Again, Coldwell refused, mainly out of loyalty to his party and its principles and he stated that "if the country needed me in the Prime Minister's chair, then it would be at the head of a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government and not as a member of a party with views and politics contradictory to those in which I believed." Rumours that King made Coldwell an offer became public during the 1946 by-election campaign in the Parkdale electoral district. On October 11, while attending a rally for the CCF's by-election candidate, Ford Brand, at Parkdale Collegiate Institute, a partisan audience member asked him about the rumour that he had been offered the leadership of the federal Liberal Party. Coldwell responded by stating that there had been no official offer and that "the Liberals thought they could buy Coldwell. Coldwell is not for sale." Coldwell and the rest of the CCF were looking forward to the Canadian federal and the Ontario elections of 1945, which would possibly be the most crucial to Canada in the 20th century. They took place at the beginning of the welfare state and set the course of political thought to the end of the century and beyond. The year was a disaster for the CCF, both nationally and in Ontario, which Coldwell and the CCF's main players realized at the time. The CCF never fully recovered and, in 1961, it would dissolve and become the New Democratic Party. As NDP strategist and historian Gerald Caplan put it: "June 4 [Ontario], and June 11 [Canada], 1945, proved to be black days in CCF annals: socialism was effectively removed from the Canadian political agenda." The antisocialist crusade by the Ontario Conservative Party, mostly credited to the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) special investigative branch's agent D-208 (Captain William J. Osborne-Dempster) and the Conservative propagandists Gladstone Murray and Montague A. Sanderson, diminished the CCF's initially favourable position both provincially and nationally: the September 1943 Gallup poll showed the CCF leading nationally with 29 per cent support, with the Liberals and the Conservatives tied for second place at 28 per cent. By April 1945, the CCF was down to 20 per cent nationally, and on election day it received only 16 per cent. Another factor in the CCF's defeat was the unofficial coalition between the Liberal Party of Canada and the communist Labor-Progressive Party which guaranteed a split in the left-of-centre vote. Coldwell had a moderating influence on party policy, and at the party's biannual convention in Winnipeg in 1956, the party passed the Winnipeg Declaration as a statement of party principles to replace the more radical Regina Manifesto.