NEARLY all TIME stories are written and edited in New York by staff members working with reports sent in by correspondents all over the world. This week's cover story on Canada's next Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, is an exception. It was written and edited in Montreal by our Canada staff, which is manning a unique outpost in TIME'S editorial operation.

The Montreal staff produces each week for the Canada edition a special section, usually four pages, of Canadian news. Launched in 1944, the Canada section, like all others, was written and edited in New York until last May, when we decided that, as a special addition to the magazine for one part of the world, it should move closer to its subject. Editor of the section is John M. Scott, 33, a native of Vancouver, who was a reporter for the Sherbrooke (Quebec) Daily Record and the Montreal Gazette, and wrote for TIME in New York for five years before he took over as Canada editor. Scott is at present the homebody of an all-Canadian clan: he found time last week to send reports on the election results to his father, Princeton Professor R.B.Y. Scott, former dean of McGill University's Faculty of Divinity, who has been doing Bible study in Jordan, and to his brother Gavin, TIME'S Buenos Aires bureau chief, who was covering an other political story at the other end of the hemisphere--Chile's municipal elections.

Reporting on Canada to John Scott and his staff of writers and researchers are twoscore correspondents, including bureaus in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Calgary. For this week's cover story, the biggest reporting job was done by Ottawa Bureau Chief John Beal, an old TIME hand, who was a correspondent in our Washington bureau for 15 years, and who is author of John Foster Dulles, a biography of the late Secretary of State. In the course of reporting the Pearson story, Beal got many new insights, including an opportunity to study Pearson's never-released diary of his 1955 official visit to Moscow. But it was the more traditional job of following the candidate along the campaign trail that the reporter found most interesting.

Beal, having known Pearson for more than 15 years as an international diplomat, watched him struggle to be a rousing political campaigner, and concluded at the end that the candidate finally was able to establish "two-way communication" with the voters. That communication was enough to make Pearson Canada's new political leader and place him on the cover of TIME, on a background of Canada's Armorial Bearings.

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