The Last Session?

Canada's 19th Parliament reassembled at Ottawa this week for its fifth session, hankering to know the best kept secret in the Dominion: the date of the next general election. It was a secret because only one man knew it--Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Mr. King need not hold the election until 40 days after April 17, 1945, the date on which the legal life of this Parliament expires.* But since few administrations ever serve out their five-year term (Canadian tradition says that it means defeat), this meeting of the 19th Parliament seemed certain to be its last.

Mr. King had good reason to keep his secret as long as he could. Though he now rules the Parliamentary roost with a fat 105 Liberal majority over all other parties, times have changed since the last election. Mackenzie King well knows that the next election may split the oldtime political structure of Canada asunder.

It may divide political power not as it is in Commons today, between his Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives, but split it into fractions among three major parties and several dissident groups.

The new major party on the Canadian political scene is the socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation which, according to the latest Gallup poll (Dec. 4, 1943), would divide the popular vote with the old-line parties (Liberals, 31%; Progressive Conservatives, 29%; C.C.F., 26%), might even ride into power.

The Old Fox. With this fateful possibility before them, the returning members looked to their shrewd Prime Minister for some clue to his election strategy. They knew that they might find the key to it in Parliament, where he has sat for 28 years. A cold personality to the average voter, Mr. King takes on more color on the front bench, becomes a calculating wielder of the oratorical stiletto.

For four wartime sessions in Parliament he has painstakingly and in great detail laid down the wartime record of his Government. But in the chamber which he has so often used as a sounding board, he has not yet stated a national issue to offset the declining popularity of his Government. As the Gallup polls show, his administration, like all other wartime governments, now suffers the usual political reaction to regimentation and control.

How Goes Quebec? King's issue, when he does announce it, must be one that will keep French Canada solidly Liberal. Quebec, with its 65 seats in the Federal House, has long been what the U.S.'s Solid South has been to the Democrats. It is the backbone of Liberal political power.

But now Mr. King cannot be certain even of Quebec. There his war policies are unpopular with the isolationist French Canadians. One of his Quebec Ministers, four other French Canadian M.P.s have already broken away. As the fanatically isolationist Bloc Populaire Canadien, a new all-Quebec party, they may be able to break the Liberal front.

Whatever Mr. King does, he must keep Quebec united behind him. In English Canada, his strongest appeal to the middle-of-the-road voter is to keep his old-line party dominant. His argument: the grim alternative that Canada's next Parliament may become a chamber of confusion.

On the Right. Nominally, the Prime Minister's Opposition is the Progressive Conservative Party, which controls 39 seats in Commons. Its parliamentary leader is polite, round-faced Gordon Graydon. But he is only warming a chair for the party's real leader, John Bracken.

Quiet, colorless Party Leader Bracken has avoided taking a seat in Parliament, let Graydon carry the legislative buiden. His strategy turns on the hope that the country is sick & tired of Mackenzie King. Mr. Bracken offers himself as a safe-&-sound administrator, backed by his record of 20 years as Premier of Manitoba.

The Real Opposition. Bracken's absence from Commons has left the real role of opposition leader to a man who has eagerly welcomed such a break. Socialist C.C.F. Chieftain Major James Coldwell attacks the administration of Mr. King and the platform of Mr. Bracken as cut from the same pattern of relentless stodginess.

The Gallup polls indicate that Coldwell's strength is much greater than his party's showing in the House (eleven members); the strength of the party in provincial elections confirms it. Commons hears C.C.F. Leader Coldwell's sharp criticism of the old order uneasily, but hears him to the end, because the members know that his are the points they must eventually answer to the voters.

Like the Progressive Conservatives, the C.C.F. is counting heavily on Canadian impatience with wartime restrictions. But. like the Progressive Conservatives, the C.C.F. has made almost no headway in Quebec. Nevertheless, if it comes out of the next election with the most determined group in a divided Parliament, C.C.F. might form the first socialist government north of the Rio Grande.

Against such a possibility Canada's old-line parties, which hate and fear the C.C.F. more than they do each other, might willy-nilly be forced into a shotgun marriage to keep the socialists out. Canada waits to hear how Mackenzie King proposes to get out of that one.

*Under Canada's written Constitution, the British North America Act of the British Parliament, the life of the Canadian Parliament is five years, reckoned from the day election returns are finally filed in Ottawa.

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