Three Years After

"I am here simply as a friend from a friendly country," said Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker last week, as he arrived in Washington for a 21-hour visit with President Eisenhower. His words were the more welcome by contrast with the insults streaming in from Moscow. At the White House Dief and Ike conferred for 2 1/2 hours, and at a black-tie dinner both toasted the warmth of U.S.-Canadian relations--which are all the warmer because they have been brought about on Canada's side by a leader who is avowedly a Canada-firster.

Three years ago this week Diefenbaker, a prairie lawyer who had been a perennial election loser, shook his bony forefinger at the electorate and won from them an upset Conservative victory over the powerful and complacent Liberals. What the voters seemed to expect from Diefenbaker was a truer national identity. This independence demanded "standing up to the Americans." as Diefenbaker put it.

Out of Balance. How well has he succeeded? In matters of economic dependence, and in the capacity for an independent defense, he has clearly done less well than he hoped. Yet with bustling energy, much of it spent in world travel, Diefenbaker has advanced Canada toward a clearer sense of nationhood, and he has the country behind him.

Before the election of 1957, John Diefenbaker promised to shift Canada's foreign trade away from the U.S. and toward Britain; to bring foreign trade into balance; to increase ownership of enterprises controlled from abroad; to balance the budget and to end unemployment. None of these goals have come true:

P: U.S. sales to Canada have increased from $3.4 billion in 1958 to $3.7 billion last year, while British sales rose from $538 million to $598 million.

P: Canada's balance of payments deficit shot to a peak of $1.46 billion last year (v. $1.29 billion in 1956).

P: Diefenbaker ran up the two most lavish deficits in Canadian history: to pay for campaign-promised high social welfare and farm payments and to get his "vision" of national development on the road.

P: Though Diefenbaker pledged that "so long as I am Prime Minister, no one who is unemployed will suffer," the latest count of unemployed (suffering or otherwise) showed 517,000 jobless, 8.3% of the labor force v. 6.1% in the U.S.

In an era when the cost, the size and the sophistication of arms have advanced so fast that small nations can fairly question whether they should try to keep up at all, Diefenbaker has floundered on defense policy. Hoping that a cold-war thaw would make arms less necessary immediately, he left Canada to be defended with obsolete, 600-m.p.h. CF-100 interceptors while basing future defense on the Bomarc-B antiaircraft missile. He stood by Bomarc as the bird failed in seven successive tests at Cape Canaveral--only to have the U.S. House of Representatives slash the Bomarc program.

Personal Impressions. If Canadian voters worry about unemployment, they do not seem to be much aroused about the Tories' performance on defense. It is in his personal and political acts that the Prime Minister has most impressed his countrymen. Confident, eloquent, dominant, he conveys a proud but not jingoistic Canadianism.

He thrives--and gains weight--traveling; he has probably logged a greater mileage in and out of Canada in his three years in office than any previous Prime Minister. He dominates his Cabinet. He does not smoke, so no one else does in the Cabinet chamber.

His "fellow Canadians" (as he likes to address them) have noticed a change in Diefenbaker's recent television appearances. Gone is the rolling oratory. The Prime Minister now sits quietly behind a desk and speaks in even tones with, as the Vancouver Province noted, "little trace of the evangelist exhorting his flock" that was once his style.

Few doubt that Diefenbaker's momentum will carry him through another election, and the most recent Gallup poll backs the majority up. The May poll showed the Tories holding steady with 48% support to the Liberals' 37% and the Socialist CCF's 9%. Less conclusive, perhaps, but the sort of news Diefenbaker takes to heart, was another Gallup poll. Of eleven countries polled, Canadians owned up to being the happiest.

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