Till the Pub Closes

The old politician sat in his party headquarters in Ottawa, glowering furiously as a proposal was presented to the national executive committee suggesting that he step down after eight years as leader of Canada's Conservatives. At last John Diefenbaker, 69, rose to speak. "I will not have it!" he roared. "That is all there is to it!" A few minutes later, his supporters rejected the proposal by a narrow 55-52 vote.

It was the third revolt in two years against Diefenbaker, and each attack has left Canada's Conservatives more deeply divided.

Shifting with the Wind. Canadians know Diefenbaker as a skilled politician, a superb speechmaker and campaigner. Preaching that one-party domination was bad for Canada, the persuasive prairie lawyer led his party to a surprising victory in 1957, breaking 22 years of Liberal rule. Yet in six years as Prime Minister he managed to get himself into a series of unnecessarily bitter squabbles with the U.S. over nuclear defense commitments, failed to fire up Canada's economy, and proved to be an imperious, eccentric administrator whose policies seemed to shift with the wind over Ottawa.

Partly because the party was badly split by an unsuccessful revolt against Diefenbaker's leadership, the Conservatives lost the 1963 election to Lester Pearson's Liberals. Despite his obvious desire to return to office, Diefenbaker has failed to find a popular issue on which to attack Pearson, actually lost prestige through his contentious opposition to Canada's new maple-leaf flag. The present revolt against him was staged by a group of respected Quebec M.P.s who consider Diefenbaker too old, too crotchety, too out of touch with the country to lead the Conservative Party. What kept him in command was his almost messianic popularity in the western prairie provinces and the lack of a serious challenger. Conservatives in the industrialized eastern provinces would much rather see Manitoba's able Premier Dufferin Roblin or Nova Scotia's Premier Robert Stanfield in charge of the party.

Helping the Liberals? The leadership tangle dismays many Conservatives who could hope to gain in new elections at the expense of Mike Pearson's scandal-smudged Liberal government. This week, as the second session of Parliament reconvenes in Ottawa, Pearson faces questioning about the latest scandal, this one concerning a U.S. operator named Harry Stonehill who was supposedly asked for a payoff by immigration officials when he sought a Canadian residency permit.

Conceivably, the Conservatives could muster enough strength to bring down Pearson's minority government and force an election. But while Pearson has lost support, he has not lost so much among Canada's calm, affluent citizens that they are ready to hurry out and vote for Diefenbaker. Many Conservatives think they would lose an election with the old man, and they are openly muttering that he is all that is keeping the Liberals in office.

Unmoved by such criticism, Diefenbaker declared: "To those of you who suggest I step down, I'm going to call to your minds a statement once made by Winston Churchill, 'I ain't going till the pub closes.' "*

* A slightly Canadianized version of Sir Winston's "I leave when the pub closes."

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