New Opposition

After six years of slumber Canada's opposition party turned over in its sleep last week and threatened to wake up and scrap. The Conservatives chose a new Party leader, a downright man with a low opinion of Canada's war policies. He will have the opportunity of pushing William Lyon Mackenzie King off the narrowing plank on which the Liberal Prime Minister has been teetering since war began.

Chief reason that the Prime Minister has been able to edge his way precariously through 25 months of war is that there has been no united opposition. The second strongest party in the Ottawa Parliament has been the Conservatives, which, under the bumbling leadership of amiable Richard Burpee Hanson, has made little headway. Actually the Liberal and Conservative Parties differ chiefly in that one is in, the other out.

A fortnight ago the Conservatives began to pull up their socks. Leader Hanson announced that ill health would force him to quit his job. Last week, at a two-day conference in Ottawa, the Dominion's Conservative bigwigs chose as the new leader of their Party tall, patrician, 67-year-old Senator Arthur Meighen, a lawyer, financier and two-time (1920-21, 1926) Prime Minister of Canada.

The Conservatives could not have picked a more conservative leader. Nor could they have chosen one more heartily against Mackenzie King. To keep the support of the potent, close-knit French political bloc in Quebec and Ontario, Mackenzie King has soft-pedaled the question of conscription for overseas service, which in the last months has been brought up with increasing vigor by the all-out-for-Britain citizens of the prairie Provinces and the West. Canadian businessmen oppose the excess-profit taxes, the regulations, the price ceilings that the wartime Government has set. And Canadian labor resents wage ceilings quite as much, cites the cases of many labor leaders and radicals locked up under the steel-lined Defense of Canada Regulations to prove that the King Government is antilabor.

By contrast, Conservative Meighen, as a member of the Cabinet during World War I, sponsored conscription, earned the Conservatives the lasting and damaging enmity of most French Canadians. In World War II Meighen has sat in the quiet backwater of Canada's appointive Senate, making subacid wisecracks about Mackenzie King's conduct of the war. He wants overall conscription, abolition of the excess-profits tax. He scoffs at the Prime Minister's "twilight twittering" about joint Canada-U.S. defense planning, grows rabid because Canada does not ban all U.S. periodicals with an isolationist slant. To Arthur Meighen, above all, Cana da is a unit of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Not until the next session of Parliament, in January, will Leader Meighen be able to assume active command of his Party. Before then he must resign his Senate seat, accept a seat in the House which some Conservative member will, by convention, surrender to him.

By then the aims of the "new" Conservative Party may be clearly enough de fined to make the Party a rallying point for anti-Government forces -- for Canadian business, for big-talking, King-hating Pre mier Mitch Hepburn of Ontario, perhaps even for the battered cohorts of Premier William ("Bible Bill") Aberhart's Albertan Social Creditors. Quickly last week one of the latter boarded the Meighen band wagon: William Duncan Herridge, one time Minister to Washington.

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