French Leave

Canadians were disturbed enough when their traditional two parties fractured into four in 1962's general elections, and the two splinter parties gained enough strength to inaugurate a siege of minority government. Last week Ottawa got a fifth political party when one of the splinters splintered. Le Ralliement des Creditistes the new party was christened, and its founding father was Real Caouette, the firebrand Quebec Chrysler dealer who has been the leader of the French-Canadian branch of the prairie-based, funny-money Social Credit Party. In last April's national elections, Caouette and his fellow French-Canadians in Quebec won 20 of Social Credit's 24 seats.

With so mucn party strength in Quebec, Caouette never could reconcile himself to the fact that the nominal leader of the party remained English-speaking Robert Thompson from English-speaking Alberta. Caouette broke from Thompson, set up his own "national party to protect French-Canadians in every province." But though the 5.5 million French-Canadians are increasingly militant in their demands for more attention, not too many are apt to follow the demagogic Caouette. In fact, Caouette failed to convince even his own Quebec M.P.s: nearly half of them announced they were sticking with Thompson.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.