USask alum John G. Diefenbaker.

The Toronto man who has spent more than a year searching for DNA proof that he is the son of former primer minister John Diefenbaker says he has found the missing link.

Last week, John George Dryden gave Maclean’s magazine an exclusive interview and reported he has obtained DNA evidence that he is related to Diefenbaker. He hired a team of private investigators who retrieved a used and discarded Q-tip from one of Diefenbaker’s distant male relatives living in southern Ontario. The family was unwilling to cooperate with his request for a sample.

“It was then sent directly to a Toronto firm where DNA analysts identified ‘genetic overlap’ pointing to common ancestry,” Maclean’s reported.

The president of the DNA firm, Harvey Tenenbaum, warned that the results are not concrete evidence that the 43-year-old Dryden was fathered by Diefenbaker.

He told Maclean’s that Dryden “could be fifth cousins” with the man who discarded the Q-tip. “You’d really need a sample from John Diefenbaker, or a member of his immediate family, to do an accurate comparison,” he said.

But Dryden believes he’s found what he was looking for.

“As far as I’m concerned, this proves it,” Dryden told MacLean’s. “I’m John Diefenbaker’s son. I don’t know that there’s a whole lot more that I can do.”

Director of the Diefenbaker Canada Centre Michael Atkinson said he had not heard of the development before it was published last week.

“I think this has been Mr. Dryden’s concern and pursuit right from the very beginning. It’s a very personal matter and he made that clear. We just tried to help him sort things out,” Atkinson said.

Dryden contacted the centre and was granted access to a stash of artifacts that once belonged to Diefenbaker, including hats, a watch strap, a pipe and a hairbrush. But forensic tests conducted on the handle of the hairbrush failed to provide a conclusive DNA profile of the former prime minister.

Then, just two weeks ago, after a re-cataloguing of the Diefenbaker Centre’s collection, previously unknown hair samples surfaced that were snipped from Diefenbaker as a child. But Dryden told the Canadian Press the hair would be “useless” without the root attached.

Dryden learned last June that his mother’s husband, the man who he had thought was his father, was not. At the time of Dryden’s birth in 1968, his mother Mary Lou was a well known Conservative socialite and a close friend of Diefenbaker, who served as the Tory prime minister from 1957 to 1963 and died in 1979.

If the affair did take place, Mary Lou would have been in her 30s, while Diefenbaker would have been in his 70s. When the story first broke, Dryden told the National Post he believes the identity of his father was kept secret because of the “social stigma and political sensitivities prevalent in Canadian society in 1968.”

Atkinson said that Diefenbaker’s legacy will now depend on whether people agree with Dryden’s interpretation of the results.

“We at the Diefenbaker Centre plan on making no investigations or rewriting any textbooks, that is not up to us. It will not affect our activities at all,” he said.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons