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Slowly, Pearson restored confidence in himself and in the Liberal Party, and mastered his new role. "His trouble," says Liberal Frontbencher Jack Pickersgill, "was that he wanted to solve the Government's problems for them." It was typical of Pearson that in seeking solutions, he called a thinkers' conference of "liberally minded Canadians" before trying to construct a new electoral platform. Slowly he rebuilt the party, collected the "Pearson team"—a brainy, intensely loyal shadow cabinet, including some of the young Liberals who propelled him into the party leadership. "There is a Pearson mystique in Canada," says a colleague, "that is something like the Stevenson cult."
Pearson likes to give the impression of operating with effortless ease; the reality is based on hard staff work and a 12-to 15-hour day of his own. "Mike is a prag-matist," explains a former aide. "He gets in the middle of a situation and feels his way around before he decides what to do." He relaxes with anything from The Age of Reason Begins to TV's Beverly Hillbillies, but prefers a hockey match or baseball game. "My tastes." he admits, "are not very high."
In four weary years of opposition, Pearson and his advisers gradually shaped a Liberal program, and Pearson became a more formidable parliamentary antagonist. For a time he had held back, in a conviction more appropriate to a historian than to an Opposition leader, feeling that the Diefenbaker Government was entitled, because of its vast popular vote, to an unhampered right to accomplish its promises. But when Diefenbaker proved surprisingly weak in office, moody and suspicious of his colleagues and subordinates, embroiling Canada with its old friend Britain over the Common Market and antagonizing its U.S. neighbor by its waffling on defense, Pearson satisfied himself that the Diefenbaker Government "has done a terrible job. These are mistakes the Government has made by itself. We didn't maneuver the Government into them."
Crisis in Confidence. In the spring of 1962, ten months before his five-year term was up, Diefenbaker called a sudden election. His Liberal critics accused him of timing it before the seriousness of Canada's coming economic crisis was recognized. But though Pearson was well-armed with ammunition, his dry campaign style was drowned in a gusher of Diefenbaker oratory. The divided Parliament that was elected mirrored a divided land. Diefenbaker lost 87 seats, but held power with 116 Tories, firmly anchored to the prairies, against Pearson's 100 Liberals, strong in the cities.
The Diefenbaker era was waning, but the public was not yet ready to return the Liberals. Instead, the result was a distressing proliferation of minorities. On the left were Tommy Douglas' 19 New Democrats and on the right a protest party of 30 Social Crediters, speaking mainly for a disaffected French Quebec in the frenetic accents of a rural Chrysler dealer named Réal Caouette, who named Hitler and Mussolini as his economic heroes.