The Player: The Life and Times of Dalton Camp

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Dalton Camp is best known for his role in overthrowing John Diefenbaker
as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1967, but he came
into the spotlight later as a political commentator—first on the CBC
as part of the legendary team of Kierans, Camp, and Lewis, and then as a
popular columnist for The Toronto Star.

As a politician and commentator, Camp helped push the PC party into the
20th century, for it was he who championed a bilingual multicultural
country that owed its poorest citizens some of its amazing wealth. When
he died in 2002, he was sorely missed; one wonders what he might have
said about the latest incarnation of the Conservative Party.

Camp was a gifted writer and the author of two splendid books,
Gentlemen, Players and Politicians (1970) and Points of Departure
(1979). Both works include personal information and would challenge any
biographer wishing to introduce new material in the periods covered as
well as to match Camp’s own high writing standards. Stevens, a former
columnist with The Globe and Mail and now a part-time professor at the
University of Toronto and Wilfrid Laurier University, has met both
challenges. While there is some repetition of earlier tales, there is
more than enough fresh material to compel interest. The author is
particularly strong on the personal side. We discover, for example, that
Camp’s father, a legendary preacher in the United States, was also a
philanderer. Like father, like son—Camp’s own record of extramarital
dalliance makes the title of this book particularly appropriate.

In his research, Stevens relied not only on the two aforementioned
books and Camp’s newspaper columns, but also on his unpublished
writings, including an unfinished memoir and archival and family papers.
In addition, Stevens conducted dozens of frank interviews with Camp’s
family, friends, and associates. The result is a polished,
well-researched work that won the 2003 Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize.