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The Formulation of Liberal and Conservative Programmes in the 1957 Canadian General Election*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

John Meisel
John Meisel*
Affiliation:
Queen's University
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Extract

In discussing the formulation of the programmes presented to Canada by the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties in the general election of 1957 I shall pay little attention to the substance of what was offered. My concern will be almost exclusively to seek out the ways in which the platforms were formulated, and to draw some conclusions in the form of a hypothesis concerning the role of Canadian parties in reconciling the sometimes opposing pulls of our cabinet and federal systems.

For more than twenty years one party had been in, the other out, of power: this circumstance necessarily made for profound differences in the way in which each shaped its programme before and during the campaign. The Liberals did little more than point to their record. The central theme of their campaign was that the party had done well in the past and, if returned, would continue doing equally well in the future. The Liberal programme, such as it was, was that of the Government. Not fashioned to suit the exigencies of the 1957 election, it had, in the main, evolved gradually as the consequence of the continuous interaction of the cabinet and the leading experts in the civil service.

The cabinet contains representatives of the various provinces and major regions of the country, yet departmental responsibilities make it difficult for the leading ministers to be fully sensitive to the varied shifts of opinion within the party. It is perhaps possible to make too much of the distinction between the cabinet and the party in the cabinet system: the cabinet is composed of the party leaders. But there seems to have been a tendency for the Liberal party, so long in power, to leave much of the formulating of policy to the leaders who could utilize the skill and knowledge of the civil service. Much of what had, in the years immediately before the election, been called Liberal policies or the Liberal programme was actually the product of the intimate co-operation of leading civil servants and their ministers.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , November 1960 , pp. 565 - 574
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1960

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Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Kingston, June 9, 1960. The research on which it is based was made possible by grants from the Arts Research Committee, Queen's University, and from the Social Science Research Council of Canada.

References

1 A fuller discussion of the formulation of party programmes and a lengthy treatment of their substance will be found in a forthcoming book on the 1957 election.

2 For an interesting discussion of this relation see Hodgetts, J. E., “The Liberal and the Bureaucrat,” Queen's Quarterly, LXII, no. 2, 176–83.Google Scholar See also idem, “The Civil Servant and Policy Formulation,” this Journal, XXIII, no. 4, Nov., 1957, 470–3.

3 Some Liberals occasionally expressed concern over this development. See, e.g., the speech by C. G. Power to the 1948 leadership convention in National Liberal Federation, Report of the Proceedings of the National Convention (Ottawa, 1948), 202–7.Google Scholar He elaborated these views subsequently in some private memoranda, notably in one dealing with Liberal failures in a number of by-elections and in another where he proposed a Liberal policy for the 1953 election. It seems that, on the whole, his views were ignored.

4 “The Advisory Council of the National Liberal Federation of Canada,” Canadian Liberal, VIII, no. 1, summer, 1955, 1.

5 Ibid. Even the most casual student of Canadian politics will be struck by the enormous gulf separating fact from this fiction concerning the locus of decision-making in the pre-1957 Liberal party.

6 “Resolutions Adopted by the 15th Meeting of the Advisory Council of the National Liberal Federation of Canada, March 28th, 29th and 30th, 1955,” Ibid., 21–6.

7 National Liberal Federation of Canada, Report of the Proceedings of the National Liberal Convention (Ottawa, 1948), 87–238 passim.Google Scholar A consolidated version of the resolutions is to be found in the Federation's The Liberal Party (Ottawa, 1957), 9–10, 63–76Google Scholar, and in Canadian Liberal, V, no. 3, fall, 1952, 169–205 Google Scholar, where they are compared with legislation introduced by the Liberal Government subsequent to the holding of the convention.

8 In view of the controversy surrounding these resolutions it is perhaps well to refer the reader to the classic discussion of the relation between the party leader and the party platform as presented in Dawson, R. G., ed., Constitutional Issues in Canada (London, 1933), 397–408.Google Scholar At the Progressive Conservative convention of 1956 the following successful motion was moved by Mr. Roland Michener from the floor, when the resolutions were first considered: “Resolved that the policy resolutions as adopted by the convention be referred to the leader with the recommendation that with such assistance as he may require from the research staff he … approve for publication a statement of principles in a more comprehensive form than that appearing in the beginning of the resolutions” (Proceedings of the National Convention). In his acceptance speech Mr. Diefenbaker referred to the resolutions in terms reminiscent of those used earlier by Mr. King: “You have given me the trust of a programme of principles. You have given to those associated with me … a chart” (“Acceptance Speech by Mr. Diefenbaker,” mimeo.).

9 Each subcommittee was responsible for an assigned field and had its own chairman and secretary. The chairman was in each instance a member of Parliament. Subcommittees were established to deal with the following topics: (1) External Affairs and Defence, (2) Agriculture, (3) Labour, (4) Natural Resources, (5) Welfare and Veterans, (6) Taxation and Trade.

10 Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, “Suggested Resolutions Submitted by Progressive Conservative Organizations for Consideration by the Resolutions and Policy Committee of the National Convention, 1956” (mimeo.).

11 See Eldon, Donald, “Towards a Well Informed Parliament: The Uses of Research,” Queen's Quarterly, LIII, no. 4, winter, 1957, 522.Google Scholar

12 Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, “Progressive Conservative Party Resolutions since 1948 (Including Resolutions of the National Convention of 1942 and 1948),” Research Dept., Report no. 59 (mimeo.) and “A Collection of Past Resolutions of the Progressive Conservative Party Prepared for the Deliberation of the Resolutions and Policy Committee of the 1956 National Convention,” Research Dept. Report no. 60 (mimeo.). The latter contains essentially the same material as Report no. 59 but presents the resolutions under headings corresponding to those of the six subcommittees.

13 “A Progressive Conservative Government in agreement with the provinces will provide increased benefits under the Old Age Assistance Act. … Similar increased benefits will be extended to recipients of Old Age Security (i.e. Old Age Pensions) where necessitous.” See Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, What the Progressive Conservative Party Stands For, Report of the Committee on Resolutions and Policy as Adopted by the National Convention, Dec. 14, 1956, 14 (italics added).

14 Gordon Churchill, “The Conservative Position: A Statement of Philosophy and Principles,” unpublished memoir dated May, 1955. Among those participating in the discussions leading towards this memoir were Mr. R. A. Bell, Mr. J. M. Macdonnell and Mr. Davie Fulton. The last-named also produced his own version of Conservative principles.

15 Published in Ottawa as a pamphlet, and also issued in French.

16 “Declaration of Principles by the Progressive Conservative National Convention, Ottawa, December 12th to 14th, 1956,” unpublished.

17 This amendment was later incorporated into the new constitution as the major part of the section that defined the party's objects. See press release by the Progressive Conservative party, “Summary of Changes in the Constitution of the Progressive Conservative Association of Canada Approved by the Meeting of the Executive Officers and Executive Members Qualified to Vote under the Present Constitution, November 30, 1959,” 1.

18 There were other non-Conservatives who felt impelled to aid in strengthening the Conservative party out of fear of what was happening to Canadian politics under Liberal rule. Professor H. G. Thorburn, for example, a political scientist then at the University of Saskatchewan, submitted a memorandum to Mr. Fulton and some of his colleagues in which he suggested what the Conservatives might do to strengthen their party. This Memorandum, which was presented in Ottawa in June, 1955, was entitled “The Political Situation.” It has not been published.

19 The Canadian Wheat Board and the International Wheat Trade: National and International Factors Influencing the Development of Canadian Wheat Policy (London, 1956).Google Scholar

20 The thought underlying the Liberal Government's position was epitomized, so Dr. Menzies believed, in a paper by an economist at Laval University. See Lamontagne, Maurice, “The Role of Government” in Gilmour, G. P., ed., Canada's Tomorrow (Toronto, 1954), 117–52.Google Scholar Mr. Lamontagne became economic adviser to the federal cabinet some time after the publication of his paper. He had for many years been close to the Liberal party and is, at present, among the Liberal leader's closest advisers.

21 Dr. Menzies, in formulating some of his ideas on a policy for the development of energy and other resources, referred to Mackenzie's, M. W. paper “Canada's Natural Resources” in Gilmour, , ed., Canada's Tomorrow, 35–63.Google Scholar He is also indebted to Ferguson, G. V., “Likely Trends in Canadian-American Political Relations,” this Journal, XXII, no. 4, 11, 1956, 437–48.Google Scholar

22 In issuing his warnings, as well as in other parts of his analysis, Dr. Menzies cited the views contained in a presidential address to the Canadian Political Science Association: see Gibson, J. Douglas, “The Changing Influence of the United States on the Canadian Economy,” this Journal, XXII, no. 4, 11, 1956, 421–36.Google Scholar

23 At the time of the 1949 election the Liberals were in power in six provinces. By 1953 they held office in four and in 1957 in three. In one of the three (Manitoba) they were unmistakably on the way out.

24 See Schlesinger, Arthur M., “Tides of American Politics,” Yale Review, XXIX, no. 2, 12, 1939, 217–30Google Scholar; Herring, Pendleton, The Politics of Democracy (New York, 1940), passim Google Scholar; Burns, James M., “Two-Party Stalemate—The Crisis in our Politics,” Atlantic Monthly, CCV, no. 2, 02, 1960, 37–41.Google Scholar