CANADA'S CHOICE
By GEORGE V. FERGUSON (Editor of the Winnipeg Free Press) Winnipeg, June 29th.
rirHE significance of the Canadian General Election last month goes far deeper than the mere return of the Prime Minister, sir. Mackenzie King, to power. It is a demonstration of the fact :hat there is today in Canada only one political party which can truly claim to be a national party. The voters, civilians and service
dike, preferred it to the alternative, none of which in their view
held out any hope of being able to achieve an over-all majority in the House of Commons That party was the Liberal Party, which, for twenty-seven years now, has been led by Mr. King. He has been accused by his opponents of constantly adjusting his policies to the desires of Quebec, and it is true that he has always had the majority support of the voters in that province. But to dismiss this as mere " appeasement " is to disregard the essential facts of govern- ment in Canada. Policies which disregard the rooted traditions and immediate aspirations of one-third of the people of a country, a section moreove; lingually and ethnically different from the rest of its fellow-citizens, are hopeless policies. Mr. King has recognised this, and the constant nt-astire of his amazing success has been the measure of the failure of all the opposition parties to recognise it too.
What were the results of this in 1945? The Coniervative Party,
animated by a new programme and a new name which associated the word " Progressive" with the traditional title " Conservative," and headed by a new leader, won a sprinkling of seats in the Maritime Provinces and in the four Western Provinces. The bulk of its in- creasing membership in the new House of Commons comes from Ontario. The Conservatives, therefore, in spite of their pretensions as a national party, are virtually an Ontario party. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the left-wing party of Canada, lost its hold on the confidence of the eastern voters. It won only one seat between Cape Breton on the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Red River in Manitoba. Its strength increases in the next House, but the C.C.F. group reveals itself as the representative of the traditional agrarian protest movement of the Prairies, a representation which it shares with another protest movement, the Social Crediters of Alberta, whose strength lies now not so much in their advocacy of queer schemes of monetary reform as in their power to persuade the people of Alberta that they will fight for them against the malevolent forces of big business and banking in Eastern Canada. These two croups are the inheritors of a North American political tradition which for eighty years now has been a force in politics west of the Slississippi in the United States and the Red River in Canada : the Populists of Kansas, the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the Prairie Progressives of twenty-five years ago, are all cut off the same !oomed cloth.
As to the Liberal Party, it held its own in the Maritimes, rejoiced
In the return of almost all the sixty-five Quebec seats to its camp, won one-third of the seats in Ontario, and more than twenty-five seats in the West. The reason for the success was the same every- where. The Quebeckers, who take their party politics as neat as their cousins in France, refused to follow the extremist appeals of the disciples of provincial autonomy, the Nationalists and the Bloc Populaire ; and the rest of the Liberal returns represented the sound view of English-speaking Canadians that successful government depends on the creation and maintenance of an adequate modus vivendi between the two major races of the country. In the face of that need they refused to vote for platforms which carried the logic of policies too far: They recognised the logical ethical content of the Conservative demand for all-out conscription but would not vote for it. They recognised the need of a large degree of State inter- vention in business and industry generally, but refused to swallow the insistent demand of the C.C.F. leaders for all-out Socialism. The result from the point of view of the country is excellent, for Mr. King's Government will have only a small working majority. It should therefore be kept on its toes.
But the extent to which Mr. King can follow through with what the country obviously wants will depend on the hitherto unsolved problem which rises from the fact that our constitutional division of powers, as between the Dominion and the nine Provinces, is no longer adequate to meet the needs of the modern State. The solution that has lain before the people since the report of the Sirois Com- mission in 1940 is that the Provinces should abandon certain taxes which they have the right to impose and, in return for leaving these to the Federal power, have the right to receive back grants-in-aid which would be adjusted on the basis of need. The Commission's objective was to render every Province, no matter what its natural revenues, competent to provide certain basic services to its citizens. This proposal was bluntly rejected by a Dominion-Provincial Con ference held in January, x941. Mr. King has now called another, to meet on August 6th. On that date the Dominion will put forward. certain proposals, the Provinces will make counter-proposals, con tinuing committees will be set up, and another, and it is hoped final, conference will be held in the autumn or early winter. If some agreement is then reached, Canada's most formidable constitutional problem will be solved for the time being, and. Dominion and Provinces can move ahead, each one with a clear assurance as to the financial resources it will have at its disposal_ If the Conference breaks down, our problems will be many, and greatly accentuated by a continuing uncertainty as to finance. The difficulty of reaching agreement, however, will be increased by the splintering of the Canadian political parties on racial and sectional grounds, as has been here described—for the National Federal Parties all have their counterparts in the Provincial Legislatures; and more than one Provincial leader will attempt to improve the national prospects of his party by developing interested lines of approach to a problem which, in its importance, transcends, or should transcend, party politics.
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