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 find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, a plant, an inanimate object, indeed lost to us until the day, which for some never arrives, when we find that we pass near the tree, or come to possess the object which is their prison. Then they quiver, call us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Freed by us, they have vanquished death and return to live with us.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)
“I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A child who is not rigorously instructed in the matter of table manners is a child whose future is being dealt with cavalierly. A person who makes an admiral’s hat out of linen napkins is not going to be in wild social demand.”
—Fran Lebowitz (20th century)
“Laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)