(See Cover)
Whatever their politics, Canadians have grown heartily sick of politics. Subjected to four national elections in six years, they voted last week in their second in ten months. The two principal contenders were familiar faces, ranged against each other for the third time. There was the flamboyant old Tory campaigner, Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker, 67, a prairie trial lawyer at his best on the hustings and at his weakest in running the Government. Against him once again stood Nobel Prizewinner Lester Bowles Pearson, 65, an able man whose quick, shy grin could not conceal his distaste for campaigning.
Politics had become a strain on Canada's nerves; not apathy but impatience was its mood. The campaign crowds were big, and listened intently, but rarely demonstratively. Issues ran deep, and touched off demagoguery, anxiety, and an impressive civic concern. A country whose steadiness used to be taken for granted, a nation that prided itself on its placidity and caution, Canada had in recent years become a cockpit of frustrations. Its national unity was threatened by the pull of regional economic self-interest, its politics had become fragmented and quarrelsome, its economy was in need of a lift, its painstakingly put-together French-English partnership—the cornerstone of the confederation that will be a century old in 1967—was coming unstuck.
The Tense Week. The nation longed for a stable government that would set about putting things right. Two weeks before the election, the likelihood seemed to be another minority regime—a Pearson plurality, needing makeshift accommodations with splinter parties to govern. Instead, when a record 7,800,000 voters went to the polls last week, in a countryside where the last blasts of winter were still being felt in many places, the voters came within an ace of giving Mike Pearson the majority of 133 of the House of Commons' 265 seats. His Liberals won 128 seats to the Tories' 96, and the minor parties divided the remaining 41. Before the tense week was out, with the delayed soldier vote swinging two more seats to the Liberals, and with a pledge of support to Pearson by some members of the small Social Credit Party, Prime Minister Diefenbaker conceded defeat. Pearson would have the reins of power and Canada a new Prime Minister.
Canada was thus narrowly spared a continuing crisis. In the first hours after his defeat, Diefenbaker, a proud and contentious man, had shown a slow-motion reluctance to quit. Before long, every major newspaper in Canada, including the few that favored his reelection, urged him to step down. They knew his tenacity in coveting power: two months ago, three of his own Cabinet had left his discredited administration, unable to persuade him to step down. Instead, casting himself in the role of a northern Harry Truman, Diefenbaker had set out on the hustings again, hoping to revive the old magic, a cornered and dangerous fighter.