Mr. Stanfield’s failure

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'etudes canadiennes Editor DENIS SMITH Redacteur Associate Editor RALPH HEINTZMAN Redacteur adjoint Editorial Board JEAN-PIERRE LAPOINTE Comite de reaction MARGARET LAURENCE JACQUES MONET, S. J. W. L. MORTON W. F. W. NEVILLE GORDON ROPER DONALD V. SMILEY PHILIP. STRATFORD T. H. B. SYMONS W. E. TAYLOR CLARA THOMAS JOHN WADLAND MELVILLE H. WATKINS ALAN WILSON Mr. Stanfield's failure To many, it may seem premature to speak of Mr. Stanfield's failure. After all, it was not much more than a year ago that his party came within a few seats or forming a government ; and just this past autumn the Conservatives were able, for the first time in years, to pull even with the Liberals in the Gallup poll. Although the most recent poll, published in the first week of February, shows the Liberals well ahead once again, there is no reason to believe that their lead is invulnerable. These are solid achievements for a politician. Why then speak of failure? The kind of failure of which Mr. Stanfield may ultimately be culpable is not one of short-term manoeuvre and strategy, though it may come to that: it is rather the kind Journal of Canadian Studies which turns upon a politician's higher responsibility to the times in which he lives and the values he is charged to represent. It is a failure of vision. Mr. Stanfield seems not to be aware that we are living at the dawn of a conservative age. He plods doggedly forward like a political basset hound, ferreting out subjects for enquiries or commissions, but seldom lifting his nose from the ground to sniff the prevailing winds of human affairs. He behaves like a respectable, even admirable, political leader of twenty years ago, when modernity wore a glad face instead of the ugly one she wears today. Now that her true character is becoming plain, even to fundamentally liberal minds, it will not do for a Conservative 1 leader who wishes to occupy the ground which is rightfully his, or to achieve political success of the kind that matters, to behave as if nothing had changed. There are at least three areas of concern in contemporary public affairs which ought to have served Mr. Stanfield as indications of the profound shift of sensibility which we are experiencing. The first is the urban crisis. That a growing proportion of the electorate are no longer prepared to permit the wholesale destruction of the urban fabric, nor to tolerate the anti-social aridity with which greed and heedless technical innovation would replace it, signals an important change in attitudes to the public interest and the private will. Mr. Stanfield's second clue should have been the crisis of the environment . Our increasing awareness that the demands of modern life undermine the very natural conditions which make life possible is a second and more insistent warning that the limits to the gratification of appetite and will may be narrower than is recognized in the metaphysics of modernity. The third clue is, of course, the energy crisis which has recently broken upon us and which has served to underline the lesson of the environmental crisis that our reckless squandering of the resources of this earth is both intolerable and, what is more, unnecessary. Nothing could have been more beneficial to us than those few days at the height of the oil embargo when persons throughout the western world began to take stock of the shamefully , arrogantly wasteful manner in which we have organized our lives and to imagine simpler, healthier, and possibly nobler ways of living, the kind at which Pierre Dansereau has hinted in his phrase "joyous austerity." Now that the crisis has abated, much of this insight will fade with it for a time, but the lesson was too plain to be altogether forgotten . The way we think has changed, as will the way we act: we have no other choice. All three of these crises have in common the impHcations that man's wilfulness is to 2 be curbed, that there are bounds beyond which he may not go without destroying the conditions of decent life, that there...