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

Abstract

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.1 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.2 The result of this collaboration was that the party, as such, tended to neglect the task of re-examining its programme and of devising new approaches to the problems facing the country.3