, he nonetheless conveys the impression of all these very misapprehensions: he does seem like a big, easy-going, kindly country lawyer. He resembles physically and very remarkably the English actor, Michael Redgrave, whom I met last summer.
His speech is quiet and filled with plain English. It is full of such phrases as “You’re right!” and “That’s a fact!” or “Now, let’s see!”
He is no orator, no spellbinder, either on the platform, in the courtroom or in a log cabin. He has a habit of pausing abruptly in the midst of an easy and casual flow of words. He reflects. Like a hunter following a track, you see him scanning the ground. Then he proceeds with what he has to say.
And after a little while with Leslie Frost, the characteristic that you have been puzzling to find becomes suddenly clear.
He may be a lawyer, he may be a businessman, he may be a politician – but what he is, above everything, is a wise counsellor. It was in that character that he built up, with his brother, a prosperous legal practice in Lindsay. It was with that characteristic that he made himself countless personal friends in Lindsay and throughout the counties of Victoria and Haliburton, in all the little villages and hamlets with such endearing names as Manilla, Little Britain, Fingerboard, Coboconk, Omemee, Buckhorn, Janetville, Norland, Elsie.
He was 39 years old, and with no thought of public life in mind, when his reputation as a wise counsellor and the wide local popularity it had inspired, shoved him into an election in 1934. That was in the whoop and hurrah of the Hepburn era. Frost was beaten. But in 1939, he was elected. From his first entry into public life, he was earmarked for office. Though in the Opposition in 1939, he was delegated by George Drew, the Conservative leader, to be financial critic of the government. And when, in 1942, Drew formed a government, Leslie Frost was appointed provincial treasurer and minister of mines.
That was in the midst of war. But it was also, in some sense, the real beginning of that enormous industrial expansion of Ontario, caused by war production, which has not slackened since. And to get this man, rocking in a chair in a log cabin, into full focus, the simplest thing to do is to state in plain figures the rather staggering statistics of the money he as provincial treasurer, has had to find, account for, provide and spend in the 10 years he has been provincial treasurer, and the three years he has been prime minister.
This is what has happened in Ontario, in its expansion as an industrial province, since he took over the account books:
In the last year of the Hepburn regime, the budget showed Ontario’s expenditures for 1942 were $96,337,015.
Frost’s budgets show the subsequent provincial expenditures to have risen from $92,000,000, when he took over, to $250,000,000 last year! This year’s budget, to come down soon, will be bigger still.
How does all this spending jibe with the figure of that good gray character, Old Man Ontario? Since 2,000,000 of Ontario’s 4,500,000 people live on the land, and since a great many of the other 2,500,000 who live in communities are village and small-town people, how does it come about that the man who handles the spending of all that money was returned to power in a political landslide? Don’t the little people worry about money any more?
Well, in the nine years of Frost budgets, there never was one cent of deficit. Each year there was a surplus, ranging anywhere from $1,000,000 to $25,000,000.
And here, in a rocking chair in his old hunting coat, with the Quebec heater humming, sits the man who has to say “Yes” and “No.”
I had the budget statistics in my notebook as we talked. And I told him I was trying to rationalize them in terms of a small-town lawyer. Frost smiled and shoved his hunting cap back on his head, as though the room were getting warmer now.
“Well,” he said, “there were quite a few people elected besides me last November.”
Which is true. He has a fine company of men in his cabinet; and, because of his characteristic habit of consulting high, wide and handsome, has many a good adviser among the rank and file of the membership of the House. He sits in his cabinet as the chairman. And if he is a wise counsellor by nature, habit and training back in Lindsay. Little Britain, Omemee. Buckhorn and Fingerboard, it is not much of a move to become a wise councillor at the big table in Queen’s Park.
Besides which, of course, he has his Kitchen Cabinet. Every weekend.
“In 30 years,” says Col. George Weeks, who is the cook at the log cabin and a very gifted cook against whom even Mrs. Frost is not keen to compete – “in 30 years, there has never been a political gathering of any kind at that summer cottage or that log cabin. Now, mind you, I don’t say we don’t talk politics. But there has never been a gathering of politicians.”
In fact, it goes farther than that. With very few exceptions, Leslie Frost has never invited any of his political colleagues down to Pleasant Point. It is strictly a retreat, a hideaway from the big world. And on the couple of occasions on which big shots in the business or political world were so ill-advised as to come down uninvited and unheralded to the log cabin, just to “drop in” on Leslie Frost, they got what might be called a frosty reception. His cronies say that the premier never gets mad about big things but always about little things like that.
Two years ago. Premier Frost’s large, amiable imperturbability was broached by one of the more gadfly members of the Opposition in the Legislature, and he lost his temper in the sudden, spectacular fashion common to the imperturbable. The account of it made the headlines, of course. And a couple of days later, he got a personal note from the late Mackenzie King, perhaps one of the last such letters the old statesman wrote, in which he cautioned Frost against allowing anything to shake his temper, and to be sure to take plenty of relaxation away from the pressure of office. Premier Frost treasures that letter among his most precious possessions.
“As a matter of fact,” he admitted, in the old log cabin, “I have to confess I try to model my own political life on that of Sir John A. MacDonald and Mackenzie King. I have read all their speeches, studied their lives, to try to convert, into terms I can understand, their political attitudes to what is good for Canada and good for us all.”
Leslie Frost is 56 years old. He was born in Orillia, Ont. He and his brother, Cecil, who was a year and 10 months younger, went to World War I as lieutenants and came home captains, both badly wounded – Leslie with a severe hip injury that hospitalized him for 17 months. He and Cecil, most devoted brothers, went to Osgoode Hall, in Toronto to study law, and then bought a practice in Lindsay, a town not far from Orillia, in which they were on familiar ground.
They married sisters, the daughters of John Carew, MLA, of Lindsay. The Frost boys being the sons of “Daylight Bill” Frost, of Orillia, who held nearly all the elective offices in that municipality, there was consequently a fairly lively awareness of politics in the whole Frost-Carew family setup. Cecil became mayor of Lindsay and president of the Ontario Conservative Association. But Leslie was approaching middle age before he even thought of entering public life.
Leslie and Gertrude Frost, therefore, have no great pretensions about public life or politics. They have no children. They have never set up a home in Toronto, despite Frost’s 10 years of service as a cabinet minister and prime minister. They have a beautiful red brick house in Lindsay, a cottage down on Pleasant Point located exactly on the site of a former small settler’s cabin which, in 1921, the two young captains home from the wars rented and lived in, six months of the year, commuting each day by steamboat up to Lindsay, until they got their law and insurance business perking.
And they also have this log cabin in which the so-called small-town lawyer, who only gets mad at little things, can, each weekend, take wise counsel with himself, his wife and his old, old friends, so that, on Mondays, he can go back happy to his office as chief administrator of a $250,000,000-a-year enterprise – a province bounding ahead into an industrial destiny that beggars the dreams of only 10 years ago.
About the only thing Premier Frost didn’t like about last November’s election was that he missed the deer hunt.
“What kind of a deer hunter is he?” I asked one of his cronies.
“Awfff!” snorted his friend. “About the same as he is a fisherman.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“Instead of sitting still and fishing,” explained his chum, disgustedly, “he keeps saying, ‘Well, I think I’ll just row around that next point and see what’s beyond there…’ The man is desperately curious. Hunting, he’s always got to see over the next hill. I never saw such curiosity. Of course, he gets his deer, too.”
“And fish?” I queried.
“Oh sure,” admitted the friend. “That is, unless he comes across some old ruined log shanty, or hears of an Indian burial ground or something. The guy is a historian gone wrong.
There isn’t an old homestead, a pioneer family, a long-abandoned lumber camp or sawmill within miles and miles of Lindsay that Les Frost doesn’t know all about. He can give you the vital statistics, names, dates and every last pernicketty particular…”
I might conclude this sketch of Premier Frost with the remark that while I called uninvited at the log cabin on Pleasant Point, he did not get mad, but, on the other hand, offered me a lift back to Toronto in his car. He drove me right to my home, away across the other side of town, and then, at my invitation, came in and shook hands with my wife and daughter, just to show them what a big guy I am to have prime ministers trotting me around.
Editor’s Notes: This article appeared in Weekend Picture Magazine.
- Leslie Frost was Premier of Ontario from 1949 to 1961. He became Premier when we was elected leader of the Conservatives on May 4, 1949 after George Drew resigned to run for federal office. His first election as Premier occurred on November 22, 1951, a few months before this article. ↩︎
- The term “Prime Minister of Ontario” remained in colloquial use until the government of Bill Davis formally adopted the usage of the term Premier in 1971. ↩︎
- A Quebec heater historically refers to a type of tall, cylindrical, cast-iron wood or coal-burning stove used for heating homes and cabins.
↩︎
