Cool Campaign

CANADA Cool Campaign Canadian Author Bruce Hutchison once remarked that "Canadians, a subarctic species, like their politics cold." Last week, in an atmosphere of cool calm, Canadian voters were in the process of deciding between two honorable gentlemen for their next Prime Minister. Election day is Monday, Aug. 10.

Intent on extending the Liberal Party's string of four consecutive victories and 18 years of power is Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, 71, who succeeded William Lyon Mackenzie King as leader of his party and nation in 1948. St. Laurent was using an old and effective campaign technique. He traveled around the country making unemotional speeches, talking to schoolchildren like a wise old grandfather, mentioning with pride the accomplishments of his government, but abstaining almost wholly from campaign promises. With a powerful, entrenched party behind him, his own unmatched personal popularity, and an enviable record of producing both social services (e.g., old-age pensions, baby bonuses) and budgetary surpluses, St. Laurent could probably afford his leisurely air of benign self-confidence.

Challenger's Punch. What heat and light the campaign has generated were mainly to the credit of George Alexander Drew, 59, a handsome lawyer who resigned as premier of Ontario in 1948 to become national leader of the run-down Progressive-Conservative Party. Drew held his own seat in the crashing Tory defeat of 1949, then started chopping away at the party deadwood. He rebuilt the Tory machine around a cadre of enthusiastic young conservatives in and out of Parliament. Drew himself studied French so he could make a personal appeal to Quebec's voters in their own tongue.

Opening his campaign in his home town of Guelph, Ont. last month, Drew took the challenger's initiative, swung hard with a 16-point manifesto -- his party's most cohesive statement of policy in recent years. Among its points: a national low-cost housing plan; a contributory health-insurance program, "without introducing state medicine''; a revised system of farm price supports; a $500 million tax cut without harming national defense. He also charged the government with laxity in ferreting out Communists in government and defense jobs, saying. "We are not going to make our country a privileged sanctuary for people trained in Moscow to carry out their activities here."

Champion's Parry. In Vancouver, B.C. last week, Prime Minister St. Laurent replied with a 12-point election program which he called "an appeal to reason and good sense." He pledged his party to continue the pay-as-you-go financing scheme under which Canada has, since 1946, decreased the national debt and. except in '50 and '51, reduced taxes. Otherwise, he promised little beyond the continuance of current policies.

Canadian political campaigns traditionally generate a gentlemanly head of steam toward election time, as the rival candidates slug it out for votes in the nation's populous heartland of Ontario and Quebec, where 160 of Parliament's 265 seats will be decided. Last week a Canadian Institute of Public Opinion poll reported that, of voters expressing a preference, 47% were pro-Liberal, 30% pro-Conservative. But the Liberals apparently have lost ground in Ontario, and some Tories, recalling last year's U.S. elections, professed to sense a "time-for-a-change" ground swell in their favor.

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