Canada: Exercise in Survival

Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s minority Conservative Government survived all threats to its existence last week. In the traditional Throne Speech debate, which allows the Opposition to tee off on every subject under the sun. the three opposition parties, who together have a majority of the Commons’ 265 seats, denounced the Diefenbaker government’s management of everything from A (for austerity) to U (for unemployment). But in two crucial votes of confidence, the right-wing Social Credit Party, like the Tories, in no mood for an early election, sided with the government to keep it in power.

Hungry for an election that he is confident would make him Prime Minister. Liberal Leader Lester Pearson led off with the longest speech of his parliamentary career (three hours and five minutes) and closed it with the shortest (18 words) no-confidence motion in Parliament’s history. He accused the Conservatives of “a major political fraud” in hiding last June’s critical run on Canada’s foreign-exchange reserves until the election was safely over, indicted the government’s tight-money austerity program as the wrong cure for the country’s economic ailments. Diefenbaker retorted by disclosing ordinarily secret foreign-exchange figures to argue that Liberal “gloom and doom” crying had worsened the run on the Canadian dollar, and that in fact he had hidden nothing.

The Socialist New Democratic Party voted with the Liberals. But the Social Crediters, who disdain the Tory economic policies, preferred the Tories to an early election. That did not necessarily guarantee the Diefenbaker government either a long or particularly happy life. This week the Prime Minister will again need the votes of the Social Crediters to defeat a Liberal challenge of his handling of the austerity program—which Social Credit leaders have vigorously damned. But whatever troubles lay ahead, John Diefenbaker. a shrewd and canny politician, had shown in the first crucial week that he had the combination to survive where it counted—in the final vote.