CANADA STAYS IN THE MIDDLE

...M. Raymond won his seat, but only one other Bloc Populaire candidate was returned to Ottawa...

...Labor Progressives, 105,409...

...The enforcement of compulsory overseas service in the last war, against the bitter and almost unanimous opposition of French-speaking Quebec, cast a blight on the subsequent fortunes of the Conservative Party, recently rechristened Progressive Conservative...

...In the first phase of the war there was agreement among all parties that Canadian participation should be on a volunteer basis...

...A total popular vote of 4,622,513 was divided as follows: Liberals, 1,809.206...

...The heavy Progressive Conservative vote in Ontario is partly the result of discontent with the Prime Minister's so-called "coddling" of Quebec on the conscription question...

...Most of its elected members are from the prairie province of Saskatchewan, wThere the CCF won a sweeping provincial victory and possesses an effective local organization...

...Before the count of the service vote, the Liberals, as a party, had lost 564,965 votes, by comparison with 1940...

...On the other hand, King may try to steal CCF thunder in the field of social security...

...Perhaps the foremost immediate practical result of the election is that there will not be a chaotic parliamentary situation, demanding the formation of some kind of coalition...

...The last is the transparent camouflage label which has been assumed by the Canadian Communist Party during recent years...

...As is often the case, the Canadian election was very inadequately reported in this country...

...King only made use of this power, and with obvious unwillingness, when the prolongation of the war and the heavy losses of Canadian troops in Europe threatened to create difficulties with an adequate supply of replacements...

...Canada Stays In The Middle By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN PARADOXICAL as it may sound, the most surprising feature of Canada's recent national election is that it revealed no great surprise in the sense of a sensational shift of balance in parliamentary power...

...The lower House in the Canadian Parliament (the Senate is appointed, not elected) has 245 members...

...George Drew, won a big majority and in the federal election all the 82 Ontario seats went either to the Liberals or to the Conservatives...

...The old maestro of Canadian politics, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, has brought his Liberal bark into port, battered, to be sure, but still seaworthy...

...A new party like the CCF, with an imperfect organization in a large part of the country, must expect ups and downs, occasional setbacks after striking local successes...

...I was only able to obtain the detailed figures of the balloting through a lucky accident, the arrival of a Canadian newspaper...

...The CCF has a devoted nucleus of local workers and several national leaders of marked ability, in men like M. J. Coldwell, Frank Scott, David Lewis, E. B. Jol-Jiffe...

...A plebiscite on the question whether the Government should be relieved of its obligation not to apply conscription for overseas service, held in 1942, revealed a pro-conscription majority in the 8 predominantly English-speaking provinces, and an anti-conscription majority in Quebec...

...The Liberal Party has always been supported by some powerful monied interests, and drastic experiments in nationalization of industry are scarcely to be expected...

...Most of the votes under the category "others" were cast in Quebec, where the popular vote for French nationalist candidates was out of proportion to the number elected...

...These were the rebellious French Canadian nationalists in Quebec and the nationwide socialist farmer-labor CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation...

...The farmer appeal of the party was apparently more effective than its labor appeal, because Saskatchewan is one of the most rural provinces of Canada, with no large industry...

...Mackenzie King, one of the very few English-speaking Liberals who supported the French Canadian Liberal leader, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in opposing conscription in the last war, won a long period of unchanging devotion from Quebec...

...Conscription for service within Canada, stretched to include such places as the Aleutian Islands and Newfoundland, had been instituted after the fall of France...

...Had it been able to repeat this performance in the national election, 30 additional CCF members would have gone to Ottawa...

...Although the majority in the whole country was about 5 to 3 in favor of releasing the government from its promise, King showed conspicuous reluctance to impose compulsion for overseas service...

...It polled about 15 per cent of the total vote reported today ; and this is considerably better than the American Socialist Party ever did, even in the days when Gene Debs was a magnetic popular leader and the party had not gone to wreck in a series of splits and splinters...

...These seats were distributed as follows, according to reasonably complete figures which may be altered in a few cases by the vote of the servicemen: Liberals, . 118, Progressive Conservatives 66, CCF 26, Social Credit 13, Independent Liberals 8, Independents 8, scattering 6. Among the latter 6 are 3 intransigent French Canadian Nationalists and one Labor Progressive...

...A good deal of unofficial pressure was put on soldiers who were conscripted for service in Canada to volunteer for overseas...

...The CCF, with between 25 and 30 seats, fell short of what its friends had hoped for and some of its opponents had feared...

...all 3 leading parties favor membership in the world security organization and insistence on Canada's rights as a "middle nation...

...King might have stumbled and broken his political neck over this issue if the election had been held 6 months earlier when the Prime Minister was under heavy fire from 2 directions, from Quebec for going too far toward conscription, from Ontario, richest and most populous of the Canadian provinces, for doing too little...

...King will be able to carry on, at least temporarily, although his government will be more vulnerable and probably will not last as long as his administration which took office in 1940...

...The Communists, or Labor Progressives, as they prefer to call themselves, put up candidates in many districts where they had no chance of success, but were able to take away enough of the labor vote to put in the Liberal or the Conservative...

...Pressure for conscription became stronger after the fall of France and took on a distinctly racial character, despite the efforts of the Government to softpedal this element in the situation...

...And that province's 65 seats are a comfortable nest-egg in a lower House of 245 members...

...The CCF, on the contrary, increased its number of voters by 271,114 and elected about 26 members, as against 10 in 1940...

...It may be temporarily "down" in terms of its more ambitious hopes...

...But now the European phase of the war has ended...

...But in the older and more populous regions of Canada east of the Great Lakes only one CCF candidate was elected...

...The Pro-Cons (as the Progressive Conservatives are sometimes irreverently called) lost 125,035...

...The Conscription Issue This is because 2 new movements in Canadian politics which had been developing steam and momentum during the period of war pressures and irritations showed up rather more weakly in the test of a postwar election than had been generally anticipated...

...A Look At The Future King is a middle-of-the-road kind of person who will try to stick pretty close to the middle of the road, as between the Right of the Progressive Conservatives, and the Left of the CCF...

...Ontario might have done likewise on the ground that he yielded too little and too late...

...Social Credit, 186,-423...

...Another reason for the weak showing of French nationalism is the division among its spokesmen...

...Had an election been held at the height of this dispute, toward the end of 1944, Quebec might well have voted heavily against King because he yielded on overseas conscription...

...As for the showdown between socialism and capitalism which some of the more ardent CCFers foresee, it would seem to be postponed to a fairly distant future, unless CCF prestige and votes rise sharply because of a severe and uncontrollable postwar depression...

...The enforcement of conscription for overseas service is always a critical issue in Canadian politics...

...But the Ontario provincial election, which took place a week before the national election, revealed a severe decline in CCF strength...

...others, 551,515...

...Explaining CCF's Setback The CCF emerged as a potential strong challenger to the traditional Liberal-Conservative 2-party system when it took second place in an Ontario provincial election in 1943, winning 34 seats out of 90...

...The motivation of these tactics seems a little obscure...

...The Prime Minister has stated that there will be no conscription for the war against Canada...

...Progressive Conservatives, 1,299,484...

...His "baby bonus^ measure, already enacted into law, with its flat payment of allowances for children between certain ages, may well be a token of things to come...

...But, although the Government obtained the passage of a bill authorizing conscription, Mr...

...The Canadian Communists still hew to the line of Teheran, Yalta, and cooperation with the Liberals...

...The provincial Premier, an energetic Conservative who tries to talk in progressive terms, Col...

...King's comfortable majority in the last parliament, elected in the spring of 1940, has been transformed into a distinctly lean margin of superiority, a margin which exists only on the assumption that the so-called Independent Liberals will support him on most issues, he came out better than most Canadian forecasters have been predicting on the basis of provincial elections and political moods during the last 2 years...

...The prolonged illness of the staunchest and ablest of the uncompromising French nationalist leaders, Maxime Raymond, helps to explain the negligible showing of the Bloc Populaire, a party which started in 1943 with a rather formidable show of strength...

...The results of a United States national election would certainly have been prominently displayed with much detailed interpretation in the larger Canadian newspapers...

...But it seems that there has been no revision of the Canadian Communist "line," comparable with what has been indicated in the United States...

...But the French-speaking voters of Quebec, in the majority, seem to have felt that it was more expedient to support King than to run the risk of letting in the Progressive Conservative leader, John Bracken, who based his campaign partly on the argument that conscription for overseas service should be generally applied...

...A new government under his leadership is accepted as a certainty both because the Liberals, although considerably reduced in strength, are still much the largest group in Parliament and because there is no conceivable basis of positive cooperation between the second strongest party, the Progressive Conservatives, and the third strongest, the CCF...

...With its broad wheatlands, little crossroads churches, small towns that end suddenly in the vast expanse of prairie, it is not unlike the neighboring Dakotas...

...It is high time that we began to practice some cultural and educational reciprocity with our friendly northern neighbor...

...But it is far from "out," and can be relied on to press its arguments for intensive socialization and state planning with increasing force in the event of the development of a postwar economic crisis...

...Foreign policy is not now a major issue in Canada...

...Although Mr...

...CCF 670,476...

...CCF leaders are inclined to blame the Communists, because of their splitting tactics, for the loss of some seats...

...All is not gloom in the CCF camp...

...In foreign policy also King may be expected to steer a middle passage between the sentimental Tory "Great Britain right or wrong" sentiment that is still prevalent among some of the Conservatives and the radical distaste of extreme French Canadian nationalists for the connection with England...