Canada's Choice
The Canadian federal general election (polling on Monday) has been comfortably dull in its preliminary stages. This is almost entirely because the Liberal Government's long and commendable record presents the Conservative opposition with very few flaws to exploit. From this distance at any rate it will be most surprising if the results send the Liberals out of office at Ottawa. Higher prices and taxes may well help Mr. Drew and his party to increase their small representation to healthier proportions, but anything like a reversal of that great landslide which in 1949 gave the Liberals their over- whelming majority is rather unlikely. If anything of the sort were to happen, it would be no parallel with the Republicans' victwy south of the border against the long entrenched Demo- crats (for there are no charges of corruption and disloyalty to drain the Canadian Liberals of their effeative strength), but rather an example of the democratic electorate's restless tendency to boredom with the reasonably just and the long successful. But it is altogether too fanciful to imagine an Ariktidean fate for Mr. St. Laurent and the shade of Mr. Mackenzie King. Mr. Drew has done what he could with accusations of "waste and extravagance," but there seems to be really very little to back them. His assertion that the Conservatives would reduce national expenditure by 500 million dollars (about a tenth of the federal revenue) has been shortly disposed of by Mr. St. Laurent as "thoroughly irresponsible." It is, at any rate, strikingly ambitious. West- ward to Manitoba the contest is primarily between Liberals and Conservatives, with the latter looking for gains especially in Ontario and perhaps in Quebec. In Saskatchewan the CCF (the Canadian Socialist Party) enters the field strongly. In Alberta Social Credit is firmly established both in federal and provincial terms; this curious Bible-quoting party of the extreme right may also gain some seats in British Columbia where it recently won the provincial government.
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