Word: stanfields
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Four-Time Winner. Bob Stanfield, 53, a lawyer by training, comes from a rich old Nova Scotia family that made its fortune in knitting mills; winter long Johns, one of its products, were known during the Yukon gold rush as "Stanfield's unshrinkables." An unassuming pragmatist, he took over Nova Scotia's Conservative leadership in 1947, when the party did not hold a single seat in the provincial legislature. Nine years later he came to power, and has since won three elections. When fellow party members suggested that he run for Diefenbaker's job, Stanfield at first...
...Conservative leader, Stanfield will face a tough public relations job in reselling a party long identified with Diefenbaker and his rogue-elephant ways. Privately indecisive, moody and often querulous, Diefenbaker won office in 1957 mainly on the strength of his flamboyant public charm. Partly because of his uncertain leadership -but also because of forces he could not possibly control - Canada's economy weakened and its politics became Balkanized, with East turning against West, French-speaking Quebec against English Canada, and many Canadians against the U.S. After the Conservative defeat in 1963, Diefenbaker proved no more adept as opposition leader...
Unlike Diefenbaker, Stanfield is a consensus man. "I'm not interested in empty decision making just to show I am decisive," he says. His policies will differ from the Liberal program mostly "in terms of priorities." He is a progressive who sees no "original sin" in government economic planning and built so elaborate a welfare program in Nova Scotia that he was called a Conservative socialist. At the same time, he wants Canada's growing welfare state to be administered in a more businesslike way. Like Pearson-and unlike Diefenbaker-Stanfield believes broadly in warmer relations with...
Drift in Feeling. Pearson's Liberals are well aware of what they are now up against. Though Canada is prospering as never before, public sentiment is drifting away from Pearson's brand of big-government spending. If Stanfield can hang on to Diefenbaker's strongholds in the West and win Ontario, a new election could well reduce the Liberals to a party significant only in its traditional power base, Quebec...
Pearson plans to sit tight for a while and watch Stanfield in action. Then he will decide whether, at 70, he wants to confirm his leadership by calling new elections (he has until the fall of 1970) or convene his own party convention and let power pass to a younger leader...