Election Ho

Before Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was elected in 1958 with the largest parliamentary majority in Canadian history, Canadian election campaigns were chastely confined to a few tight months. But the race toward the 1962 election is already lengthening to the proportions of U.S. presidential campaign. Last week Diefenbaker and his rival party leaders were all out on the hustings, for all the world as if they expected an election while he snow flies.

Conservative Tumble. Tory Diefenbaker, who is never more at home than when he is far from Ottawa campaigning, invited the early pace. He has had little choice. As unemployment in Canada rose last winter to its highest since the Depresion '30s (leaving 11.3% of the labor force without jobs), the Tories' political stock sharply tumbled; though the economy has since taken a turn for the better, in train with the U.S. recovery, Diefenbaker's fortunes have clearly failed to rebound.

Fortnight ago, a Gallup Poll of Canada reported the Tories at their lowest ebb since their '58 sweep, and Nobel Peace Prizewinner Lester ("Mike") Pearson's resurgent Liberals sprinting ahead. The standings on Gallup's fever chart: Liberals, 43%; Tories, 37%. Way down on the chart with 12%, but making headway: ex-Saskatchewan Premier T. C. Douglas' New Democratic Party. It was formed last summer, on the rough model of Britain's Labor Party, by a marriage between the old socialist CCF Party and the 1,150,000-member Canadian Labor Congress.

So far, all three party leaders have been more concerned to cultivate grass roots than to shape ringing national issues. In the wheat-growing West, Prairie Lawyer Diefenbaker has made hay by swinging a $362 million grain sale to hard-pressed Red China. By devaluating the Canadian dollar last June, the Tory government has helped spur exports 4.8% and shave Canada's deficit-of-payment imbalance. Unemployment has dropped to 318,000 (4.9% of the labor force). But on the debit side, Diefenbaker has failed to show how his government intends to meet the new challenge of world trade--particularly that posed by Britain's expected entry into the European Common Market. The Tories stubbornly oppose Britain's entry; Liberal Pearson wants Canada to join in a counterbalancing Atlantic alliance trading area with the U.S. and Europe.

To the Outparts. Last week Diefenbaker flew to Newfoundland, stumping through remote outparts where no Prime Minister had ever visited before. Lester Pearson blew into the small Ontario pulp and paper town of Espanola, Ont. (pop. 5,000) to be nominated once again as Espanola's Member of Parliament. Said he earlier in the week: "Under Liberal governments in the postwar years, our economic record was the envy of the world. Now, our friends in other countries ask, 'What has happened to Canada?' It is Tory government that has happened--a wrong the people will soon make right."

Diefenbaker's five-year term runs until 1963--though, as in Britain, Prime Ministers rarely wait until the last year to call an election. Diefenbaker is free to set an election date of his own choosing. If Canada weathers the winter well, he will probably call a spring election. Otherwise, he will hope to delay it until next fall.

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