CANADA: Fifth-Term Sweep

Canada’s Liberal government, one of the free world’s most durable political regimes, this week won its fifth straight term. In a national election, held in all ten provinces, in the Eskimo settlements of the Arctic, and at Canadian army camps in Korea and Europe, the Liberal administration led by Prime Minister Louis Stephen St. Laurent, 71, was swept back into office.

The main surprise in the Liberals’ triumph was the ease with which it was accomplished. In the 1949 election, the party won 190 out of 262 parliamentary seats, a record majority that no Liberal expected to match soon again. While confident that they could hold the 133 seats needed for a majority this year, some Liberal leaders were braced for more or less painful losses, perhaps as many as 60 seats of their 1949 bloc. But the voters decided otherwise. Early on election night, the Liberal total soared to 170 seats and was still climbing. The Progressive Conservatives (Tories), the leading opposition party, could muster fewer than 60, with most of the remainder split between the minority Social Credit and CCF (socialist) Parties, and a scattering of independents.

Even their doughtiest opponents had privately conceded a Liberal victory. In the minds of most voters, the Liberals were the party of prosperity, in office since 1935 through the years of recovery, war boom and the phenomenal postwar industrial expansion that is still going on. Erstwhile Tory businessmen were converted by the Liberal government’s highly orthodox fiscal policies, its annual budget surpluses and its steady cutting of the national debt. Farmers liked the efficient grain-marketing system and price supports. Labor was won over when the Liberals coolly borrowed the most attractive social-security planks from the CCF Party.

Against the Liberal drive, spearheaded by St. Laurent’s great personal popularity in French Canada, the opposition tried in vain to sell the idea: it’s time for a change. Taking a cue from the election in the U.S. last year, Tory Leader George Drew did his best to create a Canadian counterpart of the Republican campaign.

But the Tory crusade never got rolling, and the campaign itself turned out to be the mildest in recent Canadian history. Thin crowds attended political meetings. Even the Canadian newspapers, usually violently partisan, stayed stiffly objective in news coverage. The impression grew steadily—and the voters confirmed it resoundingly at the polls—that in Canada, the time for a change had not yet come.