To Two Parties?

On his party's monthly free half-hour on CBC last week, Progressive-Conservative M.P. Arthur LeRoy Smith of Calgary issued an invitation: "I think the extreme left wing of the Liberals should join the socialists [CCF]. That is really where they belong. And I think the Liberals of the right should join with our party."

Art Smith, no leader in top Tory councils, was just shooting the political breeze. But his suggestion was not at all fantastic. No first-rate Liberal Party leader is in sight to take the place of 72-year-old Mackenzie King when he retires or dies, and many politicos see the prospect of a breakup when the party loses the man who has directed it since 1919.

To the Left. Like the Democrats in the U.S. under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Liberals are made up of many conflicting groups. The farthest left wing is tinged with socialism; the farthest right is more conservative than many Tories. Only the political skill of Prime Minister King and the unifying influence of the war have kept groups from splintering off before this.

Moreover, the Liberal Government, which has only a slim majority in Parliament, has been forced to move steadily to the left to get the support of the CCF bloc (29 seats) in Parliament. Thus, many Canadians foresee an eventual return to the two-party system, with the radical Liberals joining the socialists, the conservative Liberals the Tories.

There have already been overtures. In 1945, King's mantle was offered unofficially by a high Liberal Party figure to CCF

Leader M. J. Coldwell. And in Mackenzie King's speech last November in Quebec, he made what was considered a left-handed bid to the socialist CCF to join the Liberals, in a pointed remark about the ineffectiveness of "a multiplicity of parties."

To Right & Left. Obviously, Mr. King, who in 1921 deftly maneuvered the old Progressive Party into the Liberal fold, would like nothing better than to bolster his party now by absorbing the socialists.

Could he do it? Like Art Smith, the Ottawa Citizen last week thought it would be the other way around. The anti-CCF Citizen noted the swing to socialism in Great Britain and elsewhere in the world, and candidly said: "Canada has already witnessed the birth and steady growth of its own social democratic party, the CCF." As the trend continues, the Citizen said, one or the other of the older parties will either disappear or will coalesce. Then the CCF "will assume ... its position as the 'other' major political party in Canada."

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