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CANADA: Right Turn

2 minute read
TIME

“No CCF government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism.” Thus in 1933 the founders of Canada’s socialist movement, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, set forth their party’s basic political aim in their first manifesto. Last week, at a convention in Winnipeg, an older and wiser CCF gave up the goal of uprooting capitalism and adopted a new manifesto recognizing a definite “need for private enterprise.”

Undiluted socialism seemed a cure-all to many Canadian voters in the depressed ‘305. and the CCF quickly became the strongest third-party movement ever launched in Canada. But in the prosperous postwar years, socialism’s appeal faded, and the CCF vote fell off sharply. Six months ago a committee of CCF theorists was appointed to chart a new course. The committee’s report, called a “Declaration of Principles,” recommended a sharp right turn toward a mixed economy, which would “provide increased opportunities for private as well as public-owned industry.”

Despite the protests of old-line socialists, a pair of more practical-minded speakers put the case for the new CCF line. One was a convention visitor, British Socialist M.P. Richard Grossman, who reminded his Canadian counterparts that Britain’s Labor Party had already acknowledged the need for both private and public enterprise (TIME, July 23). Said Grossman: “Capitalism is not going to collapse.” The other socialist plug for free enterprise came from Saskatchewan’s CCF Premier Tommy Douglas, who could speak from experience as the head of the only government ever formed by the CCF. Shortly after taking office in 1944, Douglas launched a number of government-operated industries in the province of Saskatchewan; most of them wound up bankrupt, and the regime has since been encouraging private enterprise. Warned Douglas: “If you attempt to go forward under the banner of complete state ownership, you will be marching alone.”

When the “Declaration of Principles” was put to a vote, only’ a few diehards held out. An overwhelming majority of delegates voted to proclaim a mixed economy as the CCF’s new goal, and to file the 1933 manifesto as a quaint relic.

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