The Hemisphere: Dark Horse

In choosing the man to oppose Liberal Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent in next summer’s national election, the opinion was gaining ground in Progressive Conservative ranks that the time had come to take a calculated risk with a fresh leader, unbruised and unwearied by the Tories’ past defeats in five straight elections. Ideally, he would be a man widely known and respected across the country, an able administrator, a good speaker, gifted with the intellect and energy to guide Canada’s destiny as Prime Minister or serve as a rousing leader of the opposition in Parliament. The man best qualified and most frequently mentioned as a dark-horse candidate last week was Sidney Earle Smith, 59, president of the University of Toronto.

As head of the country’s biggest university, Sidney Smith has made a notable reputation as an administrator; he boosted the school’s enrollment 65% (to 11,500) and launched a $60 million expansion program in the past ten years. Educator Smith has also traveled widely throughout Canada, winning countless friends with his genial ways and his thought-provoking speeches on almost every aspect of contemporary Canadian life (TIME, Oct. 6, 1952). He has been a champion of civil liberties, a critic of Anglophiles who would keep Canada more dependent on Britain (“They want us to ape the English in everything from accent to aristocracy”), and a staunch friend of the U.S. (he once accused Canada’s External Affairs Chief Lester Pearson of “adolescence” for carping about U.S. foreign policy). Protestant Smith has strong backing in Roman Catholic Quebec because of his support of religious teaching in schools and the fact that he speaks French.

Smith’s potential appeal has long been recognized by politicians, and he has been under pressure before to get into politics. The idea appealed to him. but the circumstances were never quite right for the move. Now, although he is in good health and is, in fact, the same age as St. Laurent when the Prime Minister entered politics in 1941, Smith is inclined to believe that he is too old to embark on a new career of rebuilding the Tory Party. But Smith has not yet said that he would refuse the nomination, and many Tories are hopeful that he may still be available for a genuine draft call at their convention next month. The Liberals are just as hopeful that he will not. Said a Liberal Cabinet minister, very much off the record: “He is the one man we couldn’t figure out how to attack.”