No Canadian journalist has shouldered so perilous a responsibility. Dafoe knows what a struggle it is to preserve national identity on a basis of one to twelve against us. Born in Ontario and experienced in the East as few editors have ever been, he surely knows the value of not surrendering our national birthright for a mess of free-trade pottage.
If he knows this as well as we think he should, will he uphold the Free Press as the constant critic of Mr. Crerar if he attempts to denationalize this country; or will he accept a portfolio of Minister of the Interior in the Cabinet dominated by Messrs. Crerar and Drury, and in his haste to establish the new Liberalism of the National Progressive Party help to strike out the meaning of the word "National" in the label?
Can a man who fought a Direct Action Strike because it aimed at revolution, consistently endorse, lock, stock and barrel, a movement which aims at a revolution by Indirect Action through Parliament?
Is government by a "National Progressive Party" Agrarian Group with a business-farmer Premier and a farmer-dominated Cabinet any less of a group government in principle than the One Big Union, even though it does not tie up the nerve centres of the country by a minority general strike, but merely throttles Parliament, which is supposed to be the national brain, by the use of the group minority in voting?
Mr. Dafoe has already begun to answer. Again we see him sweltering in his sanctum, his hair like a windrow of hay, as he dictates something like this to his stenographer:
"Your logic is good except that your major premiss is a case of being off to a bad start. The National Progressive Party is not a group; it is a business majority. It contains the people who produce the majority of the nation's wealth for consumption and export and therefore enable the nation to pay its bills. It is Liberal because it advocates free-trade and is opposed to big monopolies, and there is no other Liberalism in Canada left worthy the name. The N.P.P. is the new Liberalism, not for the West alone, but for the whole country. It depends upon the franchise of the people, not upon the strike action of revolutionary groups. Agriculture, not industry, is the basis of Canada's economics. Even labour as embodied in the Trade Unions does not aim at revolution: Only the Reds want that. And the Reds are a hopeless minority. The farmers are not as yet a popular, though they are an economic, majority; but the future of this nation depends upon a voting as well as a producing majority of farmers."
This may not be the exact way in which Mr. Dafoe would state the case, but it expresses the fact that sound economics are at the root of all ideas which have to do with fair government. And it suggests that J. W. Dafoe with his Free Press has more to do than the Grain Growers' Guide with what the people think about the N.P.P.
For this reason we hope that Mr. Dafoe, the judge and the advocate as well, will always stay "behind the scenes" to keep Mr. Crerar on the right track if ever he gets the right of way.