Return To Canada and Social Credit
Thompson returned to Canada in 1958 and resumed his activities with Social Credit and soon became president of the national Social Credit Party of Canada, doing much to rebuild the party after it was shut out of Parliament in the massive Progressive Conservative landslide of 1958.
Alberta Premier Ernest Manning saw Thompson as the ideal person to succeed Solon Low as leader of the Social Credit Party of Canada and backed him in a hotly contested leadership vote against Réal Caouette, the movement's leader in Quebec, which was won by Thompson. Years later, Caouette claimed that he would have won, but Manning told him to tell the Quebec delegates to vote for Thompson because the West would never accept a Francophone Catholic as party leader.
Under Thompson's leadership, the Socreds returned to the Commons in the 1962 federal election. Thompson himself was elected from Red Deer, Alberta. However, he was one of only four Socreds elected from English Canada, while the other 26 came from Quebec. Under the circumstances, Thompson was all but forced to name Caouette as the party's deputy leader. Thompson was re-elected in the 1963 and 1965 elections.
The 1962 and 1965 elections produced minority parliaments in which no one party had a majority of seats. This meant that the government had to rely on smaller parties such as Social Credit to pass legislation and remain in power.
Read more about this topic: Robert N. Thompson
Famous quotes containing the words return to, return, canada, social and/or credit:
“I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on the brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I do not consider divorce an evil by any means. It is just as much a refuge for women married to brutal men as Canada was to the slaves of brutal masters.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values.... Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to “americanize” him.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)