CANADA: New Viceroy; General Election

(3 of 6)

As the new Governor-General approached this week, Canadians rattled off to each other the astonishingly various milestones of his career: Born to a cousin of Gladstone; prizeman at Glasgow Uni-versity and Oxford and President of the Oxford Union; member of the "Balliol Kindergarten";* secret service operative and organizer of the Foreign Office's propaganda bureau during the World War; writer of a World War history in serial form which patriotic parents still give children in the United Kingdom; Director of Information under Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1917-18); M. P. since 1927 for the Scottish Universities; twice (1933 & 1934) Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland; 32-time novelist and lifelong apologist for War, the meat of many of his romances. Writing weightily upon the great Tolstoy's philosophy of Peace, Jack Buchan roundly postulated: "War, too, has its idealism."

Paradoxically, as the new Governor-General was about to leave England last week, profoundly peaceful Canadians were voting in a general election so hectic and confused that one of the loudest platform issues was supposed to be "WAR."

Conservative Cornered. The next U. S. election may evoke a major third party, but last week Canadians, accustomed for generations to be governed by either Conservatives or Liberals, had for the first time several genuinely vigorous and bouncing alternatives.

Month ago the Depression-made hair-shirt of popular disgust formerly worn in North America by Herbert Hoover was transferred to Canada's rich and pious Conservative Premier Richard Bedford Bennett, an able and aggressive businessman who neither drinks nor smokes but has been seen by intimates to extract furtively from the bottom drawer of his desk a chocolate cream. In desperation good Mr. Bennett attempted briefly to ape President Roosevelt's New Deal (TIME. Jan. 14) but this was dead in Canada last week and all but forgotten. From the first, Canada's alert voters sensed that the Bennett Deal, like the Roosevelt, was in many respects unconstitutional and unworkable, the Dominion's constitution being the British North America Act which aggressively protects provincial rights from encroachment by the Federal Government.

Liberal on the Loose. Since Canada's Liberals under onetime (1921-30) Premier William Lyon Mackenzie King stand at bottom for the very same Dominion fundamentals as do the Conservatives, they have been more than afraid that an anti-Bennett landslide would not be sufficiently pro-King. In a hysterical hashing up of blatant issues which have no real existence, Mr. King has charged that a vote for Bennett was a vote to conscript Canadians to fight the battles of the League of Nations and the Mother Country, while Mr. Bennett in alluding to Japanese cut-price dumping and Liberal low-tariff talk, has thundered nonsensically, "My opponent is on the side of Japan!"

Under either King or Bennett there is little doubt that Canadians would fight in any popular Empire war and would not fight in one for which they felt distaste. Under Bennett or King no great reduction of Canadian tariffs is conceivable, nor any major change in the capitalist setup. For that, restive Canadians were looking to other parties.