Tory Landslide

Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, leader of Canada's all-conquering Progressive Conservative Party, flew off to Bermuda last week in a happy haze of fatigue and felicitations, more than ready to soak up a few days of sunlight before tackling his country's lowering problems of recession and unemployment. Behind him was the most dramatic election landslide in Canada's history, a coast-to-coast sweep that carried Tory M.P.s into 208 of the House of Commons' 265 seats, and cut the combined opposition down to a hapless 57.

It was partly the result of an inexorable trend that first revealed itself in the indecisive 1957 election, partly a stunning personal triumph for Diefenbaker. Barely nine months in office with a scant plurality government, he had stepped up Canada's already generous social welfare benefits, provided new government assistance for hard-pressed prairie farmers, injected fresh government funds to spur housing construction. A few days after taking office, he called on his fellow Canadians to do more of their buying in Britain, less in the U.S., and by year's end some shift appeared to be taking place. Beyond this, able Politician Diefenbaker conceived and preached a new "vision of national destiny" to Canada's diverse and scattered 17 million inhabitants.

Diefenbaker's vision called for the mineral development of the vast, empty northland for Canada's exclusive benefit. Some observers detected tinny overtones of anti-American sentiment in the vision's emphasis on economic nationalism and Diefenbaker's veiled warnings to foreign owners of Canadian resource industries.

Liberal Leader Lester Bowles ("Mike") Pearson cautioned that Diefenbaker's vision might endanger relations with Canada's closest neighbor and best customer, the U.S. But Diefenbaker's speeches, vibrating with evangelical fervor, wrung cheers from Newfoundland fishermen who still use Elizabethan turns of speech, touched off one of melting-pot Winnipeg's wildest political demonstrations. And most surprising, it galvanized French-speaking Liberal Quebec into returning the biggest Tory delegation (50 of 75 seats) it has ever sent to Ottawa.

On election night the issue was never in doubt. Two hours after the polls closed in Ontario and Quebec, Liberal Pearson conceded the Tory victory, then sadly watched it roll westward across the time zones. It left the once-dominant Liberals with 49 seats, reduced the socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation to a splinter of 8 seats, totally wiped out of Parliament Western Canada's funny-money Social Credit movement, which held 19 seats in the old House of Commons. Surveying the wreckage of his party's national ambitions, Alberta's Social Credit Premier Ernest Manning offered a wry jest: "The voters have put all their eggs in one basket and shot the hen."

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