A Pragmatist for the Tories

A new political leader appeared last week on the Canadian national scene.

His name is Robert Stanfield, he comes from Nova Scotia, he has a long, fine stone face clearly marked by thought, and he will be heard of a great deal in the years ahead.

Although Canada has had much entertainment lately -- the glowing centennial of its independence, the excellent Montreal Expo, the amusing visit from Charles de Gaulle -- its politics have been rather dreary. The Liberal government under Lester Pearson has gone quietly on its way, strengthening relations between French-and English-speaking Canada, expanding foreign trade, and boosting an economy that has been growing 6% a year.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party, which was knocked from power by the Liberals in 1963, drifted along under the shaky but cantankerous leadership of John Diefenbaker, 72, the suspicious Westerner who has been trying to blot out modern life with interminable reflections on the pure, brave simplicities of his youth. At long last, after a seven-month battle, Dief decided to quit as Conservative boss, but not without making a final spectacle of himself, first by running for the leadership, which hardly anybody wanted, then by giving up after the third ballot and backing a candidate who was rejected by the Conservative Convention in favor of Stanfield.

Four-Time Winner. Bob Stanfield, 53, a lawyer by training, comes from a rich old Nova Scotia family that made its fortune in knitting mills; winter long Johns, one of its products, were known during the Yukon gold rush as "Stanfield's unshrinkables." An unassuming pragmatist, he took over Nova Scotia's Conservative leadership in 1947, when the party did not hold a single seat in the provincial legislature. Nine years later he came to power, and has since won three elections. When fellow party members suggested that he run for Diefenbaker's job, Stanfield at first demurred. For a man who has "always been able to keep a part of myself out of politics," he says, there was little al lure to a job that he likened to "a commitment to enter the priesthood."

But he finally felt his vocation.

As the new Conservative leader, Stanfield will face a tough public relations job in reselling a party long identified with Diefenbaker and his rogue-elephant ways. Privately indecisive, moody and often querulous, Diefenbaker won office in 1957 mainly on the strength of his flamboyant public charm. Partly because of his uncertain leadership --but also because of forces he could not possibly control -- Canada's economy weakened and its politics became Balkanized, with East turning against West, French-speaking Quebec against English Canada, and many Canadians against the U.S. After the Conservative defeat in 1963, Diefenbaker proved no more adept as opposition leader, triggering endless party squabbles and offering only a free-swinging, scattershot opposition to the Liberal government.

Unlike Diefenbaker, Stanfield is a consensus man. "I'm not interested in empty decision making just to show I am decisive," he says. His policies will differ from the Liberal program mostly "in terms of priorities." He is a progressive who sees no "original sin" in government economic planning and built so elaborate a welfare program in Nova Scotia that he was called a Conservative socialist. At the same time, he wants Canada's growing welfare state to be administered in a more businesslike way. Like Pearson--and unlike Diefenbaker--Stanfield believes broadly in warmer relations with the U.S. and more foreign investment in Canada. With his accession, the Conservative Party's main power base will automatically shift from Diefenbaker's Western prairies to the Atlantic provinces. Stanfield will also pay more attention to Ontario and Quebec, Canada's two biggest provinces, which were long neglected under Diefenbaker.

Drift in Feeling. Pearson's Liberals are well aware of what they are now up against. Though Canada is prospering as never before, public sentiment is drifting away from Pearson's brand of big-government spending. If Stanfield can hang on to Diefenbaker's strongholds in the West and win Ontario, a new election could well reduce the Liberals to a party significant only in its traditional power base, Quebec.

Pearson plans to sit tight for a while and watch Stanfield in action. Then he will decide whether, at 70, he wants to confirm his leadership by calling new elections (he has until the fall of 1970) or convene his own party convention and let power pass to a younger leader.

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