Indecisive Election

In a red smoking jacket and a blue mood, Canada's Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, 66, watched the national election returns as they flashed on the TV screen in his private railway car in Prince Albert, Sask. After eight weeks of flameless campaigning, his private estimate was that his Conservative Party would win 140 seats--not as many as the record 203 seats he held going into the election, but enough to give him a bare majority in the 265-seat House of Commons. He wound up with only 118 seats, and as a minority government would have to accept outside support to survive."On the basis of national returns," he told the party faithful, "I simply say this: we are still the government of Canada."

Said Liberal Leader Lester Pearson: "It is clear that the Tory government has been decisively rejected" But even though Diefenbaker had lost 85 seats, the election message was by no means that clear. The Liberals had had strong hopes of winning, but only succeeded in climbing from 51 seats to 97.

They swept the big cities, particularly Montreal and traditionally Conservative Toronto, but the prairies held fast for Diefenbaker, the small-town prairie lawyer, whose $425 million grain deal with Red China has helped the farmers prosper. Mike Pearson, the Nobel prize-winning diplomat, had proved to be an attractive Liberal candidate, but an insufficiently forceful one. The laborite New Democrats grabbed another 19 seats.

The party that came out of an inconclusive election holding the balance of power was one that gave most Canadians cause for anxiety and alarm. It was the Depression-born, woolly-minded, funny-money party that calls itself Social Credit, and it won 30 crucial votes that would be cast to keep the Conservatives in power, but could later be withheld at the appropriate time to bring Diefenbaker down. Its triumph was the victory of a shouting, arm-waving French Canadian auto dealer named Real Caouette, 44, who overnight became a national figure. Le Tonnerre, he is called in rural Quebec--the Thunderer.

$100 for Everyone. Until last week, Social Credit was a local Western phenomenon (the premiers of Alberta and British Columbia are Socreds). Yet Social Crediters won only four seats in the West. The movement's real strength now lies in French-speaking Quebec, where Real Caouette's spellbinding appeal was worth an astonishing 26 of the province's 75 seats.

"The only way to restore the economy," he preached,"is to put more money into the hands of the consumers." The way to handle unemployment is to give every citizen $100. "That would have moved the goods off the shelves, set the factories moving again, and made a lot more new jobs. What's the cost to the people? Just the cost of printing the money."

Nothing to Lose. Caouette has been preaching this message throughout Quebec since 1942, but really began to be effective when he started buying himself 15 minutes of TV time over a rural Quebec station every Sunday. To finance himself he sold shares in his Chrysler agency in Rouyn, 320 miles from Montreal. He followed up by crisscrossing the province, camping out in his car.

Caouette took full advantage of a growing wave of French Canadian separatist sentiment and disillusionment with the Liberal and Conservative parties, both dominated by English-speaking Canada. "You don't have to understand Social Credit to vote for it," he told those who failed to fathom the complexities of Social Credit.

Social Credit's nominal national leader is Robert Thompson, a onetime Alberta chiropractor, but after the election Caouette made it plain that the party would now need a French accent. "Bob is the leader and I am the co-leader," he said. "When Bob becomes Prime Minister, I will become co-Prime Minister."

Caouette was already doing most of the talking: "I see where the Conservatives say that Parliament will meet in mid-September. That's fine with us. We're in no hurry. I don't see any need for an election for some time, probably not for a year at least."

Caouette's timetable may prove to be realistic. On the downswing, Diefenbaker's Conservatives clearly will try to hold out as long as possible. Pearson's Liberals are talking as if they would like to force a fall election, but few political observers at the moment share their conviction that the results would be much different. Canada, a nation still in economic difficulty despite its recent devaluation of the dollar to 92 1/2-c-, seems destined to limp along as best it can with a government lacking a parliamentary majority.

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