Canada: A Teasing Game

All month long, Prime Minister Lester Pearson has been playing a teasing game with Canadians. Every where he goes he talks in riddles about calling a new election—without ever quite saying it or setting a date. On a visit to Vancouver, he pointed out that an election would be impossible before the end of 1966, if he were to await results of an electoral redistribution now under way. “Do we want to begin our centennial year [1967] with an election?” he asked. “That could mean an election this fall,” leaped a newsman. “You have a very succinct way of putting things,” winked Pearson. A few hours later, he told a Liberal dinner group that he would “pray for wisdom and patience during the months and years ahead—if I am chosen to continue to serve.”

Wheat & Security. Why an election now? Mainly because Mike Pearson seems to want one. For the last 29 months, he has been governing with a minority in the House of Commons, depending on splinter parties to pass his legislation. Yet his Liberal party lacks only six seats for a full 133-seat majority. He obviously thinks he can pick them up, and possibly a lot more.

The record on which Pearson would run is a generally good one. To be sure, his government has been plagued by a long series of nasty scandals, which forced the resignation of two Cabinet ministers as well as Pearson’s own parliamentary secretary. But Canada is calm, prosperous and more or less content with a gross national product rising 8% a year. To help heal the divisions between French-and English-speaking Canadians, Pearson pushed through a new Canadian flag and set up a special Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. In the prairie provinces—where the political leanings are Conservative, but the wheat buyer is always right—he can brag about last month’s $450 million sale of 222 million bu. of wheat to Russia. He has installed a new and vastly expanded social security system, a new minimum-wage law and a far-reaching anti-poverty program. All this seems to be reflected in the most recent Gallup poll, which gives Pearson’s Liberals a 45%-to-29% lead over the Conservatives compared with a 42%-to-33% margin during the 1963 election.

Backbone or Banana. Equally important, an election now would catch the Conservatives at a time when their party is deeply split over the curmudgeonly leadership of aging (69) ex-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. Yet the north woods are full of politicians who have learned to rue the day they counted Diefenbaker out. No sooner did Pearson drop his hints than the old Conservative war horse made a surprisingly successful five-day tour of Quebec’s rural eastern outbacks, pumping hands, signing autographs, trying out his fractured French, touring small stores and factories. Just before the last election, Diefenbaker was so unpopular in Quebec that there was real question whether he would be safe on a campaign swing through French Canada. But tempers cool, and now 1,200 citizens turned up in Ste. Perpétue (pop. 1,160) to cheer his campaign promises: abolition of the 11% sales tax on farm machinery, training schools for farmers, low-interest farm credit. Everywhere, he pecked away at the scandals singeing Mike Pearson’s administration. “This government,” he said, “is trying to make a banana into a backbone.”

As the teasing, now-you-see-it—now-you-don’t election talk went on, a lot of Canadians were tiring of Pearson’s game. “If Mr. Pearson does not have serious and clear views on whether there should be an election,” said the Ottawa Journal, “he should conceal that ghastly vacuum in impressive silence.” With that kind of sentiment growing and John Diefenbaker sharpening his sword, there was a chance that a fall election might leave Pearson little better off than he is right now.